Who He Is
A foreigner with mismatched eyes, one green and one black, who arrives in Moscow as a contracted consultant to decipher the manuscripts of the necromancer Gerbert d'Aurillac and says he is a specialist in black magic. From his calling card Ivan can read only the initial of his surname, a "W"; he himself gives the full name to Stepa Likhodeyev in apartment 50 (see Apartment 50), and it is the Master who tells Ivan who he is.
Yesterday, at Patriarch's Ponds, you met Satan.
The novel's epigraph, taken from Faust, can be read as its key: a power that does not need to want good in order to produce it.
The epigraph is Woland's key to reading in Moscow: he does not create evil, he puts the city to the test, and what he tries (like the bundle that Korovyov pushes onto Nikanor) catches only those already willing; he does not need to want good in order to produce it. Whoever quotes the passage outside the novel should know that it comes from Faust, where it is Mephistopheles who introduces himself this way to Faust, and that Bulgakov borrows it without the irony of the original context.
Trajectory
In chapter 1 he sits beside Berlioz and Ivan at Patriarch's Ponds, recalls Kant's sixth proof, which he says he criticized to Kant himself over breakfast, and announces Berlioz's death and the oil of Annushka; in chapter 2 he narrates Pilate's interrogation as one who was there.
They're going to cut off your head!
I witnessed all of this personally. I was on the veranda with Pontius Pilate, in the garden, when he spoke with Caiaphas, I was also on the platform, only in secret, incognito
In chapter 7 he appears beside Stepa's bed with a contract for seven performances at the Variety Theatre, installs the retinue in apartment 50, and in chapter 12, at the black magic session, after the rain of money over the audience, delivers his verdict on the Muscovites.
Master of black magic, Woland
They are people like any others. They love money, but it has always been so... Humanity loves money, regardless of what it is made of: leather, paper, bronze or gold. Well, they are fickle... what can you do... mercy sometimes stirs in their hearts... they are ordinary people... on the whole they remind one of the people of long ago... only the housing problem has corrupted them...
In chapter 18 he receives Sokov, the manager of the theatre's snack bar, asks how much savings he has and when he intends to die, and a voice from the next room announces the deadline and the cause of death, with the same certainty with which Woland had sentenced Berlioz.
he will die in nine months, next February, of liver cancer
In chapter 22 Margarita finds him lying down, ill, in a dirty, mended shirt, with Hella tending his knee. In chapter 23, at the end of the ball, he receives Berlioz's head on a platter and turns it into a goblet (see Berlioz's head); in chapter 24, after dinner, when Margarita herself forgives Frida, he declares that it does not count, because he did nothing, and asks her what she wishes for herself; and he refuses the Master's explanation that the novel was destroyed in the fire.
That is a fact. And a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.
Never ask for anything! Never ask for anything, especially from those who are strong. They will offer on their own and give everything as well.
I am sorry, I cannot believe [...], it is not possible. Manuscripts don't burn.
In chapter 29 he watches from the terrace the smoke of Griboyedov House, receives Matthew Levi, who calls him "spirit of evil and sovereign of the shadows," and agrees to take the Master and Margarita with him.
what would your goodness do if evil did not exist, how would the earth be if the shadows vanished from it
In chapter 31 he waits for the couple on horseback on the Sparrow Hills; in chapter 32 he presents the man in the stone armchair, returns to the Master the decision about him, and offers the Master neither Yershalaim nor Moscow, but the house with vines and Schubert's music.
Woland picks up the phrase of Yeshua Ha-Notzri when introducing the prisoner of two thousand years, and uses it to absolve whoever stood beside him.If it is true that cowardice is the worst defect, then I think the dog is not guilty.
Over there, over there! There a house and an old servant await you, the candles are already lit, but they will soon go out, because you will meet the dawn at once.
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that run through him are good and evil, the supernatural, and appearance and reality. A reading of chapter 17 on the form of the retinue's punishments:
As in the case of Nikanor, in chapter 9, and in the magic session of chapter 12, Woland's troupe turns money into something other than what it seemed. Nikanor's punishment and now that of Vasily Stepanovich have the same form: the money is not stolen, it becomes evidence against whoever touches it.
Woland spends the book pronouncing sentences on others: Berlioz's head, the countdown of nine months for Sokov, the verdict on the theatre audience, the stubborn fact before the head. The last sentence he pronounces is not his own: it is Yeshua's phrase on cowardice, which reached Pilate through the report of Afranius in chapter 25 and which Woland takes up in chapter 32, with an "if it is true," to declare Pilate's dog blameless.
Relationships
- Korovyov, Behemoth, Azazello and Hella: the retinue.
- Abaddon: the demon in dark glasses whom he shows to Margarita after introducing the retinue.
- Berlioz and Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny: the two interlocutors at Patriarch's Ponds, one sentenced, the other taken to the asylum.
- Margarita: the queen of the ball, to whom he grants the Master.
- The Master: the author of the novel about Pilate, to whom he returns the manuscript (see The manuscript) and offers refuge (see The House of Refuge).
- Matthew Levi: the messenger who brings him the request about the couple's fate.
- Yeshua Ha-Notzri and Pontius Pilate: the interrogation he says he witnessed, and the phrase of Yeshua that he takes up at the end.
- Mephistopheles: who says, in Faust, the phrase that the novel uses as its epigraph.