The Master and Margarita: Woland, Bulgakov's devil in Moscow
Woland, Behemoth the cat and Satan's great ball: Mikhail Bulgakov's novel between Faust, Pontius Pilate and a satire of Soviet Moscow.
On a hot spring evening, at Patriarch's Ponds in Moscow, an elegant foreigner approaches two men of letters who are discussing the historical non-existence of Jesus. This is the opening of The Master and Margarita, the novel on which Mikhail Bulgakov worked from about 1928 until his death in 1940. The foreigner is called Woland and he is the devil himself, arrived in the Soviet capital with his retinue.
A novel that survived censorship
Bulgakov, already known for plays and satirical stories frowned upon by the regime, wrote the book with no hope of seeing it published. He burned an early draft and returned to it several times, dictating the last corrections to his wife Elena Sergeevna when he was already gravely ill. The novel appeared only in 1966-1967, in instalments and with many cuts, in the magazine Moskva; the complete text circulated later, first abroad and then at home.
Woland and his retinue
Woland is not the tempter of medieval drama. He presents himself as a professor of black magic, exposes the pettiness, greed and cowardice of Muscovites and punishes above all bureaucrats and opportunistic writers. He is accompanied by grotesque figures: Koroviev with his cracked pince-nez, the hitman Azazello, the witch Hella and the cat Behemoth, huge, black and able to walk on his hind legs.
The novel's epigraph is taken from Goethe's Faust: there Mephistopheles describes himself as part of that power which always wills evil and always works good. Bulgakov takes the phrase literally. His devil, while sowing chaos, ends up restoring a form of justice and gives back to the Master the manuscript that he himself, in despair, had thrown into the fire.
Satan's ball and Margarita the witch
Margarita, the woman who loves the Master, agrees to act as hostess at the great ball that Woland gives every year. Thanks to a magic cream she becomes a witch, flies invisibly over Moscow and takes revenge on the critics who destroyed her beloved. At the ball murderers, poisoners and famous sinners of history parade past, in a scene that blends the tradition of the witches' sabbath with satire and a taste for the grotesque.
The novel within the novel
Alongside the Moscow story runs a second narrative, set in Jerusalem: it is the book written by the Master about Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri, a deeply human version of the figure of Jesus. The two stories mirror each other. Pilate's cowardice, condemning an innocent man while recognising his greatness, recalls the fear and conformism that Bulgakov saw around him in the Moscow of the 1930s.
The Master and Margarita has become one of the best-loved books of twentieth-century Russian literature. Its ironic, almost just devil descends from the long Faustian tradition, but Bulgakov uses him to speak about artistic freedom, power and courage. Magic, in the novel, is above all a tool for revealing the truth hidden behind the appearances of a society that claims to believe in nothing.