Master and Margarita

The love between the master and Margarita is the novel's central romance, a sudden, overwhelming passion that transforms both their lives and ultimately secures their salvation. It is a story of secret meetings, shared creation, and mutual sacrifice, set against the crushing realities of Soviet literary life and the supernatural interventions of Woland's retinue.

Meeting and First Encounter

The master, a historian by training who had won a hundred thousand roubles and quit his museum job to write a novel about Pontius Pilate, first saw Margarita on a spring day as she walked down a lane off Tverskaya. She was carrying repulsive, alarming yellow flowers, the first to appear in Moscow, which stood out clearly against her black spring coat. He was struck not so much by her beauty as by an extraordinary loneliness in her eyes, such as no one had ever seen before. Obeying this yellow sign, he turned down the lane and followed her. When she asked if he liked her flowers, he answered "No," and she smiled guiltily and threw them into the gutter. He picked them up and gave them back, but she pushed them away, and they walked on side by side. She then took his arm, and they walked on together. Love, he later said, leaped out in front of them like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, striking them both at once, like lightning or a Finnish knife. She insisted afterwards that they had loved each other for a long time without knowing each other, and that she had gone out that day with the yellow flowers so that he would find her at last, and that if it had not happened, she would have poisoned herself because her life was empty.

Secret Life and Shared Creation

The master rented two rooms in the basement of a little house in a lane near the Arbat, a private refuge with a front hall and a sink, little windows level with the paved walk, and lilacs, a linden, and a maple just outside. Margarita became his secret wife, visiting him every afternoon. No one knew of their liaison—not her husband, not her acquaintances. She would come, put on an apron, light the kerosene stove, and prepare lunch. During May storms, they would light the stove and bake potatoes, laughing in the basement as the trees shed broken twigs. When summer came, the long-awaited roses they both loved appeared in a vase. The master worked feverishly on his novel about Pontius Pilate, and Margarita was absorbed in it. She endlessly reread what he had written, sitting and sewing a black cap with the letter "M" embroidered on it in yellow silk, which she made for him. She foretold fame, urged him on, and it was she who began to call him a master. She waited impatiently for the last words about the fifth procurator of Judea, repeated certain phrases aloud, and said that her life was in this novel.

Crisis and Separation

The novel was finished in August, but when the master tried to publish it, he was met with vicious critical attacks from figures like Latunsky, Ariman, and Mstislav Lavrovich. The failure of the novel, combined with the persecution, triggered a mental crisis in the master. He became afraid of the dark, felt an octopus stealing towards his heart, and began to sleep with the light on. Margarita changed too, becoming thinner and paler, and begged him to go south to the Black Sea. To avoid an argument, he gave her about ten thousand roubles to keep for him. One night in mid-October, after she left, the master fell into a state of despair. He took the heavy manuscript of the novel and the draft notebooks from his desk drawer and began burning them in the stove. As the pages burned, someone scratched quietly at the window. It was Margarita. She rushed in, clung to him, trembling and wet, and pulled the last burning sheaf from the stove with her bare hands. She wept irrepressibly and convulsively, then collected the burnt-edged pages, wrapped them in paper, and tied them with a ribbon. She told him she would talk to her husband the next morning and come back to him forever. The master, fearing he would drag her down with him, refused. She left, saying she would be there in the morning. A quarter of an hour after she left, there came a knock at his window. The master was later arrested and, after a period of homelessness and fear, ended up in Professor Stravinsky's psychiatric clinic. He never saw Margarita again, and he believed she had forgotten him.

Narrative Role and Significance

The master and Margarita's relationship is the novel's counterpoint to the cowardice and compromise that define the world of Pontius Pilate and the Moscow literary establishment. Their love is presented as an absolute, a force that transcends the mundane and the terrifying. Margarita's courage, her willingness to sacrifice everything for the master, and her eventual alliance with Woland to rescue him, elevate her to a heroic status. The master, by contrast, is a figure of tragic weakness, a creator who is destroyed by the world's hostility and his own fear. Their reunion at the end of the novel, when they are granted eternal refuge together, is the novel's final affirmation of the power of love and art over the forces of oppression and despair. The master's cap with the letter "M" becomes a symbol of their bond and his identity as a creator, a title she bestowed upon him.