In Soviet Moscow of the 1930s, within a few days, a mysterious foreigner, Woland, and his retinue dismantle the certainties of a city that believes in nothing beyond itself. In the midst of the confusion are a nameless writer, the Master, committed to an asylum after seeing the novel he wrote rejected, and Margarita, the woman who loves him. In parallel, in Yershalaim, the Master's novel about Pontius Pilate unfolds, and it reaches the reader through different voices: first told by Woland, then dreamed by Ivan in the clinic.
Part One
On a hot late afternoon at Patriarch's Ponds, the editor Berlioz, president of the literary association Massolit, rebukes the young poet Ivan Bezdomny: the anti-religious poem he commissioned depicts a Jesus with negative traits, when the right thing would have been to deny that he existed. An elegant foreigner, who introduces himself as a consultant, joins them and tells, as an eyewitness, the morning on which the procurator Pontius Pilate received for trial the prisoner Yeshua Ha-Notzri. Before the conversation ends, he predicts Berlioz's death. Minutes later, Berlioz slips on the sunflower oil spilled by a woman, Annushka, falls under a tram and is decapitated. Ivan chases the foreigner, but is only able to be committed to a psychiatric clinic, where a doctor with a pointed goatee takes his account for a symptom.
The foreigner is Woland, who settles into apartment 50 with the retinue: the interpreter Korovyov, also called Fagot, the giant cat Behemoth, the red-haired Azazello and the vampire Hella. Stepa Likhodeyev, director of the Variety Theatre, wakes up hungover and is shipped off to Yalta. The building chairman, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, accepts a bundle of money from Korovyov and is arrested when the money turns into dollars. The financial director Rimsky, attacked by vampires, flees to Leningrad. At the black magic session, a rain of money falls on the audience, Behemoth tears off the head of the master of ceremonies Bengalsky, and Woland concludes that the Muscovites are people like any others, corrupted only by the housing problem.
In the clinic, Ivan receives at night a visitor who enters through the veranda: the Master, who refuses to say his name. A historian, he won a lottery prize, left the museum and wrote a novel about Pilate. The previous spring, he crossed paths on the street with a woman carrying yellow flowers, and the two fell in love. She calls him Master, reads the manuscript and encourages him. The publisher rejects the book, critics such as Latunsky attack it and, in October, the Master, sick with fear, burns the manuscript in the stove. The woman saves only a bundle of scorched pages. The neighbor Aloisy Mogarych denounces him to get the apartment, and the Master ends up committed.
The novel about Pilate advances to Golgotha, now in Ivan's dream, as he falls asleep in the clinic: under unbearable heat, Yeshua dies between Dismas and Gestas, and Matthew Levi, the only disciple who came close, curses the sky and carries off the body after the storm.
Part Two
Margarita Nikolayevna, thirty years old, married to a rich and kind husband whom she does not love, lives in mourning for the Master. On a bench by the Kremlin wall, she is approached by Azazello, who quotes the burned novel and gives her a cream. At night she applies it, becomes young again, gains the power to fly, leaves a note for her husband and sets off on a broomstick. She flies over Moscow and destroys the apartment of the critic Latunsky, the man who ruined the Master.
In apartment 50, Margarita is introduced to the retinue and presides, like a queen, over Satan's grand ball: for three hours she receives murderers, poisoners and traitors who have died, who climb an endless staircase. Among them is Frida, condemned to find each morning the handkerchief with which she smothered her son. At the end, Woland receives Berlioz's head on a platter and turns it into a goblet, and Baron Meigel, a spy, is killed by Azazello. Woland offers Margarita a wish. She asks first for Frida, who is forgiven, and only then for the Master, who reappears in a dressing gown, frightened. Behemoth pulls the intact novel from under his own body, and the two return to the basement where everything began.
Pilate's thread closes with Judas of Kerioth: the procurator, sleepless, entrusts the chief of his secret guard, Afranius, with the safety of Judas, and it is through him that Judas is killed in Gethsemane, stabbed by men who take the bag of thirty tetradrachms. In Moscow, a commission tries to reconstruct the facts from contradictory testimony. Behemoth sets fire to apartment 50 and escapes, and he and Korovyov also set fire to the Torgsin store and to Griboyedov House.
Matthew Levi appears before Woland and asks him to take the Master and Margarita: the Master did not earn the light, but he deserves peace. Azazello hands them a wine, and both fall. On rising, the basement is on fire, and the two mount black horses. In the clinic, the Master says goodbye to Ivan, and the patient in room 118, the Master himself, dies at that very instant. On the Sparrow Hills, the Master bids farewell to Moscow, and the retinue departs. On a moonlit night, the disguises fall away, and they arrive at a plain where Pilate has been seated in a stone armchair for nearly two thousand years, with the dog, suffering from insomnia. Woland warns that the one with whom Pilate wants to speak has already interceded for him, and the Master, upon finishing the novel, sets him free: Pilate runs along the lunar path after the dog, toward Yeshua. The Master and Margarita receive a house with vines, music in the evenings and quills to write with.
In the Epilogue, Moscow attributes everything to a gang of hypnotists. Ivan, now a history professor, cured, returns every spring full moon to the bench at Patriarch's Ponds. After the injection that his wife gives him, he dreams of Pilate and Yeshua climbing the lunar path together, with the dog behind them, and then of the Master and Margarita: the Master confirms that everything ended this way, and Margarita kisses him on the forehead. Ivan wakes in peace until the next full moon.