Delstam and many other artists of his time, was more interested in Christ than in the religion created in his name.

The Pilate chapters arc clearly included within the Moscow narrative for a reason, and there are certainly many stylistic and thematic parallels between them, but we are at first unable lo see the connection. We certainly notice the similar paradigm of teacher/failed disciple/betrayer in both plots, as well as myriad motifs which recur like operatic phrases. Displacement is pervasive: there are no last suppers, baptisms, or twelve disciples in the Pilate chapters, but these motifs are all to be found in parodie form in the Moscow strand.

The narrator's direct addresses to the reader at the most unexpected points of the story are part of the magician's diversion. This is a wildly unreliable narrator, an actor whose aims are as obscure as Woland's. But the author's aims are there for us to see if we look closely. Underneath the humor, fantasy, and deep lyrical sadness, is a philosophical structure. This structure is not meant to be perceived separately from what surrounds it, of course, but in order to reveal Bulgakov's main feat of magic here a bit of analysis is in order—always keeping in mind that he is not a philosopher or a scholar, no matter how well he impersonates one, but an artist

There are many questions which come to mind when reading this work. For example, why is the novel called The Master and Margarita when those two characters arrive very late in the narrative? What is Woland's real purpose in Moscow, and what does it have to do with Pontius Pilate? How many statements which the reader takes seriously are actually meant ironically? Are these simply loose ends, sloppy plotting? Bulgakov had finished the novel in terms of structure, but he would certainly have continued to coordinate the minor changes he began in the first part of the novel with the second part if he had lived. The changes he was in the process of making before he died were not substantive, and I doubt that they would have done anything to change the general impression that the two parts of the novel are quite different, the first seeming more concrete and dense, the second more abstract and fantastic. Before concluding that everything unclear or seemingly contradictory is a mistake, we have to look at the text more carefully.

One way to understand this work is to consider Bulgakov's other artist heroes. Dy-mogatsky, the dramatist in The Crimson Island, is appalled at what the censor and the director are doing to his play, but gives in; Moliè re, in the play of the same name, grovels before his king; the playwright in Theatrical Novel is unable to defend his play against the director; Pushkin in the play Last Days is humiliated by the Tsar. Consistently, Bulgakov's artist heroes feel themselves crushed by greater force. Their only salvation is the act of creation itself. Bulgakov himself was familiar with all of these humiliations, and his own worst compromise with his conscience was probably the writing of the play Batum, about Stalin as a young revolutionary.

The Master is a distillation of this line of somewhat autobiographical heroes: like them, he is naive about the likely reception of his work, and is unable to deal with the attacks of the critics. Unlike these other characters, the Master stops writing: he is completely broken by his encounter with both the critics and the police. The point is made that it is not his experiences, but rather his reaction lo them that is the problem, the fear itself. The Master is no conventional hero, he is barely characterized, his attitude to himself is sadly ironic (as when he shows his profile to Ivan, something Behemoth will do later in a gesture rhyme), and his novel is the only remarkable thing about him. But it is enough. It is the justification for his existence. Metafiction was characteristic of Bulgakov from the start of his career—fictionalized accounts of his