Unlocking the Meaning of The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
In the decades following the publication of The Master and Margarita, myriad critics have attempted to find a key to unlock the meaning of Bulgakov’s unfinished masterwork. Some viewed the novel as a political roman à clef, laboriously substituting historical figures from Stalinist Moscow for Bulgakov’s characters. Others posited a religious formula to understand the relationships between good and evil in the novel.
After giving myself time to think, I believe that any attempts to reduce the novel to a formula reflect some readers’ desire for neat, safe boxes to contain the world. This approach is at odds with the fear-ridden, desperate, and yet transcendent reality of Bulgakov’s experience in writing, revising, destroying, reconstructing, and then revising the novel, up to his death in Moscow on March 10, 1940. The Master and Margarita shows evidence of Bulgakov’s struggles to complete it, especially in part two, which illness prevented him from revising. I believe that the novel’s profound humanity stems from these imperfections, these facets not quite fitting neatly together, these jarring movements from scene to scene. In the end, The Master and Margarita is, by virtue of its own existence, a testament to the necessity of art in times of repression, and to the urgent need for artists to veer from cowardice and hold firmly to their commitment to living a true human life, with fantasy and reality combined, with history and invention feeding into each other, with good and evil providing the shadows and depth that make life meaningful and real.
The Master and Margarita as Fairy Tale
One approach to The Master and Margarita that appeals to me is understanding it, in part, as a fairy tale. In the novel, Bulgakov threads together three different storylines, which intertwine, especially at the novel’s conclusion: the often slapstick depiction of life in Stalinist Moscow, seen in part through the antics of the devil Woland and his demonic helpers; the story of Pilate, with names and details transformed from the familiar Biblical versions; and the story of the Master and Margarita. The action takes place in a compressed time frame, so readers looking for character development will be disappointed. Instead, Bulgakov develops an extended allegory where flight equals freedom, where greed and small-mindedness are punished, and where weary artists are afforded some mercy and peace.
The Master and Margarita provided Bulgakov with a lifeline to the imagination in the midst of the stultifying culture of Stalinist Russia. There are healthy doses of wish fulfillment in the novel, especially in those sections in which Woland’s minions, Azazello, Behemoth, and Koroviev, wreak retribution for the petty-mindedness and greed inherent in this political and social system. There also is a desperate attempt to resist the Stalinist bent towards monotony and flatness, and instead to weave dizzying strands of magic, fantasy, and power into life in Moscow.
Behemoth
These attempts to use a story as wish fulfillment, criticizing a social order by turning it upside down in fiction, and recognizing how to use an audience’s sense of wonder as a fulcrum for change, resonate with the historical and cultural functions of fairy tales as described by scholars including Jack Zipes in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition and Marina Warner in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. Magic and wonder force the reader to acknowledge other possibilities outside of a reality of political repression, poverty, and war. When fairy tales reveal challenges to misplaced authority, whether in the guise of an evil queen or a greedy government official, they may take on one of two roles: a subversive threat to authority, or a valve to release the pressure of living under severe constraints. Perhaps most important, fairy tales remind their readers that life is miraculous, and that certain freedoms, such as the freedom to imagine and dream, can be nurtured and honored even under the most restrictive regimes.
For Bulgakov, the blend of the fantastical and the everyday in The Master and Margarita serves as his manifesto. Throughout his life, he fought to preserve the full human experience, not the two-dimensional totalitarianism in the Stalinist USSR, where human life was flattened of any sense of wonder, creativity, exuberance. Instead, he advocated for human life with all its shadows and colors, with a foundation in imagination and wonder. The freedom he sought was not simply freedom from communal housing or repressive government policies. Instead, he sought the freedom to imagine, to dream, to infuse his life with wonder, and to share his vision. For this reason, any attempt to read The Master and Margarita as a simple satire of Stalinist totalitarianism is misguided. Instead, Bulgakov sought to fly free along with his characters, and in doing so to tap into the universal human need for imagination, wonder, and freedom of the intellect and spirit.
“For me the inability to write is as good as being buried alive”
Bulgakov and his wife Yelena, c. 1939
Although Bulgakov universalized his quest for artistic freedom in The Master and Margarita, he drew inspiration and a sense of urgency from his experiences. A playwright, he faced censorship as his plays were banned and productions cancelled. He saw his fellow writers imprisoned for following their calling. (In response to one of these cases, Bulgakov destroyed one version of The Master and Margarita, which he later reconstructed.)
