Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

Part Two opens with the narrator's direct address: follow me, reader, and I will show you true, faithful, eternal love. It is a sharp change of tone: after the Moscow satire comes a lyrical hymn. The love of the Master and Margarita, in the Master's own words (chapter 13), struck them suddenly, “like a killer leaping out from under the ground,” the way lightning strikes, the way a Finnish knife strikes. The comparisons are deliberately alarming: in Bulgakov true love is not an idyll but fate, a blow, almost a catastrophe. Margarita here is not a passive sufferer but someone ready to act for the man she loves. It is she, not the Master, who will drive Part Two.

The whole novel grows out of Goethe's “Faust”; no wonder the epigraph comes from it: “…So who are you, after all?” “I am part of the power that always wants evil and always does good.” These words of Mephistopheles are the key to Woland. The very name Margarita points to Margarete (Gretchen), Faust's beloved. But Bulgakov turns the plot around. In Goethe, Gretchen is an innocent victim ruined by her affair with Faust; in the end, love saves her. In Bulgakov, Margarita is a mature, strong woman who makes a deal with diabolical forces herself and saves her own “Faust,” the Master. The heroine stops being a victim and becomes a savior: one of the book's main turns of meaning.

Margarita has an earthly prototype: Elena Sergeyevna, the writer's third wife, his “muse” and the keeper of the manuscript; it was she who preserved the text and saw it through to publication after Bulgakov's death. The love described in the novel is largely autobiographical. Here Margarita looks well off: beautiful, wealthy, married to a prominent specialist, in a luxurious mansion. Yet without the Master, whose fate she does not know, she is deeply unhappy. A telling detail: she dreams of the Master in a joyless place, a premonition of trouble. Berlioz's funeral (people whisper his head was stolen) and Azazello's appearance prepare her turn toward the miraculous. A “witch” is ripening in her: not wicked but free, ready to defy convention for love.