Master and Latunsky

The Master, a historian by training who had abandoned his museum work and translations to write a novel about Pontius Pilate, first encountered the world of official Soviet literature when he submitted his completed manuscript for publication. The editor who received it reacted with embarrassment and incomprehension, asking questions that seemed to the Master utterly idiotic—who he was, where he came from, how long he had been writing, and, most tellingly, who had given him the idea of writing a novel on such a strange theme. After a two-week wait, the Master was received by the editorial secretary Lapshennikova, whose eyes were crossed towards her nose from constant lying, and was told that the publisher was provided with material for two years ahead and that the question of printing his novel "did not arise."

The Onslaught of Criticism

It was the critic Latunsky who delivered the most devastating blow. The Master opened a newspaper one day and found an article by the critic Ariman warning all and sundry that someone had attempted to foist into print an apology for Jesus Christ. Two days later, in another newspaper, Mstislav Lavrovich published an article recommending that readers strike hard at "Pilatism" and at the icon-dauber who had ventured to foist it into print. Dumbfounded by this unheard-of word "Pilatism," the Master opened a third newspaper and found two articles—one by Latunsky and another signed with the initials "N.E." The works of Ariman and Lavrovich, the Master later reflected, could be counted as jokes compared with what Latunsky wrote. Latunsky's article was entitled "A Militant Old Believer." The Master became so carried away reading the article about himself that he did not notice how his beloved entered the room with a wet umbrella in her hand and wet newspapers as well. Her eyes flashed fire, her trembling hands were cold. First she rushed to kiss him, then, in a hoarse voice and pounding the table with her fist, she declared that she would poison Latunsky.

The Descent into Fear and Illness

The articles did not cease. The Master laughed at the first of them, but as more appeared, his attitude changed. A second stage of astonishment set in: he sensed a rare falsity and insecurity in every line of these articles, despite their threatening and confident tone. He had the feeling, which he could not get rid of, that the authors were not saying what they wanted to say, and that their rage sprang precisely from that. Then a third stage came—fear. Not fear of the articles themselves, but fear of other things totally unrelated to them or to the novel. He began to be afraid of the dark. The stage of mental illness had arrived. As he was falling asleep, it seemed to him that some very cold and pliant octopus was stealing with its tentacles immediately and directly towards his heart. He had to sleep with the light on. His beloved changed very much—she became thinner and paler, stopped laughing, and kept asking him to forgive her for having advised him to publish an excerpt. She urged him to drop everything and go to the Black Sea, but something told him he was not to go.

The Burning of the Novel

The crisis culminated on a night in mid-October. The Master fell asleep without turning on the light and was awakened by the feeling that the octopus was there. Groping in the dark, he barely managed to turn on the light. His pocket watch showed two o'clock in the morning. He was falling ill when he went to bed, and he woke up sick. It suddenly seemed to him that the autumn darkness would push through the glass and pour into the room, and he would drown in it as in ink. He got up a man no longer in control of himself. He cried out, the thought came to him of running to someone, even if it was his landlord upstairs. He struggled with himself like a madman. He had strength enough to get to the stove and start a fire in it. Then he took the heavy manuscript of the novel and the draft notebooks from the desk drawer and started burning them. Written-on paper burns reluctantly. Breaking his fingernails, he tore up the notebooks, stuck them vertically between the logs, and ruffled the pages with the poker. Familiar words flashed before him, the yellow climbed steadily up the pages, but the words still showed through it. They would vanish only when the paper turned black, and he finished them off with the poker. Just then someone began scratching quietly at the window. It was his beloved. She pulled out of the stove with her bare hands the last of what was there, a sheaf that had caught fire from below, and collapsed on the sofa, weeping irrepressibly and convulsively. She said she would save him, that he would restore the novel. But the Master told her he had come to hate the novel, that he was ill and frightened.

The Aftermath

A quarter of an hour after she left him, there came a knock at his window. The Master did not specify what happened next, but by mid-January, at night, in the same coat but with the buttons torn off, he was huddled with cold in his little yard. Behind him were snowdrifts that hid the lilac bushes, and before him and below were his little windows, dimly lit, covered with shades. He bent down to the first of them and listened—a gramophone was playing in his rooms. That was all he heard. He stood there a while, then went out the gate to the lane. A blizzard was frolicking in it. A dog, dashing under his feet, frightened him, and he ran away from it to the other side. The cold and the fear that had become his constant companion were driving him to frenzy. He had nowhere to go. The simplest thing would have been to throw himself under a tram-car, but fear possessed every cell of his body, and he was afraid of the tram-car as well. He knew that the clinic had been opened and set out for it on foot across the entire city. A truck driver took pity on him and brought him to the clinic. He got away with having his left toes frostbitten. Now, four months later, he sits in the clinic, unable to recall his novel without trembling, and tells Ivan Homeless that the acquaintance from the Patriarch's Ponds would tell the story of Yeshua and Pilate better than he could.