The Master and Margarita: The Devil in Moscow, Pilate’s Story, and a Manuscript Restored

100 Works of World Literature · Article 36

# The Master and Margarita: The Devil in Moscow, Pilate's Story, and a Manuscript Restored

This factual guide introduces the writing and edition history, complete story, three interwoven narratives, characters, and major themes of The Master and Margarita. It does not replace the novel. The one-minute introduction avoids the ending; the full guide contains institutionalisation, execution, murder, nudity, fire, death, and the ending.

One-minute introduction

On a spring evening at Moscow's Patriarch's Ponds, literary chairman Berlioz and poet Ivan discuss whether Jesus ever existed. A mysterious foreign professor named Woland joins them, predicts Berlioz's decapitation beneath a tram, and begins a story about Pontius Pilate's interrogation of Yeshua. Woland and an entourage including a talking black cat, a check-suited interpreter, a red-haired killer, and a female vampire then occupy a sinister apartment. Their stage magic and impossible administrative incidents expose greed, fear, privilege, and denunciation. Elsewhere, an unnamed writer called the Master has burned his novel about Pilate after a campaign of official rejection and entered a psychiatric clinic. His lover Margarita, unable to find him, accepts transformation into a witch and serves as hostess at Satan's ball. Moscow reality, ancient tragedy, dream, novel, and supernatural judgment begin to pass through one another.

Essential facts

• Author: Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (1891–1940), a Russian-language novelist and playwright born in Kyiv, trained as a doctor, and later active in Moscow literature and theatre.
• Composition: begun around 1928 or 1929. Bulgakov burned an early manuscript in 1930, rewrote multiple versions, and continued revision with the assistance of his wife Elena until shortly before death.
• Lifetime status: unpublished. The plot was complete, but Bulgakov did not finish every intended correction, leaving editorial questions.
• First publication: an expurgated serial appeared in the Soviet journal Moskva in late 1966 and early 1967. Removed material circulated separately and abroad; more complete Russian texts appeared through differing editorial routes, so translations may have distinct bases.
• Times and places: approximately four spring days in 1930s Moscow; Jerusalem under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate; and a final space beyond ordinary historical time.
• Forms: satire, fantasy, philosophical fiction, romance, biblical rewriting, and a novel-within-a-novel. Most editions have two parts, thirty-two chapters, and an Epilogue.
• Translation note: transliteration varies. Yeshua Ha-Notsri, Koroviev or Fagott, Behemoth, and Azazello have multiple spellings. Consistency within one edition matters more than choosing a universal English form.

Composition, censorship, and editions

Bulgakov faced repeated prohibition, criticism, and publishing difficulty during Stalin's rule. He wrote to the Soviet government asking for work or permission to leave. After Stalin telephoned him, he obtained a position at the Moscow Art Theatre but no stable creative liberty. The Master and Margarita grew in this environment of private composition. It should not be reduced to a political code in which every official has one real equivalent. Censorship operates not only through a police ban but through editorial self-protection, organised reviewing, housing allocation, denunciation, and authors anticipating what must be removed.

Early versions centred more heavily on the devil's arrival. The Master and Margarita entered later. In 1930 Bulgakov threw a draft into the stove and subsequently rebuilt the book from memory and new design. The restored manuscript within the novel therefore has biographical resonance. It does not mean paper is physically indestructible; memory, rewriting, love, editing, and future readers oppose enforced erasure.

Elena Bulgakova preserved and organised the text and pursued publication for more than two decades after her husband's death. The first serial was cut, and later “complete” editions still involved choices among manuscripts and corrections. Translations vary sharply in tone: Moscow scenes depend upon bureaucratic idiom and comic timing, while Jerusalem is restrained and sensory. A difference in wording or name need not indicate carelessness until the source edition is known.

Story, characters, and ending

Patriarch's Ponds and Woland's prediction

Berlioz, chairman of the literary organisation MASSOLIT, asks the young poet Ivan Bezdomny to revise an anti-religious poem because it makes Jesus too convincingly real. Woland, apparently a foreign professor, appears and says that he witnessed Pilate's trial. He predicts that Berlioz will be decapitated because a woman has spilled sunflower oil. Hurrying to report the suspicious foreigner, Berlioz slips into a tram's path and the prediction occurs.

Ivan pursues Woland and his associates—the check-suited Koroviev, enormous black cat Behemoth, and later Azazello—through a sequence in which he loses his clothes and breaks into the writers' restaurant at Griboedov House. He is taken to Professor Stravinsky's psychiatric clinic. The rational city cannot absorb supernatural evidence but knows how to institutionalise an improperly speaking witness.

Woland's party occupies apartment 50 on Sadovaya Street, already associated with unexplained disappearances. The address reflects housing shortage, arrests, and neighbours seeking rooms. Theatre director Styopa is transported instantly to Yalta. Financial officers and housing officials are trapped through bribes, foreign currency, empty apartments, and identity documents. The devil introduces disorder mainly by enlarging desires already prepared for use.

