Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

The chapter opens with a grand picture of a storm: darkness covers Yershalaim, hides the bridges, the palace, and the temple, and the city “hated by the procurator” seems to vanish from sight. This is more than landscape. The storm arrives at the very hour of the execution and accompanies Yeshua's death: this is how Bulgakov links a natural cataclysm with an event of universal weight. Notice the echoes. Exactly the same storm will break over Moscow at the end (chapter 29), when Woland and his retinue leave the city. For Bulgakov a storm is a threshold, a boundary between worlds and eras, the moment when “everything is resolved.” An attentive reader notices that the Moscow storm and the Yershalaim storm are one and the same, flung across two thousand years. The detail matters too: Pilate sits in half-darkness, and the darkness around him reflects the darkness within. He has already done what he could not help doing, and now he lives in the twilight of conscience.

The heart of the chapter is Pilate's conversation with Afranius, head of the secret service. It is a masterpiece of ambiguous speech. Pilate does not order Judas of Kiriath killed outright; on the contrary, he says that, according to his information, Judas will be “knifed” this very night. Afranius understands the order unmistakably, though formally there is no order. This is a key to understanding power and cowardice. Pilate, who by day could not find the courage to save the innocent Yeshua, finds by night the cunning to take revenge on the traitor, but through other people's hands, so that his own stay clean. The revenge on Judas is an attempt to buy his way out of his own guilt after the fact, to do “justice” where he has just done injustice. Notice the manner: they speak in hints, and each pretends they are discussing how to prevent a murder, not how to arrange one. This is satire on any secret police and on the language of power in general, a theme keenly understood by a reader of the 1930s, who lived in an era of denunciations and the “organs” (the secret police).

In these chapters the novel's main ethical formula ripens. Yeshua, according to Afranius, counted cowardice first among human vices. Pilate himself knows full well that he was a coward. He feared a denunciation, feared for his career under the suspicious Caesar Tiberius, and so he confirmed an execution he himself did not believe in. Bulgakov makes cowardice the axis of the whole narrative. It is the vice that destroys an innocent man; it is the vice for which Pilate will be punished with sleeplessness and two thousand years of waiting. And it is the vice that Bulgakov's contemporaries understood like nothing else: keeping silent out of fear, renouncing out of fear, informing out of fear. Remember this thought: it will return more than once in the novel and will sound like a verdict passed on himself no longer by Pilate but by his creator, the Master.