Woland's servants from the Master and Margarita names. Demon Bassoon - Koroviev

Woland is a character in the novel “The Master and Margarita”, who leads the world of otherworldly forces. Woland is the devil, Satan, “prince of darkness,” “spirit of evil and lord of shadows” (all these definitions are found in the text of the novel).

Woland is largely focused on Mephistopheles "Faust" (1808-1832) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), including the operatic one from Charles Gounod's (1818-1893) opera "Faust" (1859).

The name Woland itself is taken from Goethe’s poem, where it is mentioned only once and is usually omitted in Russian translations. This is what Mephistopheles calls himself in the Walpurgis Night scene, demanding that the evil spirits give way: “The nobleman Woland is coming!” In the prose translation by A. Sokolovsky (1902), the text of which Bulgakov was familiar with, this passage is given as follows:

"Mephistopheles. Look where you've been taken! I see that I need to put my master's rights into action. Hey, you! The place! Mr. Woland is coming!"

In the commentary, the translator explained the German phrase “Junker Voland kommt” as follows: “Junker means a noble person (nobleman), and Woland was one of the names of the devil. The main word “Faland” (which meant deceiver, crafty) was already used by ancient writers in the sense of the devil ".

Bulgakov used this too last name: after a session of black magic, the employees of the Variety Theater try to remember the name of the magician: “- In... It seems like Woland. Or maybe not Woland? Maybe Faland.”

As amended in 1929-1930. the name Woland was reproduced in full Latin in his business card: "Dr Theodor Voland". In the final text, Bulgakov abandoned the Latin alphabet: Ivan Bezdomny on the Patriarchs remembers only the initial letter of the surname - W ("double-ve").

This replacement of the original V (“fau”) is not accidental. The German "Voland" is pronounced like Foland, but in Russian the initial "ef" in this combination creates a comic effect, and is difficult to pronounce. The German "Faland" would not be suitable here either. With the Russian pronunciation - Faland - the situation was better, but an inappropriate association arose with the word “halyard” (it denotes the rope used to raise sails and yards on ships) and some of its slang derivatives. In addition, Faland did not appear in Goethe’s poem, and Bulgakov wanted to associate his Satan with “Faust,” even if he had a name not very well known to the Russian public. Rare name it was necessary so that the average reader, not experienced in Demonology, would not immediately guess who Woland was.

The third wife of the writer E. S. Bulgakov recorded in her diary the reading of the initial chapters of the latest edition of “The Master and Margarita” on April 27, 1939: “Yesterday we had Faiko - both (playwright Alexander Mikhailovich Faiko (1893-1978) with his wife), Markov ( head of the Moscow Art Theater) and Vilenkin (Vitaly Yakovlevich Vilenkin (born 1910/11), colleague of Pavel Aleksandrovich Markov (1897-1980) in the literary department of the Moscow Art Theater). Misha read “The Master and Margarita” - from the beginning. The impression is enormous. Immediately persistently asked to set a day for the continuation. Misha asked after reading - who is Woland? Vilenkin said that he had guessed, but would never tell. I suggested that he write, I will write too, and we will exchange notes. We did it. He wrote: Satan, I - the devil. After that, Fayko also wanted to play. And he wrote on his note: I don’t know. But I fell for the bait and wrote to him - Satan.”

Bulgakov was undoubtedly quite satisfied with the experiment. Even such a qualified listener as A.M. Faiko did not immediately guess Woland. Consequently, the mystery of the foreign professor who appeared on the Patriarch's Ponds will keep most readers of The Master and Margarita in suspense from the very beginning. In early editions, Bulgakov tried the names Azazello and Veliar for the future Woland.

Woland's literary pedigree, used by Bulgakov, is extremely multifaceted. The devil in “The Master and Margarita” has an obvious portrait resemblance to Eduard Eduardovich von Mandro, the infernal character in A. Bely’s novel “The Moscow Eccentric” (1925), given to Bulgakov by the author. According to the definition given by A. Bely in the preface to the novel “Masks” (1933) from the same epic “Moscow” as “The Moscow Eccentric”, Mandro is a combination of “a kind of Marquis de Sade and Cagliostro of the 20th century.” In the preface to “The Moscow Eccentric,” the author argued that “in the person of Mandro, the theme of the “Iron Heel” (the famous novel by Jack London (John Griffith) (1876-1916), which appeared in 1908 (the enslavers of humanity) comes to fruition." White disguises the infernality of his character in every possible way, leaving the reader in the dark whether Mandro is Satan.

