The Master and Margarita

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Berlioz and Homeless at Patriarch Ponds
2. Woland and his strange retinue
3. Chaos at the Variety Theatre
4. The Master and his Pilate novel
5. Margarita, the cream and the ball
6. Burned manuscripts and quiet peace
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up The Master and Margarita because a friend kept insisting that no other Russian novel feels quite like it. The Master and Margarita was first published in 1967, in the edition I read from Harvill Press, 384 pages, ISBN 9780141180144, by Mikhail Bulgakov. I expected heavy Soviet satire with some Pilate chapters on the side. What I got was stranger and funnier and sadder. It mixes Moscow apartment scheming, a talking black cat, a flying woman, and a tender love story about a broken writer. I read it slowly at first, then fast near the end when Margarita takes over the story.

Moscow in the book is hot and crowded and full of talk. Everyone argues about whether Jesus existed, who should get an apartment, how to get tickets to the show. Then the devil walks in wearing a grey suit and starts asking polite questions. Bulgakov wrote much of the novel in secret during the 1930s, and it was only published after his death. That fact hung over my reading. He knew about fear and censorship from the inside, as a playwright whose plays were praised then pulled. So when his characters lie to officials, chase money, or burn papers, it does not feel invented.

The story runs on two tracks that finally meet. One track is 1930s Moscow visited by Woland. The other track is ancient Yershalaim, from a novel inside the novel about Pontius Pilate. Between them stand the Master, who wrote the Pilate novel, and Margarita, who loves him and refuses to give him up. It sounds messy. It is messy on purpose, and for long stretches the mess carries real force.

Berlioz and Homeless at Patriarch Ponds

The opening at Patriarch Ponds is one of my favorite openings anywhere. Evening heat. Two men on a bench. Mikhail Berlioz, editor of a literary magazine and head of a writers group, is lecturing the young poet Ivan Homeless, whose pen name is Bezdomny. Berlioz is brisk and sure. Jesus never existed, he says, and all the stories about him are just myths stacked on myths. Ivan listens, half convinced, half bored, smoking and coughing in the heat.

Then a stranger sits down. He speaks Russian with a slight odd accent. He wears expensive grey, carries a cane with a poodle head, and has two different colored eyes and crooked teeth. This is Woland, though he does not give that name at first. He asks for permission to join, predicts Berlioz will die that evening because Annushka has already spilled the sunflower oil, and insists that Jesus did exist. To prove his point he starts telling what happened when Pilate met Yeshua.

Berlioz thinks the man is a mad German tourist or a spy. Ivan thinks he is a dangerous crank. Woland keeps talking, calm and amused, while the air seems to thicken. When Berlioz runs for a phone to report a foreigner, he slips on the spilled oil at the tram stop and a tram car cuts off his head. It happens exactly as foretold. Ivan tries to chase Woland, ends up in his underwear, accuses people, swims in the river, pins an icon to his chest, and lands in a psychiatric clinic diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I love how much work this opening does. It sets the rules. Words have weight here. Mocking talk about truth brings punishment fast. Berlioz dies for his smug certainty and for his role as a manager of literature who tells young writers what to write. Ivan survives because he can still be shocked. His path from loud poet to patient listener starts at the Ponds. Bulgakov gives Moscow a mythic jolt in about forty pages.

Woland and his strange retinue

Woland does not work alone. He travels with a gang that feels like a circus act built for trouble. Koroviev, tall and cracked, wears a jockey cap and pince-nez and talks without pause. He can produce documents, invent uncles, and talk his way into any office. Behemoth is a huge black cat who walks on hind legs, drinks vodka, fires a pistol, cracks jokes, and breaks chess pieces. Azazello is short, red haired, with a fang and a chicken bone in his pocket, and he does the rougher jobs. Hella is a red haired witch, often undressed around the apartment, who kisses men cold and scratches when needed.

They take over apartment 50 on Sadovaya Street, where Berlioz lived. The apartment is already rumored to be cursed because tenants keep vanishing. Now it becomes Woland's office. The building manager Bosoy comes to check papers, takes a bribe in foreign cash, then finds the cash turned to paper and gets arrested for hoarding currency. The upstairs neighbor shrieks. Lights go strange. A cat the size of a hog demands vodka.