In desperation, between 1929 and 1930 Bulgakov wrote three letters to Soviet government officials, including Stalin, to protest his censorship and beg for a chance to practice his art, if not within Russia, outside it. In the final letter, dated March 28, 1930, Bulgakov movingly describes his ordeal, arguing that his duty as a writer is to defend artistic freedom, and pleading that being silenced is tantamount to death.
Although the letters provided Bulgakov with employment after receiving a favorable response, and saved him from arrest or execution, he still faced his works’ being banned and suppressed. He devoted the last years of his life to revising The Master and Margarita, knowing he would not live to see it published, and sometimes despairing it would ever be read outside of his family circle. His widow, Yelena Shilovskaya, worked tirelessly after his death for decades, preserving his manuscript and finally seeing it published, in a censored version, in 1966 and 1967.
Planes of Reality: The Fantastic, The Historical, and the Totalitarian
Azazello, Behemoth, and Koroviev
Some criticism of The Master and Margarita comes from the abrupt transitions and changes in mood among the three storylines: the actions of Woland and his minions in Moscow; the transformed story of Pontius Pilate, with some striking changes to the names of characters and the sequence of events which simultaneously make the narrative seem more historical and keep readers off-balance; and the story of the Master and Margarita, which includes Bulgakov’s central concerns about cowardice, artistry, duty, loyalty and love. I believe that Bulgakov purposefully constructed his novel so that the reader would be pulled from dimension to dimension. The effect, although jarring, is one of constant instability and surprise. The reader is immersed in a world where a Biblical past seems more historically based and less fantastic than 20th-century Moscow, where characters who are petty and greedy are meted out fantastic public punishments, at times literally on a stage, and where in the end characters with the most substance and loyalty have their lives transformed through magic.
By carefully building this multifaceted world, with all the seams showing, Bulgakov forces us as readers to consider the intersections among these worlds. Bulgakov reveals how we cut ourselves off from the wellsprings of magic and wonder, and invites us to join him in mounting a broomstick and riding off into the night sky, free from the constraints of our everyday lives.
The Necessity of Shadows: Woland
Woland
Just as Bulgakov confounds his readers’ expectations of a unified and seamless world, so he also makes us question our assumptions about good and evil. A key character is Woland, the devil at the center of the magical action. From his appearance in the first chapter, Woland presents an arresting and disconcerting figure. Woland immediately inserts himself into a conversation with Berlioz, the editor of a literary magazine and chair of MASSOLIT, a prestigious literary association, and Ivan, a poet also known by his pen name Bezdomny, engaging in a debate with them about the existence of God. Berlioz parrots many of the current arguments against the existence of God, but Woland deftly counters his arguments in a manner that veers between the charming and the sinister.
This debate introduces a theme that runs throughout The Master and Margarita: a cosmos in which good and evil each have their jurisdiction, but work together to ensure that people get the rewards or punishments that they deserve. In a famous passage later in the novel, Woland provides the following cogent description:
“You pronounced your words as if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of either shadows or evil. But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and from living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You’re stupid.”
Throughout The Master and Margarita, Woland metes out justice to wrongdoers. However, he does not simply punish — instead, he also rewards Margarita for her devotion, intelligence, loyalty, and bravery. He rescues the Master from his exile in the asylum and ultimately grants him and Margarita a destiny of peace and rest together. In doing so, Woland overturns our expectations. Bulgakov describes a world where good and evil powers work together to provide some justice and balance in our lives, in spite of the thoughtless and cruel ways that humans behave. As Woland tells Margarita at one point, “Everything will be made right, that is what the world is built on.” The true evil in The Master and Margarita does not rise from Hell, but instead comes from the pettiness and greed of flawed, small-minded humans.
The Master and Margarita: Responsibility to Art
The Master makes his appearance relatively late in the novel, in chapter 13, “Enter the Hero.” However, he is not the traditional hero. He is a broken man, living in an asylum, remembering his love for Margarita, while at the same time turning his back on the art that Margarita loved, protected, and honored: his novel about Pontius Pilate.
In a lengthy conversation with Ivan, the Master paints an idyllic portrait of his life with Margarita, who creates a cozy sanctuary full of roses and love, in which the written word is treasured and respected:
“Running her slender fingers and pointed nails through her hair, she endlessly reread what he had written, and then she sewed the very cap he had shown Ivan. Sometimes she would squat down next to the lower shelves or stand up on a chair next to the upper ones and dust the hundreds of books. She predicted fame, urged him on, and started calling him Master. She waited eagerly for the promised final words about the fifth procurator of Judea, recited the parts she especially liked in a loud sing-song voice, and said that the novel was her life.”
