Margarita and Pilate—central characters in two of the novel’s plotlines—are connected by both the Master’s book and their efforts to undo the past. One mourns the loss of her lover; the other struggles with a mistake he can no longer revoke. They despair and dream. But read against each other, they explore different ways of coming to terms with loss and history.
For Pontius Pilate, mortal grief stems from his uniquely difficult decision. He is at once tempted to take up Ha-Nozri’s “incredibly absurd” teachings that “all men are good” and unable to accept the political consequences of doing so. After failing to pardon Ha-Nozri and sentencing him to crucifixion, the Procurator languishes with guilt.
The penitent Pilate therefore seeks to redress his mistakes through his own political position—he organizes his own assassins to avenge Ha-Nozri by killing Jehudah on the outskirts of the city. Earthly power is the source of Pilate’s woes and the instrument by which he attempts to fix them. He exacts justice before Matthew Levi can.
Margarita’s sorrow—the disappearance of a lover—bears a slightly different flavor. So do her means of acting upon it. Pilate resolves his penitence through worldly means, but Margarita finds recourse beyond it. Agreeing to Woland’s requests, she lathers cream, acquires invisibility, and endures the depths of the Devil’s ghastly ball for the sake of recovering her lover. In a single night, Margarita commits herself to Woland and wins back the Master.
Pilate effectively finds himself bound by his mortal limitations whereas Margarita is not. Accordingly, she struggles to overcome them. As they gallop towards their final destination in limbo-like afterlife, Woland shows the Master his insomnia-ridden Procurator muttering about the “bad job” to himself. Pontius Pilot has to be reminded of his freedom to seek out Ha-Nozri, while Margarita seeks out her lover for herself. In bearing every trial for the Master, Margarita lives out the redemptive power of love. She gives love; Pilate—at last united with Ha-Nozri—receives it.
In a story that is at least partly about stories, the motif of record-keeping underpins The Master and Margarita but is also the subject of a complicated relationship. As characters try to capture their realities through words, the novel alternately affirms and challenges the written records’ truthful status. Writing is a means through which to document the truth and a medium vulnerable to devilish distortions.
Bulgakov privileges the written record by distinguishing it from hearsay. The narrator complains of the “utterly impossible rumors” that circulate the city in Woland’s wake, “embellishing the grain of truth at the core with the most luxuriant inventions.” By contrast, the novel delivers a triumphant defense of writing’s power when Woland retrieves the Master’s incinerated work and declares that “manuscripts don’t burn.”
But though manuscripts don’t burn, the novel presents just as many instances where they easily refract or evade reality. Some of their slipperiness comes from the sheer difficulty of putting pen to paper; in the hospital, Ivan Nikolayevich struggles to articulate his encounter with Woland and strands himself in hopeless tangents. Ha-Nozri rejects Matthew Levi’s goatskin recordings, explaining that “I never said a word of what was written there.” No one manipulates them better than Woland himself, who makes theater contracts, bills, and house deeds materialize or disappear at will.
As chervontsy become bottle caps and stories swirl, the novel increasingly challenges the written word’s claims to authenticity. It tests the religious stories at the heart of Christianity, as Berlioz and Ivan Nikolayevich doubt the existence of both God and the Devil. It notes the unreliability of records through official reports that sketch Woland as at once “tall” and “short” with a limp on both his “right foot” and “left foot.” Proliferating beyond control, writing ends up capturing nothing at all. Bulgakov questions the veracity of writing, so much so that it even becomes self-referential. Near the end of Book 1, the narrator makes a cheeky endorsement of his own “truthful narrative,” which itself is a bundle of extravagant fictions.
What is real and true? The Master and Margarita never exactly resolves this question, but it explores these concerns through its engagement with written records. Bulgakov demonstrates how writing is a double-sided medium, profound and prone to peril.
In the high drama where the Devil and Jesus compete for space, The Master and Margarita invites the initial expectation of stark contrasts. So begins its motif of darkness and light, between which the novel repeatedly alternates. Through its moments of shadow and sunlight, the novel acts out a tension between good and evil that ultimately complicates those two distinctions.
For much of the novel, Bulgakov’s passing references to light and darkness implicitly dramatize the struggle between Heaven and Hell. Woland and Ha-Nozri never come face-to-face with each other, but they wage proxy conflicts through the likes of clouds and shadows. Pilate speaks with Woland, whose face is “half-concealed” by a hood. Mischief reigns the moment Ivan Nikolayevich enters the dark alleyways past Arbat Square. In Yershalayim, the sun radiates with dazzling force and “fills” Pilate’s ears with “fire,” only to get shrouded by the “smoke-black belly” of storm clouds that enter from the west. These appeals to conventional connotations of darkness and light seem to reinforce familiar moral binaries. Woland’s realm is darkness, Satan’s ball happens in the thick of night, and the Master burns his manuscript upon imagining that he would “drown in the flood of inky darkness.”
But darkness and light also invite deeper complexity. As much as the novel associates Woland with the dark, it also creates exceptions. Varenukha’s sinister imposter does not cast shadows in Rimsky’s office, and the Moon dispels the “vestments of enchantment” as Margarita and the Master gallop deeper into the limbo-like underworld. “Brighter than the best electric light,” moonlight gradually undermines the stark distinctions that Bulgakov had previously created.
Rather than reinforcing the exclusive realms of good and evil, the motif ends up challenging them. Woland puts it best in his retort to Matthew Levi:
What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?
Like light and dark, good and evil are inseparably bound to each other. The Master and Margarita opens to a space of greater moral ambiguity by showing them to be two sides of the same coin, each dependent upon the other.