What struck me is how each member has a job in exposing Moscow. Koroviev handles paperwork and flattery. He finds the housing committee chairman, Nikanor, and traps him. Behemoth handles chaos and comedy. He rides trams, tries to pay, gets thrown off for being a cat, and shocks crowds. Azazello handles force. He beats and ejects and later carries creams and poison. Hella handles seduction and cold fright. Woland mostly watches, asks questions about whether people have changed, and lets his helpers pull strings.

They are cruel at times, no doubt. People lose jobs, clothes, heads, sanity. Yet Bulgakov keeps them oddly fair. They punish greed, cowardice, snitching, and empty cleverness. They leave simple kind people alone, or help them. Ivan in the clinic gets visits and talk rather than torment. I found myself laughing at Behemoth even while wincing at what the gang does to minor clerks. That mix is the point. Fear plus laughter was daily life for many in the 1930s, and Bulgakov turns it into persons you can see.

Chaos at the Variety Theatre

The Variety Theatre show is the centerpiece of the Moscow mockery. Woland advertises a performance of black magic with full exposure. Moscow loves free shows and full exposure, so the hall fills with cultural officials, accountants, typists, and wives in evening dresses. On stage Koroviev babbles as master of ceremonies, Behemoth tears watches apart and puts them back, cards fly, money falls from the ceiling.

Then the money scene turns sharp. Paper bills flutter down and people grab them. Women are invited to a fashion shop on stage with Paris dresses and shoes for free. They rush up, change behind screens, parade out to applause. Bengalsky, the compere, tries to keep order with Soviet slogans and loses his head for a minute, literally, when Behemoth twists it off and the crowd begs to put it back. The head returns, but Bengalsky never recovers his nerve.

The next morning the fun sours. The bills turn to paper or labels from a mineral water bottle. The dresses vanish and women run through streets in underwear. The theatre director Likhodeev wakes up in Yalta in his underwear after a drinking bout with Woland, and has to wire for help. The financial manager Rimsky sees Hella and nearly goes mad. The accountant Lastochkin ends up carrying foreign cash to the wrong office and gets arrested. Complaints flood in, yet no one can explain what happened without sounding insane.

I read this as Bulgakov settling scores with the literary and theatre world that had hurt him. He knew managers who censored lines, critics who praised then blamed, audiences who clapped for lies. The theatre lets him show greed without speeches. People reveal themselves when money falls. Officials who preach modesty grab coats. That is satire with props, not essays. Some parts go long with names and offices, and I lost track of who signed what. Still, the image of bills turning to trash stayed with me for days.

The Master and his Pilate novel

The Master enters late, and the tone drops. Ivan meets him in the clinic. A man with a shaven head and a frightened face creeps in through a balcony at night. He wears a hospital robe but keeps a black cap with a yellow M that Margarita sewed for him. He says he no longer has a name. Call him Master.

His story, told in a low voice over several nights, broke my pace in a good way. He was once a historian by training, won a large sum in a lottery, quit his job, rented a basement flat with lilacs outside, and started writing what he cared about. That was a novel about Pontius Pilate. Margarita, married but lonely, found him by chance on the street carrying yellow flowers and recognized him at once. She became his secret wife, his reader, his editor. She called him Master before anyone else did.

The Pilate chapters, as the Master wrote them, retell the trial and death of Yeshua Ha-Notsri. Pilate has a migraine and a tired heart. Yeshua speaks softly about all men being good, which annoys and touches Pilate. Pilate wants to save him but fears Caesar and the priests. He washes his hands in law and condemns him. After the execution on Bald Mountain, Pilate sits in his chair for two thousand years, sleepless on moonlit nights, waiting for a walk with Yeshua that never ends. The Master writes Pilate not as monster but as coward who understands truth too late.

When the Master finished, he tried to publish. Extracts drew fierce attacks. Critics called it Pielate worship and religious propaganda. One editor, Latunsky, led the charge. The Master cracked. He burned his manuscript in the stove, then turned himself in to fear. Margarita was away that night. When she returned, he was gone. He gave up his flat, lost his name, and drifted to the clinic. That burn scene hurt to read. Bulgakov himself had burned an early draft of this very book. Manuscripts do not burn, Woland later says, but in life they do, and the ash stays in the throat.

Margarita, the cream and the ball

Margarita takes the book and lifts it. Married to a good dull engineer, living in a fine apartment, she has everything except the man she loves. When Azazello meets her in the park with a cream that will make her a witch, she says yes without long debate. She smears the cream over her body, turns young and light, and flies out the window on a broom, naked and laughing, smashing the apartment of Latunsky the critic on the way.