However this idyll comes to a crashing end when the Master completes the manuscript and looks for a publisher. He provides harrowing descriptions of his brutal treatment by the literary world in Moscow, as editors, publishers, and fellow writers publicly criticized him for his novel. These descriptions bear the pain of Bulgakov’s personal experience with censorship and rejection, culminating in the Master’s paralyzing fear of everything around him.
Finally, in a scene inspired by events in Bulgakov’s life, the Master attempts to destroy his manuscript. Although Margarita salvages some pages, this scene marks the end of her life with the Master, who turns his back on Margarita and his art. He describes himself as a man without a name or a future, marking time in the asylum. Bulgakov depicts the Master as a broken man, whose loss of spirit and cowardice in the face of adversity led him to lose everything of value in his life.
Margarita
Margarita poses a stark contrast to the Master. When we finally meet her in part two, she is grieving over losing the Master, but she also shows herself to be intelligent, energetic, and fearless in her determination to find him and rebuild their life together. In doing so, Margarita is not taking an easy path. She is married to a successful husband who adores her. The two live in a large apartment with a great deal of privacy, a true luxury in Stalinist Moscow. She is beautiful, but she cannot put behind her deep dissatisfaction with her life, apparently perfect on the surface, but with no depth. She is living a lie. Her despair starts to break when she has a dream about the Master, which she views as a portent that her torment will soon come to an end. After rushing from her home, she has a fateful conversation with Azazello, whom Woland has tasked with inviting her to officiate as his queen at his ball. Margarita handles the interaction with spirit and courage, agreeing to follow Azazello’s mysterious instructions in hopes of learning the Master’s fate.
Margarita’s Night Ride
Margarita is transformed and embarks on a night ride, flying naked on a broomstick over Moscow. After wreaking havoc at the apartment of a publisher who had tormented the Master, and comforting a small boy who awakened, terrified by the destruction, she participates in a moonlight gathering of other magical creatures. Afterwards, she returns to Moscow in a magical car, “After all that evening’s marvels and enchantments, she had already guessed who they were taking her to visit, but that didn’t frighten her. The hope that there she would succeed in regaining her happiness made her fearless.” The night ride is a symbol of Margarita’s freedom and power.
Her fearlessness propels Margarita through her meeting with Woland and his minions, and a surreal evening as the queen of Woland’s midnight ball. Her devotion is rewarded by Woland, in scenes full of magic and moonlight. Although the Master crumbles in the face of adversity, Margarita becomes the ultimate hero and savior through her courage and commitment to the Master and his art.
The Moon
Throughout The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov uses key symbols to tie together the different chapters and storylines. Perhaps the most important symbol is the moon, which appears frequently in practically every chapter. The moon conveys a kind of otherworldly truth. Characters are bathed in moonlight at critical points in the novel, especially when making entrances, as when the Master first appears in Ivan’s hospital room. Moonlight imparts insight and truth even to the most delusional of characters. The moon lights the night rides of Woland, his companions, Margarita and the Master.
Woland and company: Night Ride
The moonlight also features prominently in the Pilate chapters, serving as a lynchpin between them and the rest of the novel. Pilate looks up at the moon for solace in the face of his agony from his migraines and his cowardice, with his faithful dog Banga as his sole companion. Bulgakov uses the moon to illuminate Pilate’s torment and his final peace, granted to him by the Master, his creator:
“[Pilate] has been sitting here for about two thousand years, sleeping, but, when the moon is full, he is tormented, as you see, by insomnia. And it torments not only him, but his faithful guardian, the dog. If it is true that cowardice is the most grave vice, then the dog, at least, is not guilty of it. The only thing that brave creature ever feared was thunderstorms. But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.”
In response to Woland’s prompting, the Master stands and shouts the words that complete his novel, and end Pilate’s torture:
“The path of moonlight long awaited by the procurator led right up to the garden, and the dog with the pointed ears was the first to rush out on it. The man in the white cloak with the blood-red lining got up from his chair and shouted something in a hoarse, broken voice. It was impossible to make out whether he was laughing or crying, or what he was shouting, but he could be seen running down the path of moonlight, after his faithful guardian.”
