Chapter summary
At night, a man in slippers and a patient's bathrobe, about thirty-eight years old, enters through the veranda of the room of Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny in the asylum, using a bunch of keys he stole from the nurse Praskovya Fyodorovna. He asks for silence, asks whether Ivan is violent and, on learning that Ivan is there because of Pontius Pilate, asks him to tell everything that happened in Patriarch's Ponds. He listens to the whole account with an interest that grows nearly to ecstasy, recognizes in the consultant described Woland, and at the end confirms what Ivan still resists accepting: the day before, in Patriarch's Ponds, he met Satan. Asked whether he is a writer, the visitor replies that he is a master and puts on a black skullcap with the letter M embroidered in yellow, made by the woman he loves; asked next for his name, he refuses it and says that he has renounced everything in life.
The Master says he was a historian and translator at a museum, and that he won a hundred thousand rubles on a lottery ticket. He left the museum, rented two rooms in the basement of a small house in an alley near the Arbat, and began writing, isolated and happy, a novel about Pontius Pilate. One day in May, on Tverskaya Street, he crossed paths with a woman carrying yellow flowers, and the two fell in love at once. Married to another man, who never appears in the scene, she began visiting him every day, reading the manuscripts, encouraging him and calling him "master." The novel was finished in August, but the editor to whom he took it received it with strangeness, said that other members of the council needed to read it and, two weeks later, sent word that the publishing house already had material for two years. A wave of hostile articles followed from the critics Ariman and Latunsky and from the man of letters Mstislav Lavrovich, who attacked the book as an apology for Christ and called it "Pilatism." The Master falls ill with fear, comes to dread the dark and, one night in October, burns the manuscript (see the manuscript) in the oven. The woman arrives running, pulls from the fire only a bundle of scorched sheets, and promises to leave her husband to stay with him for good; the Master refuses, ill and afraid of dragging her into his own ruin, and she promises to come back in the morning.
Fifteen minutes after she leaves, someone knocks at the basement window, and what came next he only whispers into Ivan's ear. In mid-January, at night, he returns to the courtyard in an overcoat without buttons, hears a gramophone playing in the rooms that were his, walks across the city to Stravinsky's clinic, and stays there, where he has been for four months. Ivan says he could have told her everything, and the Master replies that he would not make her unhappy with a letter from a madhouse; therefore he does not seek her out.
Analysis
The visitor comes to Ivan's veranda as he usually visits his neighbors, and only there discovers that Ivan is hospitalized because of Pontius Pilate, the subject of his own novel. He asks for the whole account and listens as one waits for news of a destroyed work, only afterward telling his own life. The exchange places side by side two inmates whose trouble was born of Pilate: Ivan for speaking of him, the Master for having written him.
Yesterday, at Patriarch's Ponds, you met Satan.
Subscription
The complete analysis of every chapter of The Master and Margarita comes with a subscription, along with the explanation of each quote, the quiz, the PDF guide, and the study workbook.