A red-haired and green-eyed girl named Gella is an ordinary witch of those who arrive at the Sabbath riding on a broom. Her name is mentioned in some legends in connection with Mount Brocken, considered the habitat of witches. Bulgakov himself kindly reminds of this through the mouth of Woland: ... I strongly suspect that this pain in the knee was left to me as a souvenir by one charming witch, whom I became intimately acquainted with in 1571 in the Brocken Mountains, at the Devil's Cathedra... Probably continue Woland’s words and telling about our meetings with him would be the height of immodesty, but I’ll tell you something. Surely you can trust and hope that my tales will not reach the brightest ears of Messire???:-) The Brocken Mountains... Goethe wrote a lot about them. This is a wonderful place: the air is filled with a variety of aromas, it is light and fresh, you want to completely dissolve in it. No human has ever set foot on these slopes. Brocken can be approachable and stern, but for welcome visitors it suddenly becomes affectionate and inviting into its sinful alcove. Nowhere is there softer and silkier grass and shady, cozy corners in which even God himself cannot see anything. Here the very atmosphere calls for sin, and no sin can be as sweet as adultery with Satan himself.

The dying will of the Great Master, writer Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, came true: “So that they know...”, which he said about his novel “The Master and Margarita.” The novel came to us, we accepted it, we re-read it many times, trying to comprehend the depth of the problems inherent in it.

Domestic and foreign critics praised the writer’s book as an outstanding work of our time.

During the last ten years of his life, “The Master and Margarita” was the writer’s soulful creation; he returned to it again and again. The novel played the same role in the writer’s life as famous painting the great Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa", known under the other name "La Gioconda", with which he did not part for many recent years, adding the smallest touches to it. The mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile has still not been solved, just as when rereading “The Master and Margarita,” we cannot yet comprehend the depth of the writer’s philosophical thought, which, like a diamond, appears before us with new sparkling facets.

M.A. Bulgakov was the most enlightened man of his time. His mother is the daughter of a priest, his father is a representative of the high clergy. The large family was highly cultured and musical. A doctor by training, a writer, however, he devoted his life to literature and theater.

Bulgakov worked on the novel “The Master and Margarita” for the last ten years of his life, from 1929 to 1940, until his death. The plot of the work changed; at first the writer wanted to make Woland the main character and call the novel “The Magician”. IN final version The main roles in the novel, in addition to Woland, began to be played by the Master and Margarita, Pontius Pilate and Yeshua, as well as the failed poet Ivan Bezdomny, later a professor of history.

As a person who grew up in a deeply religious family, M. Bulgakov knew spiritual literature very well: the New Testament, the Old Testament, the Gospel, the Apocalypse and other works, which is reflected in the novel. These ancient books reveal the essence of good and evil.

The writer’s novel is an open, clear, free and deep philosophical and artistic thought addressed to the most important and generally significant problems human life. The theme of the book is the theme of common human responsibility for the fate of goodness, beauty, truth in the world of people. One of the fundamental thoughts of the novel is the thought of justice, which inevitably triumphs in the life of the spirit, although sometimes belatedly, and already beyond the physical death of the creator.

M. Bulgakov's novel is multifaceted. Its construction and composition amazes with its thoughtful complexity. In the “Divine Comedy” of the great Italian Dante, three circles of hell are depicted, the underworld, where sinful souls rush restlessly in cosmic chaos, deprived of peace, doomed to eternal confusion former people. According to M. Bulgakov, the three circles of different worlds depicted by him are very close to the three circles of hell of Dante: the oldest - Yershalaim - is represented by the Roman horseman, the procurator of Judea Pontius Pilate and Yeshua, the modern, Moscow, 30s of the twentieth century - the Master and Margarita, Moscow by ordinary people; the third world - the world of Eternity, unknowable, otherworldly - is represented by Satan Woland and his retinue: the “right hand” of the devil Koroviev-Fagot, the “home, personal” jester - a cat named Behemoth, Azazello and others. These three worlds in the novel are united by Satan Woland: he is a witness to the execution that took place more than two thousand years ago, innocently condemned by a fanatical crowd of Jews, skillfully directed by the highest spiritual dignitary Kaifa, appears in modern Moscow for trial and reprisal against those who do evil, mired in him and the atrocities they commit.