Pilate, Banga and the moon
Bulgakov follows this transformative scene with Woland’s gift of peace to the Master. As she did throughout the novel, Margarita remains by the Master’s side, his loyal companion through eternity. Bulgakov cannot give salvation to the Master, perhaps because of the enormity of his cowardice against art, perhaps because he has been so damaged by a hostile society. In these final passages, Margarita gives the Master, and the reader, a soothing picture of a peaceful life, perhaps one Bulgakov himself longed for:
“Listen to the silence,” Margarita was saying to the Master, the sand crunching under her bare feet. “Listen and take pleasure in what you were not given in life—quiet. Look, there up ahead is your eternal home, which you’ve been given as a reward. I can see the Venetian window and the grape-vine curling up to the roof. There is your home, your eternal home. I know that in the evenings people you like will come to see you, people who interest you and who will not upset you. They will play for you, sing for you, and you will see how the room looks in candlelight. You will fall asleep with your grimy eternal cap on your head, you will fall asleep with a smile on your lips. Sleep will strengthen you, you will begin to reason wisely. And you will never be able to chase me away. I will guard your sleep.”
This review is dedicated to Mary, the identical mannequin of a perfect co-moderator and GR friend.In the decades following the publication of, myriad critics have attempted to find a key to unlock the meaning of Bulgakov ’ sulfur unfinished masterwork. Some viewed the novel as a political roman à clef, laboriously substituting historical figures from Stalinist Moscow for Bulgakov ’ south characters. Others posited a religious rule to understand the relationships between effective and evil in the novel.After giving myself meter to think, I believe that any attempts to reduce the novel to a formula reflect some readers ’ desire for clean, safe boxes to contain the populace. This approach is at odds with the fear-ridden, desperate, and however transcendent reality of Bulgakov ’ s have in writing, rewriting, destroying, reconstructing, and then revising the novel, up to his death in Moscow on March 10, 1940.shows testify of Bulgakov ’ s struggles to complete it, particularly in function two, which illness prevented him from revising. I believe that the novel ’ sulfur profound humanness stems from these imperfections, these facets not quite fitting neatly together, these jarring movements from scene to setting. In the end, is, by virtue of its own universe, a testament to the necessity of art in times of repression, and to the pressing need for artists to veer from cowardice and hold securely to their commitment to living a true homo life sentence, with fantasy and reality combined, with history and invention prey into each other, with estimable and malefic providing the shadows and depth that make life meaningful and real.One approach tothat appeals to me is understanding it, in separate, as a fairy fib. In the novel, Bulgakov threads together three unlike storylines, which intertwine, particularly at the novel ’ mho decision : the frequently slapstick depiction of biography in Stalinist Moscow, seen in part through the antics of the monster Woland and his demonic helpers ; the history of Pilate, with names and details transformed from the familiar Biblical versions ; and the floor of the Master and Margarita. The action takes rate in a compress time frame, so readers looking for character development will be disappointed. rather, Bulgakov develops an stretch fable where flight equals freedom, where avarice and small-mindedness are punished, and where tire artists are afforded some mercifulness and peace.provided Bulgakov with a lifeline to the resource in the midst of the cripple culture of Stalinist Russia. There are goodly doses of wish fulfillment in the fresh, specially in those sections in which Woland ’ sulfur minions, Azazello, Behemoth, and Koroviev, bring retribution for the petty-mindedness and avarice implicit in in this political and social system. There besides is a despairing try to resist the Stalinist bent towards monotony and flatness, and rather to weave dizzying strands of magic trick, fantasy, and world power into life in Moscow.These attempts to use a fib as wish fulfillment, criticizing a social order by turning it top down in fabrication, and recognizing how to use an audience ’ mho sense of wonder as a fulcrum for transfer, resonate with the historical and cultural functions of fairy tales as described by scholars including Jack Zipes inand Marina Warner in. Magic and wonder force the proofreader to acknowledge other possibilities outside of a reality of political repression, poverty, and war. When fairy tales reveal challenges to misplaced agency, whether in the guise of an evil queen or a greedy government official, they may take on one of two roles : a revolutionist terror to authority, or a valve to release the press of living under hard constraints. possibly most authoritative, fairy tales remind their readers that life is marvelous, and that certain freedoms, such as the exemption to imagine and dream, can be nurtured and honored tied under the most restrictive regimes.For Bulgakov, the blend of the antic and the everyday inserves as his manifesto. Throughout his life, he fought to preserve