Berlioz and Ivan Homeless

Berlioz and Ivan Homeless are the two writers whose chance encounter with a mysterious stranger at the Patriarch's Ponds sets the entire novel in motion. Their relationship, defined by a professional hierarchy and a shared commitment to Soviet atheism, is shattered in a single evening when Berlioz is killed exactly as the stranger predicted, leaving Homeless to confront the supernatural alone and to undergo a radical transformation of his own identity.

Identity and Professional Hierarchy

Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, the editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of Massolit, is a well-read man in his forties, short, plump, bald, and dressed in a grey summer suit with black horn-rimmed glasses of supernatural size. Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who writes under the pseudonym Homeless, is a broad-shouldered young poet with tousled reddish hair, wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers, and black sneakers. Berlioz has commissioned from Homeless a long anti-religious poem for the next issue of his journal, but is dissatisfied with the result: Homeless has portrayed Jesus as "completely alive, the once-existing Jesus," albeit furnished with all negative features. Berlioz now lectures the poet on the correct ideological line, arguing that Jesus never existed and that all stories about him are mere mythology. The editor displays solid erudition, pointing to ancient historians who never mentioned Jesus and dismissing the passage in Tacitus as a later interpolation. Homeless listens attentively, fixing his pert green eyes on Berlioz, and merely hiccups from time to time, cursing the apricot soda they have drunk.

The Encounter with Woland and the Collapse of Authority

As Berlioz lectures Homeless about the Egyptian Osiris, the Phoenician Tammuz, Marduk, and the Aztec god Vitzliputzli, a stranger appears and sits down beside them. The stranger, who introduces himself as a specialist in black magic, contradicts Berlioz's atheism by calmly stating that Jesus did exist. When Berlioz insists on proofs, the stranger begins to tell the story of Pontius Pilate, speaking of a white cloak with blood-red lining and the shuffling gait of a cavalryman. Homeless is amazed to realize that evening has fallen and that the stranger has spun a whole story without his noticing. Berlioz, studying the foreigner's face attentively, observes that the story does not coincide with the Gospel accounts, but the stranger replies that precisely nothing in the Gospels ever actually took place—a point Berlioz himself had been making to Homeless. The stranger then claims to have been personally present at the events, on Pilate's balcony and in the garden with Kaifa, and begs them to keep it secret. Berlioz, now convinced the man is mad, decides to call the foreigners' bureau, but before he can leave, the stranger predicts that Berlioz's head will be cut off by a Russian woman, a Komsomol girl, and that the meeting at Massolit will not take place because Annushka has already spilled sunflower oil. Homeless, growing angry, asks the stranger if he has ever been in a hospital for the mentally ill, and the stranger replies that he has, and that Homeless will have to find out about schizophrenia from the professor himself. When Homeless whispers to Berlioz that the stranger is a spy, the stranger produces a visiting card, a passport, and an invitation to Moscow for a consultation, bearing the initial letter "W."

Berlioz's Death and Homeless's Desperate Chase

Berlioz, attempting to reach the turnstile, slips on the cobbled slope and falls onto the rails, where a tram-car driven by a woman runs over him, severing his head. Homeless, who has seen the head go bouncing along the pavement, drops onto a bench and bites his hand until it bleeds. He overhears two women saying that Annushka from Sadovaya spilled sunflower oil at the turnstile, and realizes that the stranger knew beforehand exactly what would happen. Convinced that the stranger is not mad but a murderer and a spy, Homeless rushes back to the bench, but the stranger pretends not to understand Russian. A checkered man in a cracked pince-nez, who had earlier shown Berlioz the way to the rails, obstructs Homeless and then disappears. Homeless chases the stranger, accompanied by a checkered man and a huge black cat walking on its hind legs, through the streets of Moscow, but cannot catch them. He bursts into an unfamiliar apartment, finds a naked woman in a bathtub, steals a candle and a paper icon, and then goes to the Moscow River, where he swims and has his clothes stolen. Left in striped drawers, he decides to go to Griboedov's, the restaurant of Massolit.

Homeless's Arrest and the Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

At Griboedov's, Homeless appears barefoot, in a torn white Tolstoy blouse with a paper icon pinned to his chest, carrying a lighted wedding candle. He announces that the consultant has killed Berlioz and demands that the professor be caught. When a compassionate face tries to calm him, Homeless hits the man on the ear. He is tied up with napkins and taken to Professor Stravinsky's psychiatric clinic. There, the poet Riukhin, who has accompanied him, tells the doctor that Homeless may have delirium tremens. Homeless, however, speaks coherently about the consultant, Pontius Pilate, and the cat that rides the tram. The doctor diagnoses locomotor and speech excitation, delirious interpretations, and schizophrenia, and Homeless is given an injection and placed in a private room. Riukhin, returning to Moscow, is tormented by Homeless's insulting words and realizes the truth in them: his own poetry is bad, and he does not believe in anything he writes.

The Master's Revelation and Homeless's Transformation

In the clinic, Homeless receives a nocturnal visitor: a clean-shaven, dark-haired man of about thirty-eight, dressed as a patient, who has stolen a bunch of keys from the nurse Praskovya Fyodorovna and can move along the common balcony. The visitor, who calls himself a master, tells Homeless that he is in the clinic for the same reason—on account of Pontius Pilate. He reveals that the stranger at the Patriarch's Ponds was Satan himself, and that Homeless was one of his first victims. The master recounts his own story: he wrote a novel about Pontius Pilate, but the critics Latunsky, Ariman, and Mstislav Lavrovich attacked it, and he burned the manuscript in a fit of despair. Homeless, deeply impressed, promises to write no more poetry. The master tells him that the novel about Pilate is finished and that the last words are "the fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate." Homeless, who has been transformed by his encounter with the master, begins to see his own past as a poet as monstrous and decides to become a historian. In the epilogue, it is revealed that every year, with the coming of the spring full moon, Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, now a professor of history who knows everything, returns to the parable which for this world looks like folly, and he sees the same dream: the execution of Yeshua and the conversation between Pilate and the master.