ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that the Pilate story in The Master and Margarita gains much of its authority for the modern reader from its apparent historicity and the realistic style in which it is told. Not only these features, but also the recognisably realistic moral dilemma of its chief protagonist raise it to a level of ethical seriousness which transcends the carnivalesque Moscow story, except perhaps in its concluding chapters. And the background against which the Pilate story is set reverses our normal expectations: where we expect realism we find the fantastic: where we expect the supernatural we find the most uncompromising realism. This inversion reinforces our sense that the key to the whole text, otherwise difficult to decode, is in the realistic, historical, demythologised version of the Gospels present in turn as Woland’s narrative, Bezdomny’s dream and the Master’s novel.
