Quotes | The Master and Margarita

Part One, chapter 1: Never talk to strangers

Yes, man is mortal, but that would still be only half the misfortune. The bad part is that sometimes he is mortal all of a sudden, and that is where the danger lies! And in general he cannot even say what he will do this afternoon.

Speaker: The foreigner (Woland, still unnamed)
Characters: Woland, Berlioz, Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny
Themes: The Supernatural
Devices: Foreshadowing

Explanation and analysis

On a hot late afternoon at Patriarch's Ponds, Berlioz, editor and president of the Massolit literary association, rebukes the young poet Ivan for having written an anti-religious poem in which Jesus appears with negative traits: the proper thing would have been to deny that he ever existed. A foreigner with mismatched eyes joins the conversation, comments on the classic proofs of God's existence, and asks who, then, administers human life. Berlioz, an atheist, was already preparing the rebuttal of common sense, that man is mortal, but he does not even get to say it: the foreigner moves ahead and answers the objection before it is spoken.

What the foreigner does is add an adverb. No one disputes that human beings die; what he points out is that they die suddenly and do not even know what they will do that afternoon. The sentence suggests that the chapter's question is not mortality but the impossibility of managing one's own time: whoever cannot answer for his own afternoon hardly governs anything. From this gap comes the question of who is in charge of each person's life.

The book does not answer Berlioz with an argument, it answers with an event. Shortly afterward, when night has fallen over Patriarch's Ponds and the foreigner has finished telling the story of Pilate, he slips on spilled sunflower oil and dies under a tram, without reaching the meeting set for that night. The sentence, which sounds like barroom talk, can be read as the first proof that the interlocutor knows more than he says, and it opens the theme of the supernatural: the city that has decided the devil does not exist will spend the whole novel trying to explain what does not fit into its explanations.

They're going to cut off your head!

Speaker: The foreigner (Woland, still unnamed)
Characters: Woland, Berlioz, Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny
Themes: The Supernatural
Symbols: Berlioz's head
Devices: Foreshadowing

Explanation and analysis

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