The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Ivan Savelyevich,

Grigory Danilovich Rimsky.

Georges Bengalsky.

Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov,

‘Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once.

It suddenly seemed to me that the autumn darkness would push through the glass and pour into the room, and I would drown in it as in ink. I got up a man no longer in control of himself.

This blunted the fear somewhat—at least enough to keep me from running to the landlord—and I went back to the stove.

the request

‘Oh, God!

Vassily Stepanovich Lastochkin,

Prokhor Petrovich,

Anna Richardovna.

Maximilian Andreevich Poplavsky,

Pyatnazhko?’

Andrei Fokich Sokov.

The barman slowly

‘I believe! Something will happen! It cannot not happen, because for what, indeed, has lifelong torment been sent to me? I admit that I lied and deceived and lived a secret life, hidden from people, but all the same the punishment for it cannot be so cruel . . . Something is bound to happen, because it cannot be that anything will go on for ever. And besides, my dream was prophetic, I’ll swear it was . . .’

Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? Shadows are cast by objects and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. Trees and living beings also have shadows. Do you want to skin the whole earth, tearing all the trees and living things off it, because of your fantasy of enjoying bare light?

before my eyes your head is getting covered with snow . . . ah, my much-suffering head! Look what eyes you’ve got! There’s a desert in them . . . and the shoulders, the shoulders with their burden . . . crippled, crippled . . .’

Never again will I yield to faint-heartedness, or come back to this question, be reassured. I know that we’re both the victims of our mental illness, which you perhaps got from me . . . Well, so we’ll bear it together.’

‘I knew it! I assure you, Praskovya Fyodorovna, that yet another person has just passed away in the city. I even know who,’ here Ivanushka smiled mysteriously. ‘It’s a woman!’

‘The pun he thought up, in a discussion about light and darkness, was not altogether good. And after that the knight had to go on joking a bit more and longer than he supposed. But this is one of the nights when accounts are settled. The knight has paid up and closed his account.’

Here is your home, your eternal home. I know that in the evenings you will be visited by those you love, those who interest you and who will never trouble you.

Thus spoke Margarita, walking with the master towards their eternal home, and it seemed to the master that Margarita’s words flowed in the same way as the stream they had left behind flowed and whispered, and the master’s memory, the master’s anxious, needled memory began to fade. Someone was setting the master free, as he himself had just set free the hero he had created. This hero had gone into the abyss, gone irrevocably, the son of the astrologer-king, forgiven on the eve of Sunday, the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate.