著者

宮澤 淳一

出版者

日本ロシア文学会

雑誌

ロシア語ロシア文学研究 (ISSN:03873277)

巻号頁・発行日

no.24, pp.25-41, 1992-10-01

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The Master and Margarita(1928?-40)is a "double novel"which consists of two sections: the Moscow in 1920/30's infested by the devils, and the ancient Jerusalem describing the agony of Pontius Pilate. Inspite of its grand conception shouwing the reader a spectacular world, The Master and Margarita is nothing but a five- day short episode of Moscow in the twentieth century starting on a hot evening of Wednesday in May to end on the next Sunday morning. The secret of the dynamic development of the novel lies in the structural device to integrate the two worlds into a single noe. The structural analysis of The Master and Margarita should be focused on time rather than space. The comparative study of the two narratives (the Moscow section and the Jeusalem section) with the gospel narratives (John's Gospel and the Synoptics) concludes that the direct pretext for the Jerusalem section is John's Gospel, but that the Last Supper (Thursday evening) and the Ressurrection (sunday morning) have no correspondances in the Jerusalem section but do in the Moscow section : the black magic performance and the saving of the master and Pilate respectively. Both the Moscow section and the Jerusalem section, therefoe, depend on the gospel world for their pretext and they complement each other to reconstruct the story of Holy Week. The moment when the temporal dynamism of the Moscow and Jerusalem narratives appears is in the first three chapters, where the static parallelism of various settings and characters is obvious. As Andrew Barratt has argued, the chapters consist of the opposition of the"outsider"(Woland, Yeshua) versus the "representative of the status quo"(Berlioz, Pilate). In conversation the former challenges the conventional value and knowledge of the latter. At the point when the latter's mental condition reaches the limit of its endurance, the motif of flash (the detonation of the sun in Jerusalem, inducing the glimpse of the moon in Moscow) triggers the destruction of the spacial, static parallelism to change itself into the temporal, dynamic parallelism between the two sections. After that, the Moscow narrative leaves the Wednesday evening and progresses through Thursday towards Friday, where the Jerusalem time is stopped. Until the end of Book One (Chapter 18), the narrative goes its way on the several plots switching the scenes ingeniously. The reader, however, does not follow the narrative to the Friday unconsciously: he can recognize the temporal parallelism on the way. The first sentence of Chapter 17, which describes the day following the black magic evening, informs the reader that it is Friday. Considering that the previous chapter was the execution of Yeshua of"Good Friday "of the Jerusalem section, he predicts something important will happen on the Friday of Moscow, too. The information at the beginning of Chapter 18 that the funeral of Berlioz strts at 3.00 p.m. (the time of the Expiration) would support the reader's prediction. The reader, therefore, notices that both the Moscow time and the Jerusalem time extend afterward and beforeward corresponding each other with a fulcrum of the contacting Friday. He looks back the narratives before Friday and reads ahead through the Satan's ball to go beyond Friday expecting the organic development of the two sections. From the first chapter of Book Two, Chapter 19, the Moscow narrative progresses on a single plot featuring Margarita. In the same Chapter the Moscow time overtakes the Jerusalem time at the moment when Berlioz's funeral starts at 3.00p.m. After that, the Moscow time surpasses the Jerusalem time to reach Satan's Ball (Chapter 23) between Friday and Monday, which is the parody on the Passion. After the"evocation of the Master"(Chapter 24), the Jerusalem narrative revives as Margarita's reading process of the Master's novel, and concludes itself at the same time when she finishes reading through the novel at the dawn of Saturday in the both sections. The parallelism of th