What It Is
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 his own will, and Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, sedated after his arrest.
Where It Appears
In chapter 5, Ivan appears in the restaurant of the Griboyedov House shouting that Berlioz's murderer is on the loose, and the commotion ends with the police taking him to the psychiatric hospital.
He's appeared! You have to catch him right away, or he'll cause indescribable disasters!
In chapter 6, the on-duty doctor arrives, answer by answer, at the diagnosis whose word the consultant had already mentioned in chapter 1.
Motor and verbal excitation... delusional interpretations... a complex case, it seems... Schizophrenia, one must suppose. And on top of that, alcoholism...
In chapter 8, Stravinsky does not dispute Ivan's story: he goes over with him what he did the day before, and Ivan agrees to declare himself normal, an agreement that keeps him confined.
Here they will help you... can you hear me?... Here they will help you... You will feel relieved. It is quiet and calm here... Here they will help you...
Ivan's answer comes thought out and firmly spoken: he liked the proposal, which seemed to him the way out of the clinic, and the doctor's logic comes only afterward.I am normal.
In chapter 11, alone in his room during a storm, Ivan gives up the denunciation and debates with himself, until a voice identical to the consultant's settles the dispute.
An idiot!
In chapter 13, the Master enters through the veranda of Ivan's room, hears the account of Patriarch's Ponds, and tells him whom Ivan met.
Yesterday, at Patriarch's Ponds, you met Satan.
I am a master.
In this chapter, Ivan hears confirmed, from inside the asylum itself, what no one in Moscow wanted to believe when he himself tried to tell it: that the consultant he met at Patriarch's Ponds, in chapter 1, was the devil.
In chapter 15, Nikanor Ivanovich's cry on waking from the dream spreads through the neighboring rooms, among them the Master's and Ivan's. In chapter 24, the Master is brought back from the asylum to Margarita, still in his dressing gown and cap.
Don't cry, Margot, don't make me suffer. I am very ill.
In chapter 30, the Master returns one last time to the hospital to say goodbye to Ivan, in room 117. In the Epilogue, the investigation never discovers who the mentally ill man abducted from the clinic under number 118 was, and Ivan, now a professor, is cured, except for the full-moon symptom.
What It Means
In chapters 30 to 32 and the Epilogue, Ivan's ending can be read as that of someone who accepted having gone mad and therefore keeps what the official explanation never touched.
The Epilogue repeats, on a comic scale, the same movement as chapter 1: the rationalist refusal to admit the supernatural. Berlioz dies without believing what was foretold to him; the entire city survives by not believing, trading its fright for an explanation of mass hypnosis. The novel does not correct this refusal, it only shows its price: whoever does not believe is left with the poorest version of the story, and only Ivan, who accepted having gone mad, keeps inside himself what the official explanation never touched.
The three inmates the novel follows reached the clinic through contact with Woland's retinue or with the novel about Pontius Pilate: Ivan through his pursuit of the consultant, Nikanor Ivanovich through the dollars of Korovyov, the Master through the fear that came after the refusal and the burning of his book. The clinic, which the city uses to isolate whoever tells what they saw, is the place where the account of one of them is heard by another as true.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Madness, Truth and lies, Reason.
- Characters: Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, the Master, Margarita, Woland, Berlioz.
- Place: Moscow.
- Neighboring symbols: Berlioz's head, the scene that takes Ivan there, the foreign money, which takes Nikanor Ivanovich there, and the Moon, the symptom that remains after the cure.