Master and

Master and Margarita 11
interesting. In it he is confronted with another reality which he cannot recognize.
He becomes ‘unexpectedly mortal’. In the story of Pilate, however,
a moment of recognition does come. It occurs during Pilate’s conversation
with Yeshua, when he sees the wandering philosopher’s head float off and
in its place the toothless head of the aged Tiberius Caesar. This is the pivotal
moment of the novel. Pilate breaks off his dialogue with Yeshua, he
does not ‘go over’, and afterwards must sit like a stone for two thousand
years waiting to continue their conversation.
Parable cuts through the normality of this world only at moments.
These moments are preceded by a sense of dread, or else by a presentiment
of something good. The first variation is Berlioz’s meeting with
Woland. The second is Pilate’s meeting with Yeshua. The third is the ’selfbaptism’
of the poet Ivan Homeless before he goes in pursuit of the mysterious
stranger. The fourth is the meeting of the master and Margarita.
These chance encounters have eternal consequences, depending on the
response of the person, who must act without foreknowledge and then
becomes the consequences of that action.
The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless, who is there
at the start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and the
master, becomes the latter’s ‘disciple’ and continues his work, is present
at almost every turn of the novel’s action, and appears finally in the epilogue.
He remains an uneasy inhabitant of ‘normal’ reality, as a historian
who ‘knows everything’, but each year, with the coming of the spring full
moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks like folly.
Richard Pevear