Chapter summary
After Woland leaves the capital, on Saturday evening, Moscow tries to explain the inexplicable. The most incredible rumors circulate, and the investigation attributes everything to a gang of hypnotists and ventriloquists, with suspicion falling on Korovyov, capable of convincing people that things and people were where they were not. In several cities people with surnames similar to Woland and Korovyov are arrested for short periods, the city kills a hundred black cats on suspicion of witchcraft, and it never discovers who was the "mental patient" kidnapped from the clinic under number 118. A few years later, the minor characters settle into discreetly ironic fates: Bengalsky, the master of ceremonies, retires, unable to return to the stage; Stepan Likhodeyev becomes manager of a food store in Rostov; Rimsky resigns from the Variety Theater and goes to the puppet theater; Sempleyarov is transferred to Bryansk; Nikanor Ivanovich comes to hate the theater; and Aloisy Mogarych, the informer who denounced the Master to get his apartment, ends up in exactly the post Rimsky refused, the financial director of the Variety Theater. The manager of the Sokov snack bar dies of liver cancer, nine months after Woland's visit.
Years later, memory has not faded for everyone, and Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, now a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy, is the central case. Cured of his youth, every spring full moon he returns to the bench on Patriarch's Ponds and then to the mansion where the neighbor turned into a pig by Natasha lives, who looks at the moon and shouts "Venus!" At night, after the injection his wife administers, he dreams of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua climbing the path of the moon together, and then of the Master and Margarita. He confirms that everything ended this way, and she kisses Ivan's forehead.
Analysis
The Epilogue does not gather the loose ends by chance: it is the very mechanism of rational explanation, the "investigation," that becomes a comic character, producing an official truth more and more absurd (mass hypnosis, a ventriloquist cat) so as not to admit the supernatural. It is the same gesture that opens the novel at Patriarch's Ponds, when Berlioz tries to prove to Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny that Jesus never existed.
The center of the closing is Ivan Nikolayevich (pen name Bezdomny), now a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy, cured of the crisis he had in his youth, except for one symptom that science does not touch: every spring full moon he returns to the same bench at Patriarch's Ponds, feels the same restlessness, and continues to the mansion where Nikolai Ivanovich lives. Nikolai Ivanovich is the neighbor whom Natasha transformed into a pig, a character separate from Ivan Nikolayevich, despite the nearly identical name. Ivan sees him shout "Venus!" at the empty window, calling on Venus in place of the witch he carried through the air.
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