Refutation of Absolutes Via Pilate and Yeshua in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

The open ended dichotomy of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita creates a world of possibilities when attempting to dissect the novel. Establishing and understanding the role of the Pontius Pilate storyline leads down many paths. What role does the retelling of the one of the most religious stories in the history of civilization have within a political satire? The nature of the government targeted by Bulgakov's satire - a communist regime under Stalin - actually lends itself enticingly well toward comparisons with religious doctrine, especially Christianity. Plaguing both dogmas, absolutism - of the sort that refuses to accept variations or realistic incongruence within that doctrine - connects faith to government in this instance. That absolutism becomes a target for Bulgakov in his scathing pre-war satire. The Pontius Pilate novel within a novel acts as a coupling to the particularly violent assault on Moscow by Woland and his entourage. The re-imagining of Yeshua not only questions his earthly divinity, but also the relationship between divinity and humanity - Yeshua and Pilate. Bulgakov's carefully crafted world does not just stride to disentangle the biblical figure of Christ from the more plausible historical figure though. It reimagines the nature of a biblical figure from a grey area few willingly enter and explores how that perspective affects a literary depiction. This reimagining acts not only as a metaphoric refutation of the absolute black and white perspective of the Stalinist regime, but as a reestablishment of a relationship with a previously absolute reality. By dissecting how Bulgakov presents his apocryphal vision, I will illustrate how he uses that vision to explore the ways in which absolute views, in government, religion, and authorship cannot succeed.