The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
“The Devil visits Soviet Moscow with a retinue of demons, and the only honest relationships in the city are between the damned.”
Language Register
Shifts radically by narrative strand — Soviet journalese in Moscow, spare declarative prose in Yershalaim, operatic grotesque in supernatural sequences
Syntax Profile
The Moscow narrative employs brisk, satirical sentences with heavy use of irony and free indirect discourse — we are often inside a character's self-deceiving thoughts. The Yershalaim chapters use short, declarative sentences with formal clause structure, resembling historical chronicle. The supernatural sequences (the Ball, the departure) break into long, cataloguing sentences full of subordinate clauses, accumulating detail the way a set piece accumulates spectacle.
Figurative Language
Very high — but the figurative registers differ by narrative strand. Moscow uses grotesque exaggeration (Behemoth's chess games, the variety theater rain of money). Yershalaim uses restrained metaphor — the moonbeam road is the most elaborated image. The supernatural sequences employ surrealist compression: entire centuries of the dead fit in a single ballroom.
Era-Specific Language
Satirical acronym for a Soviet writers' union — an organization of literary bureaucrats who control art by controlling apartments, vacation homes, and publication rights
In Soviet Moscow, holding foreign currency was a criminal offense — Woland's retinue uses it to entrap greedy officials
Soviet form of address, used by Bulgakov with varying degrees of irony — sometimes sincere, usually to mark characters as ideological performers
The MASSOLIT headquarters — a symbol of artistic bureaucracy, named after a playwright, now a restaurant and meeting hall for writers who don't write
Muscovites refuse to name the Devil directly — another satirical parallel to Soviet political culture, where certain names and subjects were unspeakable
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Woland
Archaic, formal, occasionally theatrical — speaks like someone who has seen every human era and finds the present merely the latest iteration
The Devil as historical constant — he predates all ideologies, including Soviet materialism. His formality makes everyone around him sound provincial.
Koroviev / Fagot
Rapid switches between obsequious Soviet bureaucratic language and brutal dismissal — performs every register without belonging to any
The translator as trickster — someone who knows all the codes and believes in none of them. The ideal figure for a society built on performed compliance.
Berlioz
Literary-official register — precise, authoritative, confident. Uses ideologically correct vocabulary without irony.
The true believer in Soviet atheist orthodoxy. His certainty is his death warrant.
The Master
Subdued, self-deprecating, past-tense — a man who has stopped believing his own voice has a right to exist
The effect of Soviet literary suppression on the artist — not silenced by force but internally extinguished. His voice only recovers through Margarita.
Yeshua Ha-Nozri
Direct, simple, refusing indirection — addresses every person with full attention. His language has no political register because he does not recognize political reality as fundamental.
The radical honesty of someone who genuinely believes all people are good. Dangerous in every political system that has ever existed.
Narrator's Voice
Bulgakov employs an intrusive, ironic omniscient narrator in the Moscow sections who directly addresses the reader, offers sarcastic asides about Soviet life, and occasionally breaks the fourth wall. This narrator is conspicuously absent from the Yershalaim chapters, which are presented as if narrated by no one — pure unmediated event. The contrast is structural: in Moscow, everything requires interpretation; in Yershalaim, things simply happen and cannot be un-happened.
Tone Progression
Part One, Chapters 1–10
Satirical, vertiginous, darkly comic
The Devil arrives; Moscow's hypocrisies are exposed one by one. The comedy is cruel — people get exactly what they deserve and are terrified by it.
Part One, Chapters 11–18 / Yershalaim interludes
Tragic, spare, philosophically charged
Pilate and Yeshua's dialogue; the Master's story. The novel slows for its deepest thinking. Cowardice is named as the central sin.
Part Two, Chapters 19–28
Romantic, supernatural, operatic
Margarita's arc. Love and the willingness to sacrifice for it are tested. The Ball sequence is simultaneously terrifying and magnificent.
Chapters 29–32 and Epilogue
Elegiac, bittersweet, sardonic
Peace given, not salvation. The moonbeam road. Then Moscow resumes its business. The Epilogue refuses catharsis.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Goethe's Faust — direct structural model: devil as protagonist, soul bargain, salvation question. Bulgakov inverts Faust: here the devil exposes human evil rather than engineering it.
- Gogol's Dead Souls and The Inspector General — same tradition of grotesque bureaucratic satire. Woland's retinue torments Moscow like Gogol's corrupt officials torment each other.
- Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov — the Grand Inquisitor sequence (man confronts Jesus) is a clear precursor to the Pilate-Yeshua dialogues.
- Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses — magic realism deployed to interrogate religious and political authority, similarly banned and persecuted
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions