The novel of the master has been subject to a lot of opposition because it was dealing with a religious subject, focusing on the inner struggle which Pontius Pilate, according to many evangelists, has had when he was meeting with Yeshua Ha-Notsri, which is the Aramaic name for Jesus of Nazareth. That was also Mikhail Bulgakov's age when he started writing The Master and Margarita. It is only in chapter 13 that we are intrduced to the master, a man of 38 years old. The most obvious prototype for the master is Bulgakov himself, while the character Margarita is based on Bulgakov's third wife, Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya (1893-1970), born Nyurenberg. The master and Margarita are reunited to never be separated again. Meanwhile, Margarita, without news of the master's whereabouts, helped the devil Woland with his annual ball and, as a reward, she finds her lover again. In the hospital, the master has stolen keys with which he could escape, but he doesn't, because he has «nowhere to escape to». When he wanted to burn his book, Margarita saved a piece of it and kept it. One day, he met Margarita, whom he hopelessly fell in love with. He was once a historian - the same profession that Ivan would have at the end of the novel - but when he won a large sum of money in a lottery, he left his job to work on his book. «У меня нет больше фамилии» or «I no longer have a name», he says to the poet when he tells his story.

He is arrested and sent to the psychiatric hospital of doctor Stravinsky, where he meets the poet Ivan Bezdomny.īefore his internment, the master had been so struck by the accusations that he got fits of madness and denied his own identity. In the atheist Soviet Union of the time, it was a forbidden subject, so the master was heavily criticized in the press, although his novel had never been published. The master is a writer who, in the time of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), wrote a novel about Pontius Pilate (?-39), the Roman prefect in Judea who, according to the Christian gospels, confirmed the death sentence of Jesus of Nazareth (0-33).

The master and margarita book