Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

At night the very stranger from chapter 11 slips into Ivan's room from the balcony and at last tells his story. This is the title hero. He has no name in the novel: he calls himself only “the Master” and asks to be called just that. The choice matters. “Master” is not a writer's rank but a sign of true craft, set against MASSOLIT members and their membership cards. The hero renounces his old name and life (he was a historian, worked in a museum, knew several languages, won a large sum on a lottery bond). Namelessness makes him almost timeless: the artist as such, persecuted and misunderstood. Much is autobiographical: Bulgakov gave the Master his own persecution and his own burned manuscript.

The Master tells how he met Margarita. His line is famous: love struck them both suddenly, the way lightning strikes, the way a Finnish knife strikes. This comparison of love to the blow of a knife and of lightning sets the tone for the whole novel: in Bulgakov true love is a fateful, almost murderous, inescapable force. Margarita carries yellow flowers, an anxious, “bad” yellow that the Master disliked at once. In the novel yellow is often tied to anxiety and trouble. Margarita, married and unhappy, finds her only meaning in the Master. She believes in his novel, retypes the manuscript, and calls him the Master: she is the one who gives him the word. Their secret love in the little basement rented from a builder is the novel's only island of happiness, doomed but real.

The Master wrote a novel about Pontius Pilate: the very Yershalaim chapters we read inside the book. But he could not get it published: after an excerpt appeared in print, a flood of scathing, denunciatory reviews crashed down on him (the critic Latunsky, Ariman, Lavrovich). The hounding broke him: in a fit of fear and despair he burned the manuscript in the stove, fell ill, and in the end landed in the clinic, renouncing the world of his own accord. This mirrors Bulgakov's fate: Soviet critics hounded him, his plays were banned, and he too once partly burned this novel's manuscript. Later Woland will say the famous “Manuscripts don't burn,” but here we see only the artist's defeat. Note: the Master enters the clinic of his own accord, out of illness and fear, broken not only by enemies but by his own faintheartedness. The theme of cowardice as the gravest vice, central to Pilate's story, quietly touches the Master too.