The City Where the Devil Lands
The novel's Moscow is that of Stalin's Soviet Union, described with a chronicler's eye. The housing shortage appears at once: at Griboyedov House, the longest line is at the door with the sign "Housing Problems" (chapter 5), and the building manager Nikanor Bosoy receives thirty-two petitions from neighbors who want the rooms of the dead Berlioz (chapter 9). In the great Soviet cities it was common for several families to share the same apartment, with a communal kitchen and bathroom, and a room of one's own was a coveted privilege. That is why Woland, in the middle of the magic session, after the rain of money, says that only the housing problem corrupted the Muscovites (chapter 12).
The fear of denunciation also comes from the era. In the 1930s, the political police arrested people and made them disappear, often on the accusation of neighbors or colleagues. Apartment 50 already had a sinister reputation, because its owner and tenants had vanished one by one (chapter 7); Aloisy Mogarych denounces the Master for keeping "illegal literature" only so as to take his apartment (chapter 24); and Nikanor is arrested for dollars he swears he never had (chapter 9).
The State also wanted the citizens' foreign currency and precious metals. The Torgsin network, which operated from 1931 to 1936, exchanged food for foreign currency, gold and silver, and it is there that Korovyov and Behemoth set fire (chapter 28). In Nikanor's nightmare, a male audience is called to the stage to hand over the foreign money hidden at home (chapter 15).
Writers, Criticism and Official Atheism
Since 1925 the League of Militant Atheists had existed, campaigning against religion. The anti-religious poem that Berlioz commissions from Ivan is born of this climate: the editor rebukes him because the poet painted a Jesus with negative traits, when the proper thing was to deny that Jesus had existed (chapter 1).
Literary life was likewise directed by the State. At the start of the 1930s the Party dissolved the writers' groups and, in 1934, gathered them all into a single Union. The Massolit of the novel, inspired by real organizations of the time, gives its members membership cards, a summer house, a restaurant and creative holidays in Yalta (chapter 5). It is through this system that the Master falls: the editor rejects his novel about Pilate, and articles by Ariman, Lavrovich and Latunsky attack it as an apology for Christ and "Pilatism" (chapter 13).
Where the Stories Come From
The novel within the novel rewrites the Gospels. Pontius Pilate governed Judea from 26 to 36 AD, and the book calls him procurator, as the historian Tacitus does; the inscription known as the Pilate Stone gives him as prefect. The interrogation scene gathers Gospel figures: the high priest Caiaphas, the bandit Bar-Rabban released at Passover, Judas of Kerioth and Matthew, the former tax collector (chapter 2). Dismas and Gestas, the two men condemned beside Yeshua, are names the Gospels do not give the thieves and that a later tradition assigns to them (chapter 16). Berlioz himself notes that the foreigner's story does not match the Gospels (chapter 3).
Other sources appear in the text. The foreigner says he was summoned to Moscow to decipher manuscripts of Gerbert d'Aurillac, a real figure of the tenth century who became pope, as Sylvester II, and who in the Middle Ages was also known as a magician (chapter 1). And the epigraph, in which the devil defines himself as part of the force that always wills evil and always does good, is from Faust, by Goethe, spoken by Mephistopheles.
Places That Exist
Much of the map is real. Patriarch's Ponds, the park of the opening conversation, is a place in Moscow (chapter 1). Griboyedov House was modeled on Herzen House, on Tverskoy Boulevard, which housed writers' organizations in the 1920s and, until 1931, a restaurant for them (chapter 5). And the building on Sadovaya Street, where the novel places apartment 50, is the one the author lived in during the 1920s and which today houses a museum dedicated to him (chapter 9).