What It Is
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 reads inside the book are this novel. Woland returns it intact after the ball, with the line "manuscripts don't burn," and it is by ending it with the line that sets Pontius Pilate free that the Master closes it.
Where It Appears
In chapter 13, the Master tells Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny how he burned the manuscript, and Margarita arrives in time to save only a bundle of pages from the fire.
It is very hard to do that, because written paper burns against its will.
I'll save it, I'll save it. What does all this mean?
In chapter 24, Behemoth pulls the novel out intact from under his own body, and Woland rejects the Master's explanation that he destroyed it in the fire.
Forgive me, I can't believe [...], it's not possible. Manuscripts don't burn.
In chapter 29, Matthew Levi delivers the message from whoever read the work, and the Master's fate is decided on the basis of that reading.
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, Woland hands the Master the decision about Pilate, and the Master closes the novel within the novel with the line that releases the procurator.
You are free! You are free! He is waiting for you!
What It Means
Woland's line can be linked to the real bonfire of 1930, when Bulgakov burned the first version of the book.
The biographical detail is no side curiosity, because it returns inside the novel: the line Woland speaks when returning to the Master the manuscript he himself had set on fire is the author's answer to his own bonfire of 1930.
In chapter 29, the burning can be read as the retreat that weighs on the distinction between light and tranquility.
The distinction can be read as a return, from another angle, to the cowardice that Yeshua Ha-Notzri condemned: the Master burned his own novel and gave up defending it in the face of persecution, and the retreat, not the work itself, is what keeps him from the light without denying him rest.
The manuscript is the only object that crosses the novel's three planes: its content is Yershalaim, the burning and the return happen in Moscow, and the last sentence is written on the otherworldly plane, when the Master frees Pilate. Before that, in chapter 30, the Master had already let it burn in the basement, without taking it, because he says he knows the novel by heart.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Art, Courage and heroism, Forgiveness.
- Characters: the Master, Margarita, Woland, Behemoth, Matthew Levi, Pontius Pilate.
- Neighboring symbols: the House of Refuge, the fate that the reading of the manuscript decides.