Clavis Libri
Plans Sign in

The Master and Margarita · Part Two · Chapter 32

Forgiveness and eternal refuge

LoveArtCourage and HeroismForgiveness

Chapter summary

The chapter opens with an invocation by the narrator himself, outside the voice of any character, about the weariness of someone who has carried a heavy burden across the earth and surrenders to death with a light heart. On the night flight, the moon strips everyone's disguises. Korovyov reveals himself as a gloomy knight who pays for "an unfortunate joke" with a pun about light and darkness. Behemoth is in fact a young demonic page, the best court jester there is. Azazello loses his fang and crooked eye and appears as a demon assassin of the waterless desert, and the Master appears gray-haired, with star spurs on his boots. Woland also flies in his true appearance.

The group descends to a stony hill where a man in a white cloak has been sitting in a stone armchair, beside a dog, for almost two thousand years, suffering from insomnia whenever the full moon approaches. Woland introduces him to the Master as the hero of the Master's novel, which has not yet been finished, and uses the phrase of Yeshua Ha-Notzri, that cowardice is the worst defect, to say that if that is true, the dog is not to blame. He explains that Pontius Pilate always dreams the same thing: following the path of the moon to finish the conversation he left halfway with the prisoner Ha-Notzri on the fourteenth day of Nisan, and that he hates, above all, his own immortality and his unprecedented glory. Margarita cries out for them to let him go, and Woland laughs and replies that she need not intercede for him, because the one who wants to talk with him has already done so. He then returns the decision to the Master, the author of the novel, who shouts: "He is free! He is free! He is waiting for you!" The mountains collapse, a garden grown over a thousand moons appears, and Pilate runs along the moonlit path after the dog, toward Yeshua. The Master asks whether he should go after him, and Woland replies that he should not: why go after what has already ended?

Woland also refuses to let the Master and Margarita return to Moscow, and offers in its place what Yeshua asked for them: a house with grapevines, Schubert's music in the evenings, and goose quills for writing by candlelight. The two take leave of Woland and set off for the eternal home, with Margarita asking the Master to listen to the peace, the silence that life never gave him. His memory, pierced with needles, begins to fade. It is just as he had freed Pilate by finishing the novel, which closes with the forgiveness of the knight Pontius Pilate, son of the astrologer king and fifth procurator of Judea.

Analysis

The moon strips away the disguises so that each one appears as they are, and Woland leads the group to the plain where Pilate waits for the end of the conversation. He returns the decision to the Master, as the author of the novel, and in doing so fixes the fate of both sides: Pilate enters the flowering garden behind the dog, and the Master and Margarita receive refuge. The chapter does not console; it completes what each of them left unfinished.

Gods, my Gods! How sad the earth is at night! [...] surrenders into the hands of death with a light heart, knowing that only it...
Unlock with a subscription

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.

See the plansAlready subscribed? Sign in