The Master and Margarita

"I am part of that force which wills forever evil and works forever good.

Would you remove all trees and living things from the world to realise your fantasy of basking in naked light?"

- Woland

First of all, this has nothing to do with any of the Masters from certain television shows, which the novel predates by more than twenty years. And now that we have established that, let's move on.

This novel was written by Mikhail Bulgakov in 1928-1940, but only published in the Soviet Union in 1966-1967 in a severely Bowdlerised edition. It is notable for not having a single definite main character around whom most of the plot revolves, although the Anti-Villain may qualify.

The main plot nominally follows Satan, who arrives with his Ragtag Bunch of Misfits in 1930s Moscow under the guise of a foreign Professor of the occult, Woland. His true intent is to host a periodic carnival of the dead. Much of the humor and social satire in the novel is derived from Woland and his henchmen exposing the numb-skulled bureaucratic officiousness of Soviet society. He is not truly evil, but some of his pranks prove humiliating to the faux aristocracy of the Soviet Union.

On their way, they cross the path of MASSOLIT, a bureaucratic association of talentless writers pumping out trash mass-production literature extolling social order -- in fact, the book begins with Woland's encounter with publisher Mikhail Berlioz and poet Ivan Bezdomny. Immediately after the meeting, in which Woland mocks the official atheism of the Soviet citizens, Mikhail dies in a freak accident and the Ivan is commissioned into a madhouse. Ivan then meets the titular Master, a nameless novelist whose novel about Pontius Pilate did not pass Soviet censorship, prompting him to burn it and leaving him emotionally crippled. Meanwhile, the Master's former love Margarita Nikolayevna, seeking reunion with him, agrees to act as the queen of Woland's upcoming carnival.

The main plot is interleaved with chapters from the Master's novel, telling the story of Pontius Pilate and his encounters with the wandering philosopher Yeshua Ha-Nozri (Jesus of Nazareth), his only disciple Matthew Levi and the betrayer Judas of Karioth. This storyline is united with the main one and resolved at once at the end, when the Master and Margarita grant Pilate his long-awaited spiritual union with Yeshua, whom he once doomed to crucifixion.

Among Russian critics, this novel is one of the most favorite targets of the Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory syndrome, although a story featuring both Jesus and Satan as characters arguably had it coming. It has also seen a lot of adaptations, two of them in Russia (after the fall of the Soviet Union) and plenty abroad. The 2005 miniseries by Vladimir Bortko (famous for a massively popular 1988 adaptation of Bulgakov's earlier Heart of a Dog) was perhaps the most faithful to the original text, although it was somewhat of a disappointment on the technical side, particularly in regards to questionable casting choices.

The book provides examples of :
""No, no, Hegemon," the arrested man said, straining all over in his wish to convince, "there's one with a goatskin parchment who follows me, follows me and keeps writing all the time. But once I peeked into this parchment and was horrified. I said decidedly nothing of what's written there. I implored him: "Burn your parchment, I beg you!" But he tore it out of my hands and ran away.""
 * Action Girl: Margarita, after her transformation into a witch.
 * Affably Evil: Woland.
 * All Part of the Show
 * Asshole Victim: Many of these in Moscow.
 * A-Team Firing: During a showdown between Behemoth and the Moscow police, a firefight ensues in which nobody gets injured - in a tiny room. However, Behemoth's terrible marksmanship is established in an earlier scene when he tries to show off.
 * Author Appeal: Bulgakov's portrayal of the Soviet writer society; arguably also the theology, which he took interest in.
 * Bigger on the Inside: Woland's ballroom.
 * Bittersweet Ending
 * Brought to You by The Letter "S": Margarita made the Master a cap with the letter "M" on it.
 * Card-Carrying Villain
 * Chase Scene
 * Dark Chick: Hella.
 * Dark Is Not Evil: The book plays with this trope repeatedly.
 * Deal with the Devil: Margarita accepts various magical formulae and attends a Satanic Ball in order
 * Decoy Protagonist: Ivan the poet. The Master and especially Margarita are introduced relatively late in the book -- the Master first appears a third of the way through the novel, in a chapter entitled Enter the Hero.
 * Devil in Plain Sight
 * Dumbass No More: Ivan the poet in the epilogue.
 * Enfant Terrible: Behemoth, a feline version.
 * Epigraph: See the quote at the top of the page; it sets the main theme for the rest of the novel.
 * Even Evil Has Standards: Woland and his entourage get quite persnickety about characters who take bribes, engage in officially sanctioned double-think about literary merit, show greed in the face of consumer goods, or other misdemeanors one might think small relative to being a demonic force of evil.
 * Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Master deliberately abandoned his name.
 * Faking the Dead: Behemoth.
 * Five-Bad Band: Woland, Behemoth, Korovyev, Azazel and Hella.
 * Foreign Money Is Proof of Guilt: One character gets arrested because the police find foreign currency in his apartment. He had accepted a bribe from Woland, in rubles. Woland then anonymously called the police, who found the currency, now mysteriously American dollars. At the time, possession of foreign currency was indeed a crime in the Soviet Union.
 * Giant Mook: Centurion Marcus "Ratkiller".
 * Heroic BSOD: Ivan the poet - although he is not the hero, but rather a Jerkass who eventually redeems himself - when he realizes Woland is Satan.
 * Heroic Sociopath: Woland, for some sense of heroic.
 * Intellectual Animal: Behemoth, though he is actually a demon in the form of a large black cat.
 * Literary Agent Hypothesis: Woland says it most blatantly in the first chapter, but the story of Yeshua itself suggests that the Gospels are portrayed in the novel as highly fictionalized Memetic Mutation of real events, which are themselves revealed through the Master's novel. Matthew Levi, in particular, is likely supposed to become Matthew the Evangelist, and Yeshua himself asserts this:


