The Master and Margarita

13 a poodle’s head: In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles first gets to Faust by taking the form of a black poodle.

14 a foreigner: Foreigners aroused both curiosity and suspicion in Soviet Russia, representing both the glamour of ’abroad’ and the possibility of espionage.

15 Adonis: Greek version of the Syro-Phoenician demi-god Tammuz.

16 Attis: Phrygian god, companion to Cybele. He was castrated and bled to death.

17

Mithras: God of light in ancient Persian Mazdaism.

18 Magi: The three wise men from the east (a magus was a member of the Persian priestly caste) who visited the newborn Jesus (Matt. 2:1-12).

19 restless old Immanuel: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German idealist philosopher, thought that the moral law innate in man implied freedom, immortality and the existence of God.

20 Schiller: Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), German poet and playwright, a liberal idealist.

21 Strauss:

David Strauss (1808-74), German theologian, author of a Life of Jesus, considered the Gospel story as belonging to the category of myth.

22 Solovki: A casual name for the ‘Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps’ located on the site of a former monastery on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. They were of especially terrible renown during the thirties. The last prisoners were loaded on a barge and drowned in the White Sea in 1939.

23 Enemies? Intementionists?: There was constant talk in the early Soviet period of ’enemies of the revolution’ and ‘foreign interventionists’ seeking to subvert the new workers’ state.

24 Komsomol: Contraction of the Union of Communist Youth, which all good Soviet young people were expected to join.

25 A Russian émigré: Many Russians opposed to the revolution emigrated abroad, forming important ’colonies’ in various capitals - Berlin, Paris, Prague, Harbin, Shanghai — where they remained potential spies and interventionists.

26

Gerbert of Aurillac: (938-1003), theologian and mathematician, popularly taken to be a magician and alchemist. He became pope in 999 under the name of Sylvester II.

27 Nisan: The seventh month of the Jewish lunar calendar, twenty-nine days in length. The fifteenth day of Nisan (beginning at sundown on the fourteenth) is the start of the feast of Passover, commemorating the exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

Chapter 2: Pontius Pilate

1 Herod the Great: (?73 BC-AD 4), a clever politician whom the Romans rewarded for his services by making king of Judea, an honour he handed on to his son and grandson.

2 Judea:

The southern part of Palestine, subject to Rome since 63 BC, named for Judah, fourth son of Jacob. In AD 6 it was made a Roman province with the procurator’s seat at Caesarea.

3 Pontius Pilate: Roman procurator of Judea from about AD 26 to 36. Outside the Gospels, virtually nothing is known of him, though he is mentioned in the passage from Tacitus referred to above. Bulgakov drew details for his portrayal of the procurator from fictional lives of Jesus by F. W. Farrar (1831-1903), Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, and by Ernest Renan (1823-92), French historian and lapsed Catholic, as well as by the previously mentioned David Strauss.

4 Twelfth Lightning legion: Bulgakov translates the actual Latin nickname (fulminata) by which the Twelfth legion was known at least as early as the time of the emperors Nerva and Trajan (late first century AD), and probably earlier.

5 Yershalaim: An alternative transliteration from Hebrew of the name of Jerusalem. In certain other cases as well, Bulgakov has preferred the distancing effect of these alternatives: Yeshua for Jesus, Kaifa for Caiaphas, Kiriath for Iscariot.

6 Galilee: The northern part of Palestine, green and fertile, with its capital at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinnereth). In Galilee at that time, the tetrarch (ruler of one of the four Roman subdivisions of Palestine) was Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great. According to the Gospel of Luke (23:7- 11), Herod Antipas was in Jerusalem at the time of Christ’s crucifixion.

7 Sanhedrin: The highest Jewish legislative and judicial body, headed by the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem. The lower courts of justice were called lesser sanhedrins.

8 Aramaic: Name of the northern branch of Semitic languages, used extensively in south-west Asia, adopted by the Jews after the Babylonian captivity in the late sixth century BC.