the wax human have, not the two-dimensional dictatorship in the Stalinist USSR, where human life was flattened of any sense of wonder, creativity, exuberance. alternatively, he advocated for human life with all its shadows and colors, with a foundation in imagination and wonder. The exemption he sought was not simply freedom from communal housing or inhibitory government policies. rather, he sought the exemption to imagine, to dream, to infuse his life with wonder, and to share his vision. For this cause, any undertake to readas a simple sarcasm of Stalinist dictatorship is misguided. rather, Bulgakov sought to fly rid along with his characters, and in doing so to tap into the universal homo necessitate for imagination, wonder, and freedom of the mind and spirit.Although Bulgakov universalized his request for artistic exemption in, he drew inhalation and a common sense of importunity from his experiences. A dramatist, he faced censoring as his plays were banned and productions cancelled. He saw his chap writers imprisoned for following their calling. ( In reception to one of these cases, Bulgakov destroyed one translation of, which he late reconstructed. ) In desperation, between 1929 and 1930 Bulgakov wrote three letters to soviet government officials, including Stalin, to protest his censoring and beg for a opportunity to practice his art, if not within Russia, outside it. In the concluding letter, dated March 28, 1930, Bulgakov movingly describes his ordeal, arguing that his duty as a writer is to defend artistic exemption, and pleading that being silenced is equivalent to death.Although the letters provided Bulgakov with employment after receiving a friendly response, and saved him from arrest or execution, he silent faced his works ’ being banned and suppressed. He devoted the last years of his life to retool, knowing he would not live to see it published, and sometimes despairing it would always be read outside of his syndicate traffic circle. His widow, Yelena Shilovskaya, worked indefatigably after his death for decades, preserving his manuscript and finally seeing it published, in a censor interpretation, in 1966 and 1967.Some criticism ofcomes from the abrupt transitions and changes in mood among the three storylines : the actions of Woland and his minions in Moscow ; the transform report of Pontius Pilate, with some hit changes to the names of characters and the sequence of events which simultaneously make the narrative look more historical and observe readers off-balance ; and the history of the Master and Margarita, which includes Bulgakov ’ second central concerns about cowardice, art, duty, loyalty and beloved. I believe that Bulgakov purposefully constructed his fresh so that the reader would be pulled from proportion to property. The effect, although jar, is one of constant imbalance and surprise. The subscriber is immersed in a world where a Biblical by seems more historically based and less fantastic than 20th-century Moscow, where characters who are fiddling and greedy are meted out fantastic populace punishments, at times literally on a stage, and where in the end characters with the most meaning and loyalty have their lives transformed through magic.By cautiously building this many-sided populace, with all the seam indicate, Bulgakov forces us as readers to consider the intersections among these worlds. Bulgakov reveals how we cut ourselves off from the wellsprings of magic and wonder, and invites us to join him in mounting a broomstick and riding off into the night flip, free from the constraints of our everyday lives.Just as Bulgakov confounds his readers ’ expectations of a unify and seamless world, so he besides makes us question our assumptions about commodity and evil. A key character is Woland, the devil at the center of the charming action. From his appearance in the first chapter, Woland presents an collar and disconcerting figure. Woland immediately inserts himself into a conversation with Berlioz, the editor of a literary magazine and chair of MASSOLIT, a prestigious literary association, and Ivan, a poet besides known by his penitentiary name Bezdomny, engaging in a argument with them about the universe of God. Berlioz parrots many of the current arguments against the universe of God, but Woland deftly counters his arguments in a manner that veers between the charm and the sinister.This debate introduces a subject that runs throughout : a universe in which good and evil each have their legal power, but work together to ensure that people get the rewards or punishments that they deserve. In a celebrated passing by and by in the novel, Woland provides the follow cogent description : passim, Woland metes out justice to wrongdoers. however, he does not merely punish — alternatively, he besides rewards Margarita for her devotion, intelligence, commitment, and courage. He rescues the overcome from his expatriate in the refuge and ultimately grants him and Margarita a destiny of peace and rest together. In doing so, Woland overturns our expectations. Bulgakov describes a world where dependable and evil powers work together to provide some department of justice and poise in our lives, in cattiness of the thoughtless and barbarous ways that humans behave. As Woland tells Margarita at one point, “ Everything will be made right, that is what the world is built on. ” The true malefic indoes not rise from Hell, but