Has accepted the rational explanations his world has provided him with, and he will never be an artist because of it.

the knight Pondus Pilate—the Saakyants text has a slight difference in phrasing between the ending of Chapter 32 and the Epilogue. The chief difference is that the name Pontius is spelled differently— Ponttiskit instead of Pontii. This matters because if the endings are different, and only one matches what the Master said the last words of his novel would be—and it is hard to believe that Bulgakov would not remember such an essential phrase—then only that one, specifically the ending to Chapter 32, is the real ending to the Master's novel. Yanovskaya stales that Bulgakov's own last text did end with the different form of Pontius, but that the author's widow, Elena Sergeevna, entered the change which made both the Epilogue and Chapter 32 end with identical words. For many reasons it makes sense that Chapter 32 is the end of the Master's work, and the Epilogue the end of Bulgakov's. This point, like so many other textual differences, will have to be left unresolved. In either case, it would be hard to convey such a difference in English— Pontian is the closest equivalent in English.

afterword: BULGAKOV the magician

Bulgakov the magician confidently steps out on the stage of a theater he has constructed himself and begins his performance. Its success depends on the successful implication of the audience itself. What the audience-reader notices in the exuberant, intricate extravaganza that is The Master and Margarita is how Bulgakov the magician spares no resources in his effort to make us believe—but on first reading we are left unsure of both his intentions and his beliefs. This is a very cinematic work, respecting no unities of geography or epoch, full of dazzling humor and startling shifts. At the end of this work we have been profoundly amused by both the situations and characters, but we have also been disturbed. In this afterword I will concentrate on the sources of that disturbance, not because it is more important than the buoyancy on display, but because its sources are harder to fathom.

Thanks to the work of numerous crides and scholars, we know much more now about Bulgakov's most famous novel than we did when it was first published in English. Bulgakov worked sporadically on different versions of The Masler and Margarita from 1928 up until 1940. The main text was completed in the summer of 1938, but Bulgakov continued making corrections up until a few months before his death. Although he had moments of thinking he might be able to get the novel published, most of the time Bulgakov wrote with full awareness that this novel would not be published in the foreseeable future. But Bulgakov was counting on the unforeseeable future—which caught up with him in 1966, twenty-six years after his death, when a censored version of the text was serialized in a Moscow journal. The Russian literary world was stunned by the unexpected transformation of a dramatist of the 1920s into a major novelist and an unnerving influence on the culture as a whole. To this day Russians use key phrases from the novel (" second-degree freshness"), and label certain kinds of banal-yet-mysterious events " Bulgakovian."

Throughout his career Bulgakov specialized in genre mutations: plays that were dreams, science fiction that was neither science nor fiction, adaptations that were actually original. So it is no surprise that The Master and Margarita is dense with mystery, ambiguity and irony, a subversive work which fits no genre neatly. The question of genre is essential to Bulgakov's magic: because we don't know what category this work belongs to, we don't know what expectations to bring to it. But it is a mark of the quality of this work that both the ignorant and initiated may find entertainment equally— it is not necessary to solve all the mysteries to enjoy The Master and Margarita.