The novel revealed the writer's extraordinary talent - the ability to create symbolic figures. For the author, the image of Satan and his retinue is only a symbol, a poetic likeness. The figures of the Master, Margarita and others are also symbolic.

The name Woland may have the following origin: taken from Latin, there is a Latin proverb: “Words fly away (“volant”), what is written remains,” where the word “volant” meaning “fly away,” “flying” turned into Woland (spirit) . Probably, the Romans (Latins) founded in ancient times a fortress called Woland high in the mountains of Armenia, which characterized it as flying against the background of a high sky. The word “Woland” is related in meaning and similarity to the words “wave”, “shuttlecock” (frills).

Woland (Satan, devil, evil spirits, demon) - the devil has a huge pedigree in world literature. From N.V. Gogol (M. Bulgakov was born in Kyiv, lived in this city for many years, here he studied and received his education) - Viy, from M. Yu. Lermontov - The Demon, then the famous Mephistopheles from the tragedy of I. V. Goethe "Faust"; however, the connection with Faust is most obvious through opera of the same name French composer Charles Gounod, beloved by M. Bulgakov. The similarity between Bulgakov's Satan and Mephistopheles is emphasized by the name Woland, which appears in Goethe's tragedy as one of the names of the devil. The scene of the Spring Ball of Satan, given by him and his retinue for Margarita, where before their eyes pass a string of monstrous images of sinners appearing from the underworld, hell, is undoubtedly inspired by phrases from the famous monologue - the aria of Mephistopheles from the opera by C. Gounod: “On earth the whole race people honor one sacred idol... that idol is the golden calf... Satan rules the show there... People die for metal...” Bulgakov’s name Margarita is an echo of the name Gretchen (Margarita) from Goethe’s “Faust.”

The majestic image of Satan is created by M.Yu. Lermontov in the poem “Demon”:

Sad Demon, spirit of exile,
Flew over the sinful earth...
He sowed evil without pleasure...
And he got bored with evil...

The heavenly spirit was an exile of paradise, but he remembered the time “when he, a pure cherub, shone in the dwelling of light,” that is, those times of cosmic chaos when light alone reigned and there was no darkness, darkness - the possessions of the Demon in the future. In M. Bulgakov’s novel, there is also talk about light and darkness, when Woland and Yeshua’s disciple Levi Matvey talk about how to reward the Master: With Light, then his spirit will take Ga-Notsri to itself, or with darkness, then the Master will be at Woland’s disposal, but the Master is rewarded with peace without depriving him of light, although Yeshua does not want to take him into his kingdom, perhaps because he somehow did not like the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate, perhaps because the Master did not forgive the procurator who doomed Yeshua to death, only in the final chapters of the novel (Yeshua and Woland considered the Master’s novel unfinished) Woland arranges a meeting between the Master and his hero Pontius Pilate, sitting in the mountains of Eternity in a stone chair in the company of a faithful dog, who, even in immortality, is obliged to share the fate of the owner. Pontius Pilate suffers, he has no peace, he is tormented by insomnia, especially on bright moonlit nights. He realizes that this suffering is due to the fact that he could not figure something out with Yeshua, whom he sentenced to death. Now in Eternity, Yeshua forgave the executioner: the mountain masses collapsed, the stone chair disappeared, in front of the former convict, for whom the “principle of the presumption of innocence” was violated, and the arbiter of his fate, a lunar path lay ahead, onto which the procurator’s dog ran out first, then Yeshua and Pontius went Pilate, peacefully discussing the problem of truth, which everyone had their own. They will never agree, since the struggle between light and darkness is eternal. Spiritual superiority remains with the bearers of light, truth, goodness and justice, embodied in the image of Yeshua, aka Ga-Nozri. However, Woland, turning to the Master, expressed the hope that the son of the astrologer king, the former cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the horseman Pontius Pilate, and Yeshua, perhaps, would agree on something.

