As a result of this chaos, truckloads of Muscovites are shipped off to Stravinsky’s clinic. Similarly, Berlioz’s uncle’s attempt to claim his late nephew’s apartment is thwarted by Behemoth and Azezello, who send him violently off. Immediately thereafter, Andrei Sokov, barman at the Variety Theatre, visits the apartment.
Woland welcomes him in, offering fine food and drink, though Sokov declines these niceties. After some conversation, Woland reveals to Sokov that he will soon die of liver cancer and suggests that he spend his savings to enjoy a short life of hedonism.
Part two introduces Margarita, the Master’s mistress, who refuses to despair of her lover and his work. Azazello gives her a magical skin ointment, which turns her invisible, and invites her to the Devil’s midnight Good Friday ball, where Woland gives her the chance to become a witch.
Margarita enters the realm of night and learns to fly and control her unleashed passions. Natasha, her maid, accompanies her, riding on their neighbor Nikolai Ivanovich who has taken the form of a pig, as they fly over the Soviet Union’s deep forests and rivers. Margarita bathes and returns to Moscow with Azazello as the hostess of Satan’s spring ball. At Koroviev’s side, she welcomes dark historical figures as they arrive from Hell.
Margarita survives the ordeal, and Satan offers to grant her deepest wish. She chooses to ask to free a woman she met at the ball from eternal punishment. The woman, who had been raped, murdered her child; her punishment was to wake each morning next to the handkerchief she used to smother it.
Satan tells Margarita that she liberated the woman, and still has a wish to claim from him. She asks for the Master to be delivered to her and he appears, dazed and thinking he is still in the lunatic asylum. They are returned to the basement apartment which had been their love nest.
Matthew Levi delivers the verdict to Woland: the reunited couple will be sent to the afterlife. Azazello brings them a gift from Woland: a bottle of Pontius Pilate’s (poisoned) wine.
The Master and Margarita die; Azazello brings their souls to Satan and his retinue (awaiting them on horseback on a Moscow rooftop), and they fly away into the unknown, as cupolas and windows burn in the setting sun, leaving Earth behind and traveling into dark cosmic space. The Master and Margarita will spend eternity together in a shady, pleasant region resembling Dante Alighieri’s Limbo, in a house under flowering cherry trees.
Woland and his retinue, including the Master and Margarita, become pure spirits. Moscow’s authorities attribute its strange events to hysteria and mass hypnosis. In the final chapter, Woland tells the Master to finish his novel about Pontius Pilate – condemned by cowardice to limbo for eternity.
The Master shouts “You are free! He is waiting for you!”; Pontius Pilate is freed, walking and talking with the Yeshua whose spirit and philosophy he had secretly admired. Moscow is now peaceful, although some experience great disquiet every May full moon. Ivan Ponyrev becomes a professor of philosophy, but he does not write poetry anymore.
Interpretations
There are several interpretations of the novel:
Response to aggressive atheistic propaganda
Some critics suggest that Bulgakov was responding to poets and writers who he believed were spreading atheist propaganda in the Soviet Union, and denying Jesus Christ as a historical person. He particularly objected to the anti-religious poems of Demyan Bedny.
The novel can be seen as a rebuke to aggressively “godless people”. There is justification in both the Moscow and the Judaea sections of the novel for the entire image of the devil. Bulgakov uses characters from Jewish demonology as a retort to the denial of God in the USSR.
Literary critic and assistant professor at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Nadezhda Dozhdikova notes that the image of Jesus as a harmless madman presented in ″Master and Margarita″ has its source in the literature of the USSR of the 1920s, which, following the tradition of the demythologization of Jesus in the works of Strauss, Renan, Nietzsche and Binet-Sanglé, put forward two main themes – mental illness and deception.
The mythological option, namely the denial of the historical existence of Jesus, only prevailed in the Soviet propaganda at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s.
Reflection of Bulgakov’s experiences as a Soviet writer
Commentators often note autobiographical elements in the novel. Beyond parallels between fictional characters and Bulgakov’s acquaintances, the work has been examined as a reflection of Bulgakov’s own psychological troubles spurred by the oppression he faced in his creative career.
Some also interpret Ivan and the Master as prototypes of the extremities of Soviet attitudes towards writers. Whereas Ivan is a celebrated rising star supported by MASSOLIT, the Master is a literary outsider who is at once denounced and cast away after submitting his novel for publishing.
As a Soviet writer, Bulgakov walked a fine line between the two. Professor of religion and peace studies Alexandra Carroll analyzes Woland through the lens of Jungian psychology, suggesting that Woland serves as a “shadow archetype”, which she defines as a “paradoxical figure of evil that appears malevolent, yet works towards an individual’s psychological renewal”.
Other commentators note that Bulgakov’s life experiences have also likely influenced the Yershalaim narrative of the novel; Haber and Weeks argue that it is Bulgakov’s father’s academic work that influenced the narrative, rather than Bulgakov’s own view of evil. Weeks interprets this as “Bulgakov’s return to elements of his own childhood.”
Occlusive interpretation
Bulgakov portrays evil as being as inseparable from our world, as light is from darkness. Both Satan and Jesus Christ dwell mostly inside people. Jesus was unable to see Judas’s treachery, despite Pilate’s hints, because he saw only good in people.
He couldn’t protect himself, because he didn’t know how, nor from whom. This interpretation presumes that Bulgakov had his own vision of Tolstoy’s idea of resistance to evil through non-violence, by creating this image of Yeshua.
The Spring Festival Ball at Spaso House
On 24 April 1935, Bulgakov was among the invited guests who attended the Spring Festival at Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, hosted by Ambassador William Bullitt.
Critics believe Bulgakov drew from this extravagant event for his novel. In the middle of the Great Depression and Stalinist repression, Bullitt had instructed his staff to create an event that would surpass every other embassy party in Moscow’s history.
The decorations included a forest of ten young birch trees in the chandelier room; a dining room table covered with Finnish tulips; a lawn made of chicory grown on wet felt; a fishnet aviary filled with pheasants, parakeets, and one hundred zebra finches, on loan from the Moscow Zoo; and a menagerie including several mountain goats, a dozen white roosters, and a baby bear.
Although Joseph Stalin didn’t attend, the 400 elite guests at the festival included Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, Defense Minister Kliment Voroshilov, Communist Party heavyweights Nikolai Bukharin, Lazar Kaganovich, and Karl Radek, Soviet Marshals Aleksandr Yegorov, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and Semyon Budyonny, and other high-ranking guests.
The festival lasted until the early hours of the morning. The bear became drunk on champagne given to him by Karl Radek. In the early morning hours, the zebra finches escaped from the aviary and perched below the ceilings around the house.
In his novel, Bulgakov featured the Spring Ball of the Full Moon, considered to be one of the most memorable episodes. On 29 October 2010, seventy-five years after the original ball, John Beyrle, U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation, hosted an Enchanted Ball at Spaso House, recreating the spirit of the original ball as a tribute to Ambassador Bullitt and Bulgakov.
Major characters
The Master
An author who wrote a novel about the meeting of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth), which was rejected by the Soviet literary bureaucracy, ruining his career. He is “detained for questioning” for three months by the secret police because of a false report by an unscrupulous neighbor.
Later, having been driven to the point of insanity by the critics (as the Master describes in Chapter 13), he is committed to a psychiatric clinic, where Bezdomny meets him. Little else is given about this character’s past other than his belief that his life began to have meaning when he met Margarita.
Underscoring this point, the Master wears a hat with an “M” on it, made for and given to him by Margarita. The Master claims that he renounced his own name, further demonstrating his symbolic identity.
The Master is an author surrogate for Bulgakov himself, as he represents Bulgakov’s own struggles with censorship, criticism and stifled creativity in the Soviet Union. Further underscoring the Master’s role as Bulgakov’s shadow, The Master’s title allegedly stems from a nickname that the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union William Bullitt coined for Bulgakov.
Margarita
The Master’s lover. Trapped in a passionless marriage, she devotes herself to the Master. She is invited by Azazello to serve as the hostess of Satan’s Grand Ball on Walpurgis Night. Margarita agrees as she believes this step may save her love.
Her character is believed to have been inspired by Bulgakov’s last wife, Elena Bulgakova, whom he called “my Margarita”. He may also have been influenced by Faust’s Gretchen, whose full name is Margarita, as well as by Queen Marguerite de Valois.
The latter is featured as the main character of the opera Les Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer, which Bulgakov particularly enjoyed, and Alexandre Dumas’s novel, La Reine Margot. In these accounts, the queen is portrayed as daring and passionate.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz
The Chairman of the literary bureaucracy MASSOLIT. He bears the last name (Берлиоз) of
