In honor (pun not intended) of the essay, I'd like to point out a few of my observations during my close reading. On page 67, there is a strange interruption in the flow of the text. The narrator flows from describing the scene that is going on to saying that none of the pirate fantasy that Archibald Archibaldovich was a part of exists. The narrator then flows from saying that none of that exists to begging for gods to give them poison. The sudden shift from storytelling to pressing the nonexistence of the fantasy is similar to how censorship takes works of fantasy that evoke a sense of revolt in oppression and silences them. As ideas are silenced, a desire for freedom from an artist's standpoint rises. The line "Oh, gods, gods, poison, give me poison!" could refer to the narrator's desire for gods, or some other form of myth/fantasy to poison his mind with ideas that Soviet censorship does not allow. Bulgakov's inclusion of the strange deviation from the story's progression could be his way of voicing his opinion about Soviet censorship and how it needs to go away.
P.S. I commented on Tyler's post.
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