Satan appears in Moscow in the era of the 30s of the twentieth century, specifically on the Patriarch's Ponds; It was the hour of an unprecedentedly hot sunset. The demon appeared before Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny in human form: he was a tall citizen, dark-haired, his right eye was black, his left for some reason green; the eyebrows are black, one higher than the other, the teeth on the left side have platinum crowns, on the right - gold. He is wearing an expensive gray suit, with foreign shoes that match the color of the suit. The gray beret is tucked dashingly behind the ear. Woland's style of wearing a beret is reminiscent of Goethe-Gounod's Mephistopheles. Woland looks to be about forty years old. M. Bulgakov often pays attention to the hero’s eyes; the left, green, eye of Satan is especially expressive; he lives, sparkles, sparkles, throws thunder and lightning, but the right, black, eye is always extinct, cold, deserted, icy.

This is how Woland appeared before the chairman of Massolit and the mediocre, uneducated poet, who again, nineteen centuries later, judge Christ, rejecting his divinity and very existence. Woland is trying to make them believe in the existence of God and the devil. In the 30s of the twentieth century, as throughout the existence of Soviet power, general informing and surveillance reigned and was encouraged in the country. Ivan Bezdomny instantly realized that Woland was a suspicious character, perhaps a White emigrant, and he should be immediately reported to the police.

Woland is “part of that force that always wants evil and always does good.” The writer created his own Woland-Satan; he differs sharply from the world standard of the devil in the depiction of his classical predecessors. His Satan is humane. The task of the prince of darkness is to remove Margarita, the genius of the Master, and his novel about Pontius Pilate and Yeshua from Moscow. The master was unattainable for Woland, since the blessed and mentally ill were under the special protection of God. The master, having set his novel on fire (an echo of the influence of N.V. Gogol’s act, who burned the second volume of the book “Dead Souls”), voluntarily went to the House of Sorrow (Stravinsky’s clinic for the mentally ill). However, having met Margarita, Woland was filled with cold respect for her for her wonderful spiritual qualities (kindness, mercy, loyalty in love, devotion to her chosen one and femininity). Margarita, having temporarily forgotten about the misfortunes of her beloved, seeks Frida’s mercy so that in hell she would not be given a handkerchief every day - a reminder of the baby son whom she killed with the help of this handkerchief. Woland fulfilled Margarita's wishes regarding Frida. Again the influence of the tragedy of the great Goethe: Gretchen also took the life of her son from Faust. Then Margarita gives release to Pontius Pilate, of course, with the consent of Woland and Yeshua. This release to the man in the white cloak with bloody lining was confirmed by the master, shouting: “Free! Free! He (Yeshua) is waiting for you!” - and Woland summed up what happened: now the Master can consider his novel finished, since, following religious dogmas, one must forgive, the idea of ​​forgiveness and kindness formed the basis of Yeshua’s truth.

Since Woland found himself in Moscow in the 30s of the 20th century, he decided to get acquainted with Moscow inhabitants and their life. Before Easter, when the church approves fasting and prohibits all entertainment, Muscovites enjoy having fun in a variety show. “We need to punish them for this!” - Woland and his retinue will decide. They amuse the audience with tricks with playing cards, dressing up ladies in fashionable outfits And so on. Woland and his henchmen pursue a goal: to punish evil, but it turns out that this is not necessary, since people are greedy (shouting, quarreling, they catch the ducats falling on them), envious (they gladly take off their elegant clothes: after all, in a variety show they came dressed in their best), husbands cheat on their wives, deceiving them by being “busy” until four in the morning at work with ongoing official meetings, while they themselves are having fun with their girlfriends; Among the men there are persistent non-payers of alimony; they have been bombarded with subpoenas in this regard. In fact, the audience deceived themselves for their vile qualities: fashion clothes disappeared from the ladies, and they found themselves naked, the gold pieces turned into simple paper. Woland conducted two cruel experiments: the audience at a variety show agreed, for the sake of entertainment, to “punish” the chatterbox entertainer, who was boring her with antics and vulgar jokes, by cutting off his head, which Woland’s retinue did. But the ladies were horrified and demanded that the head be returned to its original place. Bengalsky regained his head. Woland noted to himself that people, as always and everywhere, are frivolous and cruel, but at the same time they are compassionate. Things didn't turn out that way with Berlioz's head, which was cut off by a tram. Woland punished him without further forgiveness for his militant atheism. At the ball, the manager's head was in Woland's hands. Massolita, which then turned into a cup for drinking a satanic potion, and Woland cruelly tells the head that now Berlioz will go into oblivion, and he, Woland, from his head, which will become a cup, will drink with delight to existence.

Margarita saves the Master, although for this she must become a witch. The master understood and approved of her action: “When people are completely robbed, like you and me, they seek