Black magic at the Variety Theatre

Woland stages a performance of “black magic and its exposure”. Behemoth removes the master of ceremonies Bengalsky's head and restores it; banknotes rain down; women exchange clothes for Paris fashions. Later the money becomes worthless paper and the clothing vanishes in public. The episode does not mock greed and appearance in a vacuum. Audiences live within shortage and privileged distribution, so desire has an institutional history. Woland's inquiry into whether people have changed concerns both individual appetite and its environment.

Investigators try to explain the events as hypnosis, organised crime, or mass hallucination. Each explanation has rational form but becomes absurd because it must protect the existing picture of reality. A gun-firing cat, self-generating documents, telegrams from Yalta, and a singing office make bureaucracy and magic resemble one another: both move persons into impossible documentary states.

Ivan meets the Master

At the clinic Ivan encounters a patient in the neighbouring room who refuses his personal name and calls himself the Master. Formerly a historian, he won money, rented a basement flat, and wrote a novel about Pontius Pilate. He fell in love with the married but lonely Margarita. Editors refused the manuscript, and critics including Latunsky attacked its ideological and religious character. The acquaintance Aloisy denounced him and desired his rooms. Terrified and broken, the Master burned the manuscript, abandoned contact with Margarita, and entered the clinic.

He is not a flawless artistic saint. His disappearance leaves Margarita without knowledge, and he identifies public defeat with the end of self. Ivan had been a successful poet who wrote on assignment; hearing the history allows him to acknowledge that his poems are false. A psychiatric ward becomes the only place where two writers speak honestly about literature.

Pilate and Yeshua

Woland begins the Jerusalem sequence; Ivan dreams it; the Master's manuscript contains it. Pontius Pilate, suffering an intense headache, interrogates the wandering philosopher Yeshua Ha-Notsri. Yeshua believes truthful speech possible and calls human beings good. He is not simply the omniscient Christ of doctrine but a historical person altered by records and retellings.

Pilate finds that Yeshua relieves his isolation and does not seem an insurrectionist. Once the charge involves language against Caesar, fear of political accusation overcomes him. A Passover custom allows one prisoner to be freed, but high priest Caiaphas insists upon Bar-Rabban rather than Yeshua. Pilate hides cowardice inside procedure. Yeshua and two other prisoners are executed in the sun; his follower Levi Matvei arrives too late and can only record and attempt to shorten suffering.

Pilate later directs the secret-police chief Afranius to arrange the death of Judas of Kiriath and return the payment to the high priest's household. Secret revenge cannot compensate for public submission. Pilate and his dog Banga endure moonlit insomnia. The central sin is not abstract doubt but the act of a ruler who recognises injustice and authorises it because he fears the emperor and his own position.

Margarita becomes a witch

Margarita possesses material comfort but no child and no knowledge of the Master's fate. Azazello offers magical cream and an invitation. The transformation makes her young and capable of flight. Naked above Moscow, she destroys critic Latunsky's luxurious apartment, then stops when she encounters a frightened child and comforts him. Witchhood gives bodily action to anger restrained by marriage and etiquette, but freedom remains mixed with revenge.

She serves as hostess at Woland's spring full-moon ball, greeting an endless procession of legendary and historical murderers, poisoners, and powerful dead. Each must receive welcome. She remembers especially Frieda, condemned to encounter every morning the handkerchief used to kill her newborn child. When Woland invites a request for payment, Margarita first asks that Frieda be released from the recurring cloth. Compassion interrupts even the self-focused purpose that brought her to the ball.

Woland allows a further request, and she asks for the Master. He appears, and the burned manuscript returns. Aloisy is expelled, while the lovers recover the basement flat. Restoration cannot mean ordinary life: the Master remains exhausted, and Soviet Moscow offers no publication for the novel.

Rest rather than light

Levi Matvei comes on Yeshua's behalf to ask Woland to give the Master rest, not light. The exclusion from light is never given one conclusive explanation. The Master may have abandoned his work and lacked heroic endurance; quiet home may also be the mercy he can receive. Woland is not a merely good dispenser of justice. Within a larger metaphysical order he supplies shadow, irony, and punishment, while also manipulating, terrorising, and enjoying disorder.

Azazello brings Falernian wine. Master and Margarita collapse in the basement while their worldly bodies die elsewhere; he then awakens another form of them. Woland's group departs the burning apartment and rides into night. Comic disguises fall away, revealing grave or terrifying aspects of Koroviev, Behemoth, and Azazello.

On a height the Master sees Pilate, who has waited for roughly two thousand full moons with Banga beside him, unable to finish a conversation. The Master speaks release into his own story. Pilate follows the moon road towards Yeshua. The writer receives no public publication or historical triumph but completes the destiny he created.

