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.23, pp.15-27, 1991-10-01

---

The Jerusalem section of The Master and Margarita (1929?-40) is a story of a man of agony, the cruel fifth Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, who executed a vagrant philosopher, Yeshua Ha-Nozri, knowing his innocense. In this section, which is written as a historical novel independent of supernatural phenomena, there is an enigmatic figure who rules its world secretly: Afranius, the chief of the secret service to the Procurator. The enigma of Afranius lies in his false report to Pilate of the last moment of Yeshua on the cross: the chief didn't tell him the fact that Yeshua had accepted his atonement and died forgiving him for his conviction; on the contrary, he described Yeshua as if he had ridiculed Pilate and gave him the false words of the philosopher that "cowadice is one of the worst human sins." Having heard the report, Pilate became aware of his sin. so that he instigated the chief to assasinate the betrayer Judas of Karioth in revenge for Yeshua's death. In that sense, it was Afranius who kept Pilate on a string to let him do "evil" of the assasination. The figure of Pilate is not a typical Bulgakovian "coward" who often appears in the earlier novels of Bulgakov, such as the hero of The Red Crown (1992): Pilate is not a passive "coward" who finds no hope and is always in despair, but an active "coward" who tries to do anything, even "evil," to expiate one's sins like Frudov of The Flight (1925-8). At the end of the whole novel, Pilate is led to the world of "light or good" for his activeness. He stands in contrast to The Master of the Moscow section who is a typical passive "coward" so that he only has earned "rest". If we admit the systematical consistency of The Master and Margarita and analize the two "cowards" of the two sections in comparison, we must find out the figures who help the decision of their fates as well: in the Moscow section it is Woland, the Faustian devil, who leads The Master to the fate of "rest"; in the Jerusalem section the other who leads Pilate to the fate of "light"-must be Afranius! He is nothing but a Mephistophelian figure which is the "part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good" (the epigraph from Faust). Thus, in The Master and Margarita there is not only a single Mephistopheles who controls the Moscow section and determine the fate of the hero, but also another Mephistopheles in the Jerusalem section to do the same work. Bulgakov has the device to give the function to the the devils to develop the both stories. His effort leads to the reconstruction of the whole novel as a newly organized evangel, "The Evangel by Bulgakov."