alternatively comes from the pettiness and avarice of flawed, petty humans.The Master makes his appearance relatively late in the novel, in chapter 13, “ Enter the Hero. ” however, he is not the traditional bomber. He is a break man, living in an refuge, remembering his love for Margarita, while at the same clock turning his back on the art that Margarita loved, protected, and honored : his novel about Pontius Pilate.In a drawn-out conversation with Ivan, the Master paints an idyllic portrait of his life with Margarita, who creates a cozy sanctuary full of roses and love, in which the written news is treasured and respected : however this eclogue comes to a crashing end when the Master completes the manuscript and looks for a publisher. He provides agonizing descriptions of his brutal discussion by the literary worldly concern in Moscow, as editors, publishers, and boyfriend writers publicly criticized him for his fresh. These descriptions bear the pain of Bulgakov ’ s personal have with censoring and rejection, culminating in the Master ’ s paralyzing fear of everything around him.Finally, in a scenery inspired by events in Bulgakov ’ randomness life, the Master attempts to destroy his manuscript. Although Margarita salvages some pages, this view marks the end of her life with the Master, who turns his back on Margarita and his art. He describes himself as a man without a diagnose or a future, marking time in the mental hospital. Bulgakov depicts the Master as a crack man, whose loss of spirit and cowardice in the confront of adversity led him to lose everything of value in his life.Margarita poses a stark line to the Master. When we finally meet her in region two, she is grieving over losing the victor, but she besides shows herself to be intelligent, energetic, and audacious in her decision to find him and rebuild their life sentence in concert. In doing sol, Margarita is not taking an easy path. She is married to a successful husband who adores her. The two live in a bombastic apartment with a great batch of privacy, a genuine luxury in Stalinist Moscow. She is beautiful, but she can not put behind her abstruse dissatisfaction with her life, obviously perfect on the surface, but with no astuteness. She is living a lie. Her despair starts to break when she has a dream about the Master, which she views as a omen that her anguish will soon come to an end. After rushing from her home, she has a fateful conversation with Azazello, whom Woland has tasked with inviting her to officiate as his queen at his testis. Margarita handles the interaction with spirit and courage, agreeing to follow Azazello ’ s mysterious instructions in hopes of learning the Master ’ second fate.Margarita is transformed and embarks on a night drive, flying naked on a broomstick over Moscow. After wreaking havoc at the apartment of a publisher who had tormented the Master, and comforting a modest boy who awakened, terrified by the destruction, she participates in a moonlight gain of early charming creatures. Afterwards, she returns to Moscow in a charming cable car, “ After all that evening ‘s marvels and enchantments, she had already guessed who they were taking her to visit, but that did n’t frighten her. The hope that there she would succeed in regaining her happiness made her fearless. ” The night ride is a symbol of Margarita ’ s exemption and power.Her fearlessness propels Margarita through her meet with Woland and his minions, and a dreamlike evening as the queen of Woland ’ s midnight testis. Her idolatry is rewarded by Woland, in scenes broad of magic and moonlight. Although the Master crumbles in the confront of adversity, Margarita becomes the ultimate hero and savior through her courage and commitment to the maestro and his art.Throughout, Bulgakov uses key symbols to tie together the different chapters and storylines. possibly the most important symbol is the moon, which appears frequently in much every chapter. The moon conveys a kind of nonnatural truth. Characters are bathed in moonlight at critical points in the novel, specially when making entrances, as when the Master first gear appears in Ivan ’ s hospital board. Moonlight imparts penetration and accuracy even to the most delusional of characters. The moon lights the night rides of Woland, his companions, Margarita and the Master.The moonlight besides features prominently in the Pilate chapters, serving as a anchor between them and the remainder of the novel. Pilate looks up at the lunar month for solace in the face of his agony from his migraines and his cowardice, with his faithful dog Banga as his lone companion. Bulgakov uses the daydream to illuminate Pilate ’ s agony and his final examination peace, granted to him by the Master, his creator : In reaction to Woland ’ s prompt, the Master stands and shouts the words that complete his novel, and end Pilate ’ s distortion : Bulgakov follows this transformative scene with Woland ’ s endow of peace to the Master. As she did throughout the fresh, Margarita remains by the Master ’ sulfur side, his patriotic companion through eternity. Bulgakov can not give salvation to the Master, possibly because of the outrageousness of his cowardice against art, possibly because he has been so damaged by a hostile club. In these final passages, Margarita gives the master, and the reviewer, a soothing picture of a passive life, possibly one Bulgakov himself longed for :
