What It Is
The destination that Woland offers to 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 Yershalaim, which Woland refuses, nor the garden through which Pontius Pilate runs to meet Yeshua. Chapter 32 is titled "Forgiveness and eternal refuge."
Where It Appears
In chapter 29, Matthew Levi brings Woland the request of whoever read the Master's work, and it is he who draws the distinction between light and tranquility.
He has read the Master's work [...] and asks that you take the Master with you and return his tranquility
He did not earn the light, he earned the tranquility
In chapter 32, after Pilate is freed, Woland points to the house, and Margarita leads the Master to it across the moss-covered stone bridge.
Over there, over there! There a house and the old servant await you, the candles are already lit, but they will soon go out, because you will find the dawn immediately.
Listen to the stillness [...] listen and delight in what they did not give you in life, silence.
What It Means
In chapter 32, the text does not use "light" for what Pilate receives nor "rest" for what the Master receives, and it gives the Master a concrete house.
The text never uses the word "light" for what Pilate receives (a garden he crosses running himself, with no clarity about what he finds on the other side), nor the word "rest" for what the Master receives: it gives the Master a concrete house, with music, candles, and manual work, the opposite of a mystical reward. It is this contrast, between a forgiveness that is resolved in a conversation resumed and a refuge (see the House of Refuge) that is resolved in a domestic routine, that fixes the idea that Pilate gains the peace of a conversation finished and the Master gains the calm of a life with no further interruption, neither of them the enlightenment of someone who no longer needs anything.
In chapters 30 to 32 and the Epilogue, the difference between the two fates can be read through the kind of cowardice each one showed.
The book states it plainly, in chapter 29, that the Master "did not earn the light," and what it offers him instead, in domestic detail (grapevines, Schubert, goose quills), is the opposite of Pilate's flowering garden. It is not punishment: in chapter 32 the house is given as a reward, "what Yeshua asked for you." One may read that Pilate failed through cowardice before power and waits nearly two thousand years for the conversation, and that the Master failed through weakness before criticism (he burned his own novel) and gains rest, not light: each receives what his own failure left within reach.
The house repeats the condition in which the novel about Pilate was written: in chapter 13 the Master says he rented two rooms in the basement near the Arbat and began to write, isolated and happy, with Margarita visiting him every day. The refuge restores the isolation, the writing, and her presence, without the editor's refusal and the criticism that came later; the real basement, to which the two return in chapter 24, burns in chapter 30.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Home, exile and return, Redemption, Courage and heroism.
- Characters: the Master, Margarita, Woland, Matthew Levi, Yeshua Ha-Notzri, Pontius Pilate.
- Neighboring symbols: the manuscript, whose reading decides the refuge, and the Moon, the path Pilate takes in the same scene.