Woland gives the lovers an eternal house with candles, books, music, cherry trees, and expected friends. This is repose rather than revolutionary victory or conventional heaven. Ivan becomes a historian and abandons poetry. Every spring full moon he remains disturbed and dreams of Pilate's liberation and the lovers together. Official explanations reduce the Moscow events to hypnosis and crime; dream and narrative continue transmitting an unfinished history.

Structure and narration

Three main lines interweave: Woland's satirical Moscow visit, the Master and Margarita's artistic and romantic fate, and the ancient tragedy of Pilate and Yeshua. Jerusalem is told by Woland, dreamt by Ivan, written by the Master, and presented by the narrator. It is not merely another novel inserted into this one but an experiment in how historical truth travels through different authors and media.

The narrator addresses readers, exaggerates, withholds, and turns abruptly from slapstick to lyric gravity. Moscow chapters use mistaken identity, pursuit, bodily transformation, and official phrasing in a Gogolian tradition. Pilate's chapters are comparatively restrained, returning to headache, sun, rose oil, and moonlight. The styles test one another: bureaucratic realism looks less plausible than magic, while sacred history becomes political fear and individual choice.

Time does not move in a single direction. Pilate's story seems fixed by two millennia of tradition yet waits for the Master to finish it. A paper burns and a text returns. Ivan repeats the event in dreams. The novel does not promise that art automatically defeats authority. Art persists precariously through persons, copies, memory, and later reading.

Major themes

Cowardice, power, and responsibility

Pilate knows that Yeshua should not die but submits to fear of Caesar. Moscow writers and officials pre-emptively obey possible censorship. The book treats cowardice as a choice magnified by institutions while acknowledging that fear is not imaginary: position, home, liberty, and life may be lost. Moral judgment cannot pretend that cost is absent, but cost cannot remove responsibility.

Art, censorship, and manuscripts

The Master loses not through open argument about literary quality but through labels and institutions of publication. Burning the manuscript is resistance and surrender. Its return does not produce social legality; preservation passes to supernatural power, love, and futurity. Art guarantees no victory, but can cause an erased question to recur.

Good and evil beyond simple camps

Woland punishes greed while frightening bystanders. Margarita rescues the Master and enjoys destruction. Pilate secretly murders Judas as compensation for permitting an execution. Complexity does not cancel judgment. It refuses a light imagined without shadow and asks that persons be judged by choices, consequences, and recognition of others.

Love, fidelity, and freedom

Margarita's action returns the Master from self-erasure. She is not a passive muse but negotiator, flyer, and ceremonial host. Love does not repair the public sphere, however. The pair receive departure from Moscow. Their fate can be salvation and an accusation against a society where artists possess a home only outside life.

Common simplifications

This is not merely a comic fantasy carried by a talking cat. Behemoth's slapstick stands among disappearance, diagnosis, censorship, and execution. Woland is not simply a righteous hero; his punishments are arbitrary and theatrical, not a model of modern justice.

The Master should not be equated transparently with Bulgakov, nor Margarita with Elena. Biography supplies material, but characters developed across multiple versions. Pilate's chapters are not a historical reconstruction of the Gospels; they recreate record, authority, and truth. Finally, if the return of a manuscript is taken to mean that art must survive, actual destruction disappears. Its claim is better understood as an ethical hope requiring preservation to be practised.

Place in literary history

The Master and Margarita combines Russian satire, European Faust and devil traditions, biblical rewriting, modernist fragmentation, and Soviet everyday life. It belongs to histories of censorship while exceeding political allegory. It asks whether history can be known, how texts construct truth, and whether mercy can complete what law cannot.

Delayed publication shaped its canonical life. Readers in the 1960s compared the cut serial with separately circulated omissions; the novel's themes of secrecy, manuscript, and return were mirrored by its transmission. Translators must reproduce bureaucratic jokes, theological terms, and differing textual bases, giving each language another editorial layer.

What to notice while reading

Begin with the translator's or editor's note: identify the Russian base, relation to the expurgated serial, transliteration, and annotation. Draw three timelines and mark who tells or dreams each Pilate chapter. Do not immediately turn every Muscovite into a real official; first watch housing, documents, currency, telephones, theatre, and MASSOLIT form a system.

Track moon, sun, rose oil, fire, heads, clothing, and names. Compare Pilate's public sentence with secret remedy, the Master's burning with Woland's restoration, and Margarita's request for Frieda with the later request for herself. At the end, distinguish rest from light. Does the reward express the Master's limitation, his desire, or the novel's final accusation about an artist's conditions?

Sources

• Russian State Library for the Blind: composition and the censored 1966–67 publication
• Middlebury College: manuscript versions and Bulgakov's 1930 account of burning a draft
• The Master and Margarita research archive: genesis across multiple versions
• Penguin Classics: book and publication introduction
• Penguin Random House reading guide: Pilate, narrative layers, and the conclusion
• Harvard English: course materials on censorship, ethics, and twentieth-century literature

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