Suddenly, I decided to compile all the passages from The Master and Margarita[1] which I have underlined while reading the book for the second time. Something told me that the mutilated text would thus reveal a plan, a purpose, yet unknown both to myself and the late writer. How blissful this reading was, dear reader, I cannot possibly describe! Here is my compilation, though:

“But one must have some proof…” began Berlioz.
“There’s no need for any proof,” answered the professor. In a low voice, his foreign accent vanishing altogether, he began: “It’s very simple…”[2]

[…] the Caribbean doesn’t exist, no desperate buccaneers sail it, no corvette ever chases them, no puffs of cannon smoke ever roll across the waves. Pure invention.[3]

Witchcraft once started, as we all know, is virtually unstoppable.[4]

“Don’t write any more!” said the visitor imploringly.
“I promise not to!” said Ivan solemnly.[5]

[…] among the passengers of the Kiev express a respectably dressed man carrying a little fiber suitcase emerged from a first-class sleeper onto the Moscow platform. This passenger was none other than the uncle of late Misha Berlioz, Maximilian Andreyevich Poplavsky, an economist who worked in the Planning Commission and lived in Kiev.[6]

Here I should reveal a secret about Maximilian Andreyevich. He genuinely mourned the death of his wife’s cousin, but at the same time, being a practical man, he fully realized that there was no special need for his presence at the funeral. Yet Maximilian Andreyevich was in a great hurry to go to Moscow. What for? For one thing—the apartment. An apartment in Moscow was a serious matter. He did not know why, but Maximilian Andreyevich did not like Kiev, and the thought of moving to Moscow had lately begun to nag at him with such insistence that it was affecting his sleep.[7]

“How dreadful for you,” said the host. “I always think, present company excepted of course, that there’s something unpleasant lurking in people who avoid drinking, gambling, table talk, and pretty women. People like that are either sick or secretly hate their fellow men. Of course there may be exceptions. I have had some outright scoundrels sitting at my table before now! Now tell me what can I do for you.[8]

Follow me reader! Who told you that there is no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue![9]

“Towns! Towns!” shouted Margarita.
Two or three times she saw beneath her what looked like dully glinting bands of steel ribbon, which were rivers.[10]

“I wouldn’t like to meet you when you’ve got a revolver,” said Margarita with a coquettish look at Azazello. She had a passion for people who did things well.[11]

Pilate shuddered. In the last few lines of the parchment he deciphered the words: “… greatest sin … cowardice …”[12]

The Levite jumped back from the table, stared wildly round and cried: “Who did it?”
“You must not be jealous,” said Pilate, baring his teeth mirthlessly and rubbing his hands, “but I’m afraid he had other admirers besides yourself.”
“Who did it?” repeated the Levite in a whisper.
Pilate answered him, “I did it.”
Matthew opened his mouth and stared at the Procurator, who said quietly, “It is not much, but I did it.” And he added: “Now you will accept something?”[13]

The body was impossible to move.[14]

How sad, O gods, how sad is the world at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps. You will know it when you have wondered astray in those mists, when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it, too, when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret—its mists, its swamps, and its rivers—ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you.[15]

Thus spoke Margarita as she walked with the master toward their everlasting home, and Margarita’s words seemed to him to flow like the whispering streams behind them, and the master’s memory, his accursed, needling memory, began to fade. He had been freed, just as he had set free the character he had created. His hero had now vanished irretrievably into the abyss; on the night of Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, pardon had been granted to the astrologer’s son, fifth Procurator of Judea, the cruel Pontius Pilate.[16]

“If one were only capable of sustaining for years on end the same dream of writing a single book,” thought Ivan, “until the dream would take over, for one’s role would have been exhausted and the book would have gained a momentum of its own, invading the unsuspecting victims and spreading far and wide like an epidemic.” He nodded his tired head: “Maybe, just maybe, the monstrous dream would then go away by itself.”[17]

I was deluded, of course. Nothing is ever revealed in this manner. The truth, the true word, must be sought in the passages yet unwritten. Follow me reader! Who told you that there is no such thing as real, true, eternal book?

Footnotes

1. Bulgakov, M., The Master and Margarita, New York: Signet, 1967.

2. Op. cit., p. 20.

3. Op. cit., p. 62.

4. Op. cit., p. 77.

5. Op. cit., p. 134.

6. Op. cit., p. 192.

7. Op. cit., p. 193.

8. Op. cit., p. 203.

9. Op. cit., p. 213.

10. Op. cit., p. 238.

11. Op. cit., p. 275.

12. Op. cit., p. 319.

13. Op. cit., pp. 320-321.

14. Op. cit., p. 335.

15. Op. cit., p. 367.

16. Op. cit., p. 372.

17. Op. cit., pp. 382-383.