1939

1939 was the decisive year in which Mikhail Bulgakov, working against the encroaching darkness of his final illness, made the last substantive revisions to The Master and Margarita. His alterations to the typescript during this period fixed the novel's definitive ending and resolved the long-debated question of what reward the master deserved, a question that had tormented Bulgakov through years of composition and personal compromise. The year thus marks the moment when the novel's moral architecture—the distinction between light and peace, between heroic martyrdom and a quieter, more ambiguous grace—received its final, enigmatic form.

Final Revisions and the Fate of the Master

In 1939, Bulgakov undertook further alterations in the typescript of The Master and Margarita, and the most important of these concerned the fate of the hero and heroine. In the last manuscript version, the fate of the master and Margarita, announced to them by Woland, was to follow Pilate up the path of moonlight to find Yeshua and peace. In the typescript, however, the fate of the master, announced to Woland by Matthew Levi speaking for Yeshua, was not to follow Pilate but to go to his "eternal refuge" with Margarita, in a rather German-Romantic setting, with Schubert's music and blossoming cherry trees. When Woland asked, "But why don't you take him with you into the light?" Levi replied in a sorrowful voice, "He does not deserve the light, he deserves peace." This exchange, which became definitive, was the culmination of Bulgakov's long struggle with the problem of the master's guilt—and his own.

The Weight of Cowardice and Guilt

Bulgakov's pondering of the question of cowardice and guilt in considering the fate of his hero was painfully evident in earlier notes. In one note from 1936, he had written even more tellingly: "You will not hear the liturgy. But you will listen to the romantics . . ." These words, which do not appear in the definitive text, reveal how deeply Bulgakov weighed the thematic link between Pilate, the master, and the author himself, connecting the historical and contemporary parts of the novel. The 1939 resolution, while lightening the severity of earlier drafts with an enigmatic irony, still made clear that the master was not to be seen as a heroic martyr for art or a "Christ-figure." Bulgakov's gentle irony was a warning against the mistake of equating artistic mastery with saintliness, or confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.

The Unfinished State and Posthumous Publication

At his death in 1940, Bulgakov left The Master and Margarita in a slightly unfinished state. His final revisions, undertaken in October of 1939, broke off near the start of Book Two. Later he dictated some additions to his wife, Elena Sergeevna, notably the opening paragraph of Chapter 32 ("Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth!"). The novel's composition had accompanied Bulgakov through the period of greatest suffering for his people—the period of forced collectivization and the first five-year plan, the expansion of the system of "corrective labour camps," the liquidation of the intelligentsia, and the vast party purges and Moscow "show trials." These circumstances are everywhere present in The Master and Margarita, which was in part Bulgakov's challenge to the rule of terror in literature. The successive stages of his work on the novel, his changing evaluations of the nature of the book and its characters, reflect events in his life and his deepening grasp of what was at stake in the struggle.

The Novel's Enduring Significance

The year 1939 thus stands as the final chapter in the novel's long evolution, a process that began early in 1929 and was abandoned, taken up again, burned, resurrected, recast and revised many times. The Pilate story, which passes through a succession of narrators, finally joins the Moscow story at the end, when the fates of Pilate and the master are simultaneously decided. The novel's form excludes psychological analysis and historical commentary, allowing Bulgakov to exploit all the theatricality of its great scenes—storms, flight, the attack of vampires, the seance in the Variety theatre, the ball at Satan's, but also the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, the crucifixion as witnessed by Matthew Levi, the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane. The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless, who is there at the start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and the master, becomes the latter's "disciple" and continues his work, is present at almost every turn of the novel's action, and appears finally in the epilogue. He remains an uneasy inhabitant of "normal" reality, as a historian who "knows everything," but each year, with the coming of the spring full moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks like folly.