Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, who signs as Bezdomny, is the young poet who sees Berlioz die at Patriarch's Ponds, tries to tell the truth about the foreigner, and ends up interned. He is the one to whom the Master tells his own story, and it is with him that the book ends.
In chapter 1, Berlioz argues with him about the antireligious poem Ivan wrote on commission: he wants Jesus to stop appearing with negative traits and to be presented as never having existed. After the editor's death, Ivan realizes that the foreigner knew everything, chases the retinue through Moscow, and arrives in his underwear at the Griboyedov restaurant, shouting "He has appeared!" He is taken to the psychiatric clinic, where the duty doctor speaks of schizophrenia, and Doctor Stravinsky has him declare: "I am normal."
At the clinic, in chapter 13, the Master comes in through the veranda, hears his account, and tells him that he met Satan. In chapter 30, before leaving, the Master returns to say farewell to him and calls him disciple.
In the Epilogue, Ivan is a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy and knows that in his youth he was the victim of hypnotists. But every spring full moon he returns to the same bench at Patriarch's Ponds and, at night, dreams of the procurator and of the Master, who confirms to him: "It ended this way, my disciple." Ivan begins the book on that bench and returns to it in the Epilogue, and what the cure does not reach in him is the full moon.