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The Master And Margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov

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The novel The Master and Margarita is set during the Stalin period in the Soviet Union, but was written about ten years after the Stalin period by Mikhail Bulgakov. The story of the Master runs alongside with the story of Pontius Pilate being told to Berlioz and Ivan or Homeless by Woland. Throughout the novel Bulgakov refers to Pontius Pilate and speaks about him in an atypical way from what we previously know about Pontius Pilate. The story of Pilate in The Master and Margarita is different than the Role that Pontius Pilate plays in the Bible. As discussed in class, Bulgakov uses this character that is already familiar to us and changes his narrative to something unfamiliar to society. Bulgakov is defamiliarizing his reader to various …show more content…

Any of his readers with a background in Christianity would know the story from the Bible of Pontius Pilate. Bulgakov chooses to use the character of Pilate from the Bible, but change some things about him so that the reader is now unfamiliar with the character they would usually be familiar with…Pilate. In the novel readers can describe Pontius Pilate as a ruler, decision maker, lonely, remorseful, and torn. Some would see him as a monster. However, you cannot totally write Pilate off as a beast because while he did make some regretful decisions he wanted to do the right thing. He knew Yeshua Ha-Nozri should not be condemned, he did not want to condemn him even before they had formed a relationship, but he knew he had no other option because of the rules of the society during that time. He was pushed into doing something he knew to be wrong because of his position as a leader or decision maker during the time in the novel when Woland is discussing him. The decisions that Pontius Pilate was compelled to make to save his own skin is a reflection of the influence the systems had on the rulers in the book. Bulgakov also focused on defamiliarizing Yeshua Ha-Nozri. He was a character in the book that the reader would attach to Christ in the Bible, but is also not exactly the same. An interesting detail that is different between Pilate and Yeshua in Bulgakov’s novel is that in The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov kept Pontius

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