Afterword 365

what do we ourselves really know? The Master and Margarita seem to recognize Woland fairly quickly, but at first they both expect something terrible. Only after the ball has Margarita come to understand something of this personage, although, significantly, she is ready to trust him if it will help her lover. Margarita is the most active figure in the novel, the one most willing to take risks. As for the Master, only after death does he say the words " Now I understand everything." To begin to see what the Master now " understands, " we have to trace one of the essential themes of this work.

The manipulation of the reader-audience begins early, at the time of Berlioz's death. Berlioz is obnoxious and arrogant, everything that a writer like Bulgakov could not tolerate, and it seems that the reader would be glad to see him go. But his death, like so many here, is described in a jarringly violent way. Is the reader really happy to see that severed head rolling on the street? Or to see the loathsome master of ceremonies, Bengalsky, have his head torn off during the Variety performance? Perhaps Bulgakov is merely settling scores like Dante, killing off his enemies in print, instead of in life? We are in the position of the Variety audience here, and even they beg for mercy for Bengalsky. Is Margarita enchanting when she destroys Latunsky's apartment? Pilate fits into this context of revenge as well. Unlike Levi Matvei, Pilate is capable of understanding what Yeshua has tried to teach, but he rejects it and insists on retribution, using the mysterious Afranius who is pursuing his own ends. Pilate, like many Bulgakov heroes before him, experiences guilt over the fact that he gave into his fear and let Yeshua go to his death. The procurator is forced to suffer long to expiate his sin, and is not freed until the Master is instructed by Woland to finish his novel with a single line: " Free! Free! He is waiting for yout" which brings us to the question of who is in charge. Yeshua intercedes for Pilate, and requests a specific outcome for the Master and Margarita. Paradoxically, Yeshua does not appear to be more powerful than Woland, and it is left quite unclear whether there is a power higher than Woland himself.

The reader is so convinced that Woland is the devil he knows, that even Woland's consistent actions are not quite enough to awaken the reader's suspicions. Woland, like his creator, is inexhaustibly ironic. When Margarita is instructed to show no preference for any one at the ball, for example, this is to see if her compassion will shine through even in the face of prohibition. When Woland rewards her despite her favoritism toward Frieda, and complains that compassion leaks through the cracks, he is being disingenuous: he rewards Margarita because she has passed the real, not the stated, test

The violence in this novel is meant to disturb the reader, so that eventually, he, like the Master and Margarita, will understand that even Mark Ratkiller is indeed a good man, as Yeshua claims. The characters and the reader are meant eventually to see beyond apparent identity to the real identity, to understand that Woland and Yeshua bring the same message. Woland gives everyone, especially Margarita, the same test, and to pass it, one must show compassion even to the worst humanity has to offer, from the hell of the dance at Griboyedov, to the hell of the criminals at the ball, to Pilate suffering torture in the relentless sun. Yeshua teaches by example. Woland by provocation, but they are both teaching that compassion is preferable to revenge. Read in this light, the barbed conversation between Woland and Levi Matvei about the need for shadows assumes new significance, as does the way in which the Master comes to regard his neighbor, the betrayer Alotsy. The very process of reading the novel is meant to educate the reader, to lead him to a state of enlightenment in which the division of humanity into good and evil is no longer useful and the transcendence of the need for retribution is the goal.

This issue of the process of perception was also important in Bulgakov's first novel.