Her night flight over Moscow rivers and forests is pure release after hundreds of pages of offices and clinics. She talks to frogs, splashes in water, feels no weight. Then Natasha, her maid, joins her on a pig, the neighbor Nikolai turned into a hog for wanting what he should not. It is silly and joyful, and Bulgakov lets it run.

Then comes the Satan ball. Woland needs a hostess, a queen of mixed blood, and Margarita agrees to serve so she can ask for the Master back. Hella and Natasha wash her in blood and oils, dress her in a heavy crown, and lead her to a vast staircase inside the small apartment. All night she greets dead murderers, poisoners, and hangmen climbing up from hell. She offers a knee for kisses, smiles through pain, talks kindly to Frieda, a woman who strangled her child and burns the handkerchief each morning. The ball smells of perfume and rot. A jazz band plays. Champagne flows. Behemoth drinks. Koroviev manages names.

Margarita holds up. She does not drink or sit. When Woland asks what she wants as reward, she first asks for mercy for Frieda rather than for herself. That choice matters. Only then does she ask for the Master. Woland returns him in his hospital gown, returns the burned manuscript from ash, and returns their basement love for one last night. I found this section moving because Margarita bargains without tricks. She suffers in public, keeps manners under strain, and spends her one wish on another woman first. Power sees that and bends.

Burned manuscripts and quiet peace

The ending splits readers, and I see why. Woland and his gang leave Moscow in fire and wind. Apartment 50 burns. The Variety staff scatter to clinics and prisons. Ivan leaves the clinic, becomes a professor of history, but still visits Patriarch Ponds each spring with a shot of sadness. The Master and Margarita do not return to normal life. They die in Moscow, by poison from Azazello that frees rather than kills, and wake in a small stone house with lilacs, music, and a river walk.

Pilate gets released too. The Master, restored to author, shouts that the hero is free, and Pilate walks up a moonbeam road with Yeshua, finally talking without fear. It is a famous image and it earned its fame for me. Two thousand years of headache end in talk.

The phrase manuscripts do not burn sounds hopeful, but Bulgakov treats it with care. The pages return by magic, yet the Master still cannot live among men. He is granted peace, not light. That distinction confused me on first pass. Peace here means rest outside struggle, a house, a garden, love, sleep without knocks on the door. Light would mean moral triumph or heaven. Bulgakov, who knew what the state could do, does not grant triumph. He grants shelter. Margarita chooses that shelter with him rather than alone in a bright world.

My criticism is that the book feels fragmented in the middle and dense at the end. The Moscow chapters pile names, housing plots, currency traps, and theatre staff until I had to flip back to remember who Rimsky was and why Styopa was in Yalta. The Pilate chapters, beautiful as they are, slow the Moscow farce right when it races. The ball goes on for many pages with guests I could not keep straight. The final flight with horses over roofs, with transformations of Koroviev and Behemoth into darker knights, reads fast but crowded. Some readers will love that crowd. I sometimes wanted fewer tricks and more time with the Master and Margarita talking in the basement.

Still, the density serves a purpose. Fear makes life fragmented. Memory under pressure jumps. Bulgakov writes that jump honestly instead of smoothing it. When I finished, I did not feel I had read a neat satire with a love story added. I felt I had read a love story that needed devils to be told at all, because ordinary offices would have killed it. The Master burns his book and Margarita buys it back with courage. That trade, failure met by loyalty, is what I will keep.

If you try it, give the first hundred pages room. Learn the names of the retinue, follow the money at the Variety, then let the Pilate story settle. Keep a marker at the ball and read it late at night when noise helps. Expect to laugh, then to ache. I closed my copy wishing Bulgakov had lived to see readers argue about peace and light in kitchens and parks. He wrote for that argument, and the pages still hold heat.

FAQ

When was The Master and Margarita published?

It was first published in 1967, after Bulgakov died. The Harvill Press edition runs 384 pages with ISBN 9780141180144.

Who are the main characters?

Woland with Koroviev, Behemoth, Azazello and Hella, plus the Master, Margarita, Ivan Homeless, Berlioz and Pontius Pilate.

Is The Master and Margarita hard to read?

Yes, the middle is crowded with Moscow offices and the Pilate chapters slow the farce. Give the first hundred pages room and keep track of the retinue.