Note on the text: I used The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgalov as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and published by Penguin Books in 1997.
Truth is a volatile thing. Even dangerous sometimes because once you know the truth you cannot unknow it. That makes it not only dangerous, but painful because truth is the one thing that you cannot hide from. Truth, in many ways, is as undeniable as reality itself.
Not everyone can handle the truth. Not everyone has the courage to face the truth, and the pain that comes with it. One character, the poet Riukhin, thinking of himself in the third person, says that the reason he isn’t more appreciated is because he speaks the truth which no one else wants to face: “What would these poems him? Glory? What nonsense. . . . Glory will never come to someone who writes bad poems. What makes them bad? The truth, he was telling the truth!” (73). Telling the truth takes guts, and you have to be willing to pay the price for telling it.
The main character, called simply “The Master”, is another person who had to suffer for telling the truth. He wrote a book on Jesus and Pontius Pilate, which is regarded by other characters in the book as the truest book ever written, and the result was decades worth of mental and physical suffering. Neither he nor the people around him could handle the impact of the truth he revealed and thus he was reviled and persecuted for the truth that he revealed. So he has been spending decades in a Purgatory-like place suffering for the truth that he told. So when Levi, Bulgalov’s version of the disciple of Jesus, goes to Satan, here named Woland, on Jesus’ behalf, he doesn’t ask that “the master” be allowed to go into the kingdom of truth but instead asks that he be given peace: “He does not deserve the light, he deserves peace” (361). Truth and peace cannot coexist in Bulgalov’s world. To tell the truth takes guts and you must be wiling to pay the price. Even when the master is finally freed from his Purgatory it is to go to a place that is beyond truth and lies where he will be able to “put on [his] greasy nightcap [and]. . . fall asleep with a smile on [his] lips” (385). The price for telling the truth is a lifetime of suffering following by the bliss of oblivion.
Telling the truth is hard for multiple reasons. Mainly that the truth is unshakeable and undeniable and once you know the truth than you can’t unknow it. Reality in some sense is truth: you can’t deny that the sky is blue or that you ran over someone’s child any more than you can deny gravity. The inescapability of truth makes it hard to face, on top of which is the fact that not everyone is equipped to face it which means that they will blame you for exposing them to the truth. That’s why those who tell the truth must be ready to handle the consequences of doing so, even if they are in the right.