 * Loveable Rogue: Korovyev and Behemoth.
 * Lou Cypher: In German folk legend, Woland is an old nickname for the Devil, and Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust goes one time by this moniker.
 * Man of Wealth and Taste: Woland, who may have inspired Mick and Keith to write that tune
 * Mega Neko: Behemoth.
 * Mind Screw
 * Mismatched Eyes: One of Woland's eyes is bright green, the other one is black. Apparently Marilyn Manson was also inspired by the book.
 * Motive Rant: Totally averted -- Woland and his pals never bother to explain their motivations when they behead, beat and kidnap people, burn a restaurant and, in general, wreak havoc. They're the devil and his servants, after all.
 * Naked Apron: Hella wears this when she's not completely naked.
 * Narrator All Along: It is implied, at various times and depending on the translation that the Master/Woland/Berlioz wrote some/all/none of the book. Epileptic Trees spring up occasionally that suggest Behemoth, Azazel, Margarita, etc. are somehow in on this as well.
 * Noble Demon
 * Only Sane Man: Ivan gets institutionalized after discussing his actual, literal meeting with Satan with a psychiatrist.
 * Our Vampires Are Different: Hella.
 * Pet the Dog: Ruthless - if somewhat sympathetic - Pontius Pilate has a dog, the only creature he loves.
 * Psychotic Smirk
 * Right-Hand-Cat: Behemoth.
 * Rule of Cool
 * Rule of Funny
 * Satan: Woland, literally.
 * Satan Is Good: Woland is either this or an Anti-Villain.
 * Self-Inflicted Hell: Berlioz, who believes in nothing, gets nothing after death.
 * Selfless Wish: Margarita wants more than anything else for the Master to be returned to her, but when Satan offers to grant her one request, she instead asks for mercy for one of the damned souls she met at his ball.
 * Shout-Out: Particularly to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drama of Faust.
 * Show Within a Show: The Master's novel.
 * Smite Me Oh Mighty Smiter: Matthew Levi; it accomplishes nothing.
 * Smug Snake: Lots of bureaucrats and high-ranking functionaries in the Moscow storylines, Caifas in the Jerusalem storyline.
 * Sympathy for the Devil: Literally - it's this book which inspired the Rolling Stones song, after all.
 * Take That:
 * Towards Russian society; possibly also towards many individuals on whom the asshole victims were supposedly based)
 * Particularly choice moment of anti-bureaucratic Take That: a ticket inspector is quite unfazed by Behemoth's being a giant, biped, talking cat, but furious that he is breaking the regulation against cats on public transport. Even though he offers the right change for his fare.
 * When Margarita transforms into a witch, she violently trashes the apartment of one of the critics who rejected and badmouthed the Master's novel. He is based on real Soviet critics that Bulgakov had to put up with.
 * Talking Animal: Behemoth.
 * That Came Out Wrong: In the original and translations to Slavic languages ("Bezdomny" means "Homeless"), Ivan's phone call to the MASSOLIT goes like "It's Ivan, the homeless! I'm calling from the insane asylum!" No wonder the conversation is short.
 * The Brute: Azazel.
 * The Hunter: Hilariously subverted with Ivan the poet, whose attempt to track and stop Woland and his servants ends very abruptly and anticlimactically.
 * The Messiah: Jesus/Yeshua in the Jerusalem storyline.
 * The Thirties: No, not The Great Depression -- the Soviet thirties, when Stalin and his cadre of fanatics were consolidating their power. (Strictly speaking, the novel is ambiguous on its setting: Critics generally argue that the novel is a mashup of The Soviet Twenties (when it was begun) and the Thirties.)
 * Trickster: Korovyev and Behemoth.
 * Two Lines, No Waiting: Moscow and Yershalaim.
 * What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic
 * You Can't Go Home Again

The Bortko TV series provides most of the above, plus this :

 * California Doubling: Since Moscow doesn't look much like its 1930s self nowadays, they used the generally more well-preserved St. Petersburg instead.
 * Deliberately Monochrome
 * The Movie of the Book: Well, the television series of the book, but much of that still applies.