Symbols

The manuscript The novel about Pontius Pilate that the Master writes in the basement near the Arbat, which the editor rejects, which the critics attack with the term "pilatism," and which he himself burns in the oven one October night. The Yershalaim chapters the reader... Berlioz's head Berlioz's head, cut off by the tram in chapter 3 after he slips on the sunflower oil spilled by Annushka, as Woland had announced hours earlier at Patriarch's Ponds. Stolen from the coffin on the morning of the funeral, it reappears in chapter 23 on a... Apartment 50 Apartment number 50 in the building on Sadovaya Street, in Moscow, where Stiopa Likhodeyev wakes up hungover and where Berlioz's vacant rooms are. It already had a sinister reputation before the story, because earlier residents vanished without a trace. After... The foreign money The foreign currency, the dollars, that Woland's retinue makes appear in the hands of Muscovites and that, in the novel's Moscow, is a crime to keep. In chapter 15, the scene satirizes real campaigns to confiscate gold and foreign currency in the USSR of the... Frida's handkerchief The handkerchief with which Frida smothered her newborn son and which, thirty years ago, she finds on waking on her own bedside table, placed there by a housekeeper. It appears in chapters 23 and 24, at Satan's ball and in Margarita's request to Woland... Stravinsky's clinic The psychiatric hospital of Doctor Stravinsky, to which Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny is taken, tied up, on the night of Berlioz's death. It is also called the psychiatric clinic and the asylum. In neighboring rooms are Ivan, the Master, who committed himself of... The Moon The full moon, which in the novel marks Satan's ball, Pontius Pilate's insomnia, and Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny's yearly restlessness in the Epilogue. In chapter 32 it is also the light that undoes the retinue's disguises during the flight, and the path up... The House of Refuge The destination that Woland offers the Master and Margarita in chapter 32, "what Yeshua asked for you": a house with grapevines, Schubert's music at night, candles, the old servant, and goose quills for writing. It is neither the return to Moscow nor to...