The Master and Margarita
Paratexts, villains and ambiguities in Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece
This is the twenty-second chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the classic Russian novel about a lot of things—but mostly about what happens when the devil visits Moscow and wreaks havoc upon the corrupt Soviet elite. (There are spoilers in here of one of the book’s sublots, which is based on one of the most famous stories of all time, but I guess this merits a warning.)
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is a complicated novel that eludes simple explanation. On one level, it concerns the shenanigans of the devil and his coterie when they arrive in Stalin’s Moscow. On another, it is a love story between a sad-sack novelist only known as the master with a lively married woman named Margarita. It also happens to feature a novel-within-a-novel starring Pontius Pilate, the reluctant executor of Jesus. Needless to say, this novel has a lot going on.
In this post, I will focus on just a few of Bulgakov’s craft elements. These include his incorporation of the Pilate novel as a paratext; his complex characterization of the all-powerful devil, Woland; and Bulgakov’s careful–crafted ambiguities that make his novel a puzzle that cannot be solved. For anyone who is trying to craft ambiguities that keep readers engaged with the story long after they have finished reading, The Master and Margarita is a fascinating example for how to achieve such an effect.
Pontius Pilate
The Master and Margarita opens with an unlikely scene—a seemingly Socratic dialogue between some Moscow intellectuals and a foreign professor named Woland—who is actually Satan. After the intellectuals demand proof of Jesus’ historic existence, Woland insists there is no need for proof (14). He elaborates:
‘It’s all very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan…’ (14).
Immediately, we are thrust into the next chapter, which opens with the same line:
In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate (15).
Suddenly, the prose style has changed from a zigzagging, satirical narrative voice (“the poet, for whom the editor was telling him was new… merely hiccupped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under his breath” (5)) to a formal narrator. In such fashion, we receive a more controlled voice, as exemplified by some lush imagery of Roman Judea—“a rosy smell exuded from the cypresses and palms in the garden” (15). In this case, the Pilate narrative is triggered by the exact lines Woland utters. Later, we learn that the Pilate narrative is in fact the master’s novel (135), but its chapters are triggered in different ways and as experienced by different characters: as a hallucination by Ivan Nikolaevich (168), as a manuscript read by Margarita (298), and presumably, as a diabolically-correct direct quotation of that manuscript by the devil (14). Complicating the Master’s novel is that the devil asserts that he was present at the events of Jesus’ sentencing and execution (we’ll come back to this) (40). The formal narrative voice, however, is consistent within the Pilate sections, making it immediately distinguishable from the rest of the novel. Instead of regularly alternating the Pilate novel with the main story, the sections are infrequent, coming in the second chapter, the sixteenth, and the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters, respectively. Each section is triggered by a character reading or saying a line that makes up the first line of a Pilate section.
But enough on that. Let’s talk about “villains who have a point.”
Villains who have a point
There is some clichéd adage that a protagonist can only be as strong as the villain he or she faces. In The Master and Margarita, the devil Woland is as all-powerful as one can get. But because he is also a sympathetic adversary to the master, while being ‘less’ sympathetic to everyone in Moscow—his role is complicated, making him a stronger character. When he finally offers the master a chance at purgatory, as heaven is off-limits (according to the ‘angel’ Matthew Levi), our expectations of his nefarious intentions are thwarted (381). As readers, we have been dreading what Woland might do to the master since the devil restored the burned manuscript and said “‘Well, it’s all clear now’… tapping the manuscript with a long finger”—an action that might indicate Woland’s interest in destroying the master (287). And yet, in time, we learn Woland has something better in mind—the chance to forgive the subject of his novel, Pontius Pilate:
‘Your novel has been read,’ Woland began, turning to the master, ‘and the only thing said about it was that, unfortunately, it is not finished. So, then, I wanted to show you your hero’ (381).
In most Christian texts, God or Jesus have the power to forgive. And yet, in Bulgakov’s novel, Jesus, through the guise of Matthew Levi, refuses to admit the master to heaven (287). Only the devil can give the master peace, and offer him the chance to give Pilate his own form of freedom. Perhaps this was a way for Bulgakov to show how, in a topsy-turvy Stalinist world, only Satan will do what Jesus refuses—to act, to take matters into his own hands, to grant reprieves to those who have struggled their whole lives—the master—or, in the case of Pilate—eternity.
For a villain to be compelling, he has to be partly correct, his worldview exposing the weaknesses in the protagonist’s vision—causing the protagonist to grow or collapse. In the case of Woland, he offers the master a sanctuary from the ruin in which he has so long toiled:
‘What are you going to do in the little basement?... The house and the old servant are already waiting for you, the candles are already burning, and soon they will go out, because you will immediately meet the dawn’ (383).
Woland gives the master the freedom to pass on, something Jesus won’t even allow.
But enough of the devil. We need to talk about Aphranius.
Aphranius
“You try to hold the novel’s face, and it turns away once again,” Boris Fishman wrote in the forward to the novel’s 50th anniversary edition (x). The Master and Margarita possesses a great deal of ambiguity. Much like the best David Lynch films, while some elements are spelled out, others seem to shift, disguise themselves deeper in their mysteries.
In the third chapter, Woland asserts that he was present during Jesus’ trial:
‘The thing is…’ here the professor looked around fearfully and spoke in a whisper, ‘that I was personally present at it all. I was on Pontius Pilate’s balcony, and in the garden when he talked with Kaifa, and on the platform, only secretly, incognito, so to speak, and therefore I beg you—not a word to anyone, total secrecy, shh…’ (40).
In the first Pilate chapter, there are two moments in which the devil might have appeared. The first is when a swallow flies into the room during Jesus’ trial, the bird’s arrival coinciding with a surge in Pilate’s headache and the procurator’s decision to execute Jesus (24).
The second instance is a very brief mention of Pilate meeting “a certain man, whose face was half covered by a hood, though he could not have been bothered by the sun’s rays in this room” (34). Was the devil the bird, or the hooded man? Or both? By the second Pilate section, we meet the “same hooded man with whom Pilate had a momentary meeting in a darkened room of the palace” (170).
In the third Pilate section, the hooded figure returns and has an extended audience with Pilate, and we learn he is the head of Pilate’s secret police (301-309). We are given the detail “it would be difficult to establish this man’s nationality”— which seems to signal that this is Woland, since when we first meet the devil, he is described as a foreign professor of ambiguous nationality (303, 6-14).
But the novel averts such a firm distinction—rather, it further complicates it. Pilate asks the man to “protect” Judas, and the man—finally named “Aphranius”—accepts the assignment (308-309). In the next Pilate section, Aphranius meets Niza, a woman who proceeds to lead Judas to his assassination (312-317).
After Judas’ killing, a figure with a hood, presumably Aphranius, appears and examines Judas’ body (317). We are led to believe this assassination has been part of Aphranius’ secret plan all along, but then Bulgakov throws us for yet another loop. After Aphranius apologizes to Pilate for failing to save Judas’ life, Pilate is nonchalant (“The procurator grinned and said: ‘Not much’” in reaction to Judas’ meager reward of silver) (321). Pilate proceeds to interrogate Matthew Levi, and admits it was he who actually ordered Judas’ assassination (327-330). “‘It is not much to have done, but all the same I did it,’” Pilate tells Matthew (330).
Was Pilate speaking in code to Aphranius? That by protecting Judas, he wanted Aphranius to kill him? Then why speak in circles, as Aphranius apologizes for not ‘saving’ Judas? Or is Pilate taking credit for something he did not do? An even wilder reading might be that Aphranius orchestrated Judas’ killing in the same way Woland orders the ‘death’ of the master and Margarita, poisoning them so they can enter a form of eternal life (370-371). Either way, the murkiness of Aphranius’ true identity—the conflicting nature of both Pilate and Aphranius’ attitude toward Judas’ assassination—allow for no simple answers. The deeper we look, the more the novel ‘turns away.’
In my own work, I write for ambiguities that force the reader to try to solve a puzzle that may or may not be solvable, but that ambiguity must not undermine the efficacy of the work as a whole. A movie like Mulholland Drive creates paradoxes, but most of these paradoxes can be resolved by its end. The Master and Margarita answers some questions, but leaves others unresolved. Mastering effective ambiguity, it seems, will take a great deal of time in a Moscow basement.
Works Cited
Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. 50th anniversary edition. New York: Penguin. 2016.