Woland is the devil of the novel: a foreigner who arrives in Moscow claiming to be an expert in black magic, and whom the Master, in chapter 13, plainly identifies by telling Ivan that he met Satan.
The narrator describes him with a black right eye and a green left one, and with uneven eyebrows. At Patriarch's Ponds, he introduces himself as a consultant, hired to decipher manuscripts by the necromancer Gerbert d'Aurillac, announces to the editor Berlioz that they are going to cut off his head, and states that he met Pontius Pilate in person. He then settles with his retinue in Apartment 50 and holds a session of black magic at the Variety Theater.
Woland does not create Moscow's evil; he puts the city to the test. To the manager of the theater's snack bar he says that he "only wanted to see Muscovites en masse," and the retinue offers temptations that many accept on their own. Faced with the audience trampling itself for money, he concludes that they are ordinary people, "only the housing problem corrupted them." Before Berlioz's head at the ball, he applies to the dead man the theory in which he believed, reminding him that "to each is given according to his belief."
The epigraph, taken from Goethe's Faust, gives the key to the figure: "I am part of the force that forever wills evil and forever works good." It is Woland who returns the burned novel to the Master, grants Margarita what she asks for and, in the end, carries out the message that Matthew Levi brings him to give the Master peace.