The Master and Margarita (1967)
Author: Mikhail Bulgakov · written 1928–1940, published 1967
Plot
On a sweltering evening at Patriarch’s Ponds in 1930s Moscow, the head of the state writers’ union, Berlioz, is explaining to a young poet named Ivan Homeless that Jesus never existed. A foreign professor interrupts them. He calls himself Woland, claims to be a consultant in black magic, and casually predicts that Berlioz will have his head cut off — by a Russian girl, that very evening, on a specific tram. He’s the Devil, and he’s just arrived in Moscow with a retinue: a fanged hitman named Azazello, a seedy ex-choirmaster called Koroviev, a naked witch, and a giant black cat named Behemoth who walks on his hind legs and carries a Primus stove. Within the hour Berlioz slips on spilled sunflower oil and is decapitated by a tram. Ivan chases Woland through the city in a state of hysterical panic and is committed to an asylum.
In the asylum, Ivan meets a broken, nameless man who calls himself only “the Master.” The Master was a historian who wrote a novel about Pontius Pilate — a novel the Soviet critics savaged until he burned the manuscript and abandoned his lover, Margarita, out of terror and exhaustion. Interleaved with the Moscow chaos, we read his novel: the Yershalaim (Jerusalem) chapters, where Pilate, suffering from a migraine, is forced to judge a gentle wandering philosopher named Yeshua Ha-Nozri who insists “there are no evil people in the world.” Pilate is intellectually fascinated by him, wants desperately to save him — and, paralyzed by political fear, condemns him anyway. It’s the most terrible thing he’ll ever do, and for two thousand years he will sit on a stone summit in the mountains, watching the moon, unable to sleep.
Back in Moscow, Woland’s retinue tears the cultural elite apart. They stage a “black magic” show at the Variety Theatre where they make money rain from the ceiling and give the women of Moscow free Parisian dresses — both of which vanish by morning, leaving the crowd naked in the street. They bully and humiliate greedy officials, toss a bureaucrat’s head around like a ball, and put the manager of the Variety on a flight to Yalta mid-sentence. Meanwhile Margarita, still grieving for the Master, is offered a deal: anoint herself with a magic cream, become a witch, and serve as hostess of Satan’s annual Midnight Ball. She accepts immediately. She flies over Moscow on a broom, smashes the apartment of the critic who destroyed the Master, and that night she greets hundreds of the historical damned as they materialize from a coffin.
Her reward is a wish. But instead of asking for the Master, Margarita — because of one moment of unbearable pity at the ball — asks Woland to release a damned woman named Frieda from her punishment. Woland is impressed. He grants Frieda’s release as a gesture, then gives Margarita her real wish anyway: the Master is restored, the burned manuscript is whole again, and Woland pronounces the line that has outlived everything else in the novel: “Manuscripts don’t burn.”
In the end Yeshua, from the spiritual realm, sends word through his disciple Matthew Levi that the Master has suffered too much for the world’s light but has earned its peace. Woland carries out the sentence. The Master and Margarita are poisoned in their bodies, and their souls ride off with the Devil’s cavalcade into an eternal, moonlit landscape. Before they settle into their refuge, the Master looks down from the sky at the Pilate he invented, and — in the last gesture of the novel — writes him free. Pilate rises from his stone and walks up the path of moonlight to finally finish the conversation with Yeshua he’s been waiting two millennia to have.
What the Book Is About
On the face of it, this is the funniest novel ever written about Stalinist terror. Bulgakov drops the Devil into the most aggressively atheist city on earth and lets him make a buffoonish mess of its cultural commissars. But underneath the circus there are two absolutely serious arguments, and both run through the figure of Pilate.
The first is that cowardice is the worst sin. Not cruelty, not greed, not unbelief — cowardice. “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices,” a phrase that appears again and again in the novel, is what Pilate understands too late, and what the Master himself, when he burned his manuscript to survive, fell to. The entire Yershalaim storyline is a study of a man with the truth right in front of him who lets it be killed because he’s afraid of losing his job. Bulgakov, writing under Stalin, knew exactly what that temptation felt like. He wrote the novel in a drawer for twelve years, certain it would never be published, and he never burned it.
The second argument is Woland’s. When Matthew Levi, the fanatic disciple, calls him the “spirit of evil” and demands a universe of pure light, Woland answers with what may be the most quoted sentence in Russian twentieth-century literature: “what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?” The Devil in this novel is not a tempter. He’s the principle of consequence — the thing that exposes the frauds, punishes the cowards, and gives the suffering their rest. “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good,” reads the epigraph from Goethe’s Faust, and the whole novel is that epigraph dramatized. The real evil in Moscow is not Woland. It’s the literary bureaucracy, the apartment informers, the censors, the men who would sentence a Yeshua every morning before breakfast.
What the novel is for, finally, is a kind of freedom you can’t take away by burning a manuscript or arresting an author. Margarita is fearless love. Yeshua is absolute truth. The Master is the artist who broke but whose book survives anyway. And the universe, in Bulgakov’s vision, has enough slack in it that even Pilate, after two thousand years, gets let out.
The Cast
The Master. Nameless (he burned the name along with the manuscript), the Master is the artist consumed by his own creation and then destroyed by the critics. “I no longer have a name… I renounced it.” He is not a martyr — he broke, and he knows it. Yeshua’s judgment is that he deserves not the light of heaven but peace, and the distinction is everything the book wants to say about what state terror does to an honest mind. By the time we meet him in the asylum, he is done: “I came to hate this novel, and I’m afraid. I’m ill. Frightened. I’m nobody now.” Margarita’s love doesn’t resurrect him; it just earns him a quiet eternity.
Margarita. The moral engine of the book. Bored and trapped in a comfortable marriage, she finds the Master and then loses him, and when the Devil offers her a chance to get him back she does not hesitate. “I’m a witch and I’m very glad of it.” Her greatness is the moment at the ball when, with one wish burning in her pocket, she spends it not on the Master but on a stranger: “I want them to stop giving Frieda that handkerchief with which she smothered her baby.” That is what Bulgakov means by mercy — the thing rational Soviet Moscow has no concept of — and it is what earns both her and the Master their passage out.
Woland. Not the Devil of Sunday school. He’s something closer to a cosmic auditor — arriving in a city of lies to measure them and see whether anything is still upright. His rules are strict and not unjust. He punishes pettiness with pettiness (the theatre manager sent to Yalta in his underwear), cruelty with horror (Berlioz’s head detached and used at the ball), and cowardice with two thousand years of insomnia. But he honors Margarita’s dignity, restores the burned book, and in the end gives both the Master and Pilate their release. His advice to Margarita is the novel’s clearest aristocratic ethic: “Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you.”
Pontius Pilate. The real tragic hero. A brutal colonial administrator (“there never has been, is not, and never will be any authority in this world greater or better for people than the authority of the emperor Tiberius!”), he meets Yeshua, recognizes him as something the world cannot afford to lose, and lets him be killed anyway because he is afraid. His punishment is perfectly measured: two thousand years on a stone summit, a dog for company, the moon for a calendar, unable to sleep because the one conversation he wanted to finish was interrupted. “Even by moonlight I have no peace.” When the Master finally releases him in the last chapter, it is the most generous gesture in any twentieth-century novel.
Yeshua Ha-Nozri. Not quite Jesus. A wandering, bruised, radically trusting young man who cannot conceive of evil because he has never met anyone he considers evil. “There are no evil people in the world.” His first words to Pilate, seeing his tormentor wincing from a headache, are: “The truth is, first of all, that your head aches.” This — compassion as diagnosis — is what the Soviet world can no longer produce, and it’s what gets him killed within twenty pages.
Ivan Homeless. A hack state poet who spends the novel being terrified into honesty. He chases Woland through Moscow in his underwear, lands in the asylum, meets the Master, and emerges a professor of history who is cured but permanently haunted — a decent man, finally, who will never write another of the anti-religious verses the state commissioned him for. “I won’t write any more poetry.”
Symbols
| Symbol | What it signals | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| The moon / moonlight | The realm of guilt, memory, and spiritual truth; the path Pilate cannot walk until he is forgiven | Pilate on his stone summit waiting two millennia; the flight into eternity at the end |
| The burnt manuscript | The indestructibility of real art; state terror’s failure to erase what is true | Woland returning the restored novel to the Master: “Manuscripts don’t burn.” |
| The Primus stove | The absurd cramped banality of Soviet life that the demons gleefully co-opt | Behemoth the cat “reparating my primus” moments before a police shootout |
| The tram and the sunflower oil | Fate’s ordinary tools; the proof that human beings don’t actually run their own lives | Berlioz’s decapitation, predicted to the second by Woland |
| The ball at Satan’s court | The hidden economy of historical evil, and the moment mercy breaks through it | Margarita greeting the historical damned and sparing Frieda |
Key Debate
Atheism vs. the world. Berlioz opens the novel explaining to Ivan that Christ never existed and that “man governs himself.” Woland listens politely, then points out that a man who can’t even guarantee he’ll be alive tomorrow — who can, let us say, slip on some sunflower oil and be run over by a tram in the next ten minutes — is perhaps not in a strong position to claim he is governing anything. Berlioz dies on schedule. Woland does not triumphantly gloat about it; he simply proceeds as if the argument is now settled, because it is. The debate isn’t really about God’s existence. It’s about the Soviet fantasy that a society can master history by decree. The rest of the novel is what happens when that fantasy meets actual reality.
Light vs. shadow. The angelic Matthew Levi arrives at the end to deliver Yeshua’s judgment and cannot resist telling Woland he is a “spirit of evil.” Woland’s reply is the philosophical core of the book: evil is not the enemy of good but its necessary shadow; a world of pure light would be an unlivable blank. Levi, having no counter, mutters “old sophist” and leaves. Bulgakov’s sympathies here are unmistakable — a twentieth-century Russian writer who had watched utopian purity become mass graves had little patience for anyone demanding a shadowless world.
How It’s Written
Bulgakov keeps two novels running in parallel and plays them in different keys. The Moscow chapters are farce — slapstick, magical mayhem, Soviet apartment comedy. The Yershalaim chapters are grave, exact, historical, almost biblical in their calm. He cuts between them without warning, and the effect is that the modern city starts to feel thinner and cheaper while the ancient story, the one being written by a broken man in an asylum bed, starts to feel like the only real thing in the book. By the end the two timelines merge: the Master, from Moscow, writes Pilate, from antiquity, free.
The prose is restlessly ironic — what one critic called “detached observation to ironic double voicing, to the most personal interjection,” sometimes in the same paragraph. It is also formally radical for its time and place. Writing under the regime of socialist realism, Bulgakov produced a novel with talking cats, a flying witch, a Jesus figure, and the Devil as a sympathetic character. He knew it could not be published in his lifetime. It could not, and it was not. It came out in a heavily censored magazine serialization twenty-seven years after his death.
The opening and closing set the widest possible contrast. The book begins in a sweating, atheist, rational Moscow park on a hot afternoon. It ends on a moonlit flight out of the material world entirely, with the Master and Margarita rising into an eternity whose geography the realist novel was never supposed to be able to describe.
Connections
- the-white-guard — Bulgakov’s first novel, a largely realist account of the Russian Civil War from inside a White-officer family. The same moral lucidity is there, but the supernatural hasn’t yet broken in.
- the-heart-of-a-dog — the early satirical novella where a Moscow professor surgically creates a Soviet New Man out of a stray dog, with predictable catastrophe. The germ of Behemoth is here, and so is Bulgakov’s diagnosis of Soviet utopianism.
- the-fatal-eggs — another early satire where a scientific discovery meets Soviet bureaucratic incompetence and produces monsters. Bulgakov perfecting the device he’ll use in Master and Margarita: magical premise, realist Moscow, total official blindness to what’s actually happening.
- the-trial — Kafka’s parallel case. K. is arrested by a system that never explains itself; the citizens of Moscow are terrorized by a system that explains itself constantly and lies every time. Two twentieth-century novels about being tried for no reason by an authority that cannot be addressed.
- dead-souls — Gogol is Bulgakov’s direct ancestor. The demonic-bureaucratic Russian fantasy, where the supernatural and the provincial office are the same register, starts here. Behemoth and Koroviev are Chichikov’s great-grandchildren.
- crime-and-punishment — Pilate is the Dostoevskian conscience transplanted into an imperial Roman office. Cowardice instead of pride is the sin, but the psychological mechanism — an unforgettable act that ruins every subsequent moment of the rest of the life — is identical.
- nineteen-eighty-four — Orwell and Bulgakov both looked at the Stalinist state and saw the central fact: that it does not just want to control behavior, it wants to rewrite memory. Bulgakov’s answer is “manuscripts don’t burn.” Orwell’s is bleaker.
- civilization-and-its-discontents — Freud’s argument that civilization runs on guilt that has no clean exit is Pilate’s story in one sentence. The superego does not forgive, and there is no escaping it except by going outside the whole system of reward and punishment — which is what Yeshua, finally, does for Pilate.
- thus-spoke-zarathustra — Nietzsche is the half-silent presence behind Woland. The demand to see beyond the moral binary of good and evil, the conviction that the “good” of the crowd is often cruelty in costume, the aristocratic contempt for resentment: Woland’s speech to Levi is Zarathustra in formal evening wear.
Lineage
Predecessors
- dead-souls (1842) — Gogol’s provincial demonology, the grammar Bulgakov inherits and modernizes
- crime-and-punishment (1866) — the moral-psychological interior that Bulgakov ports onto Pilate
Successors
- nineteen-eighty-four (1949) — the totalitarian state seen from the other end: no Devil visits to redeem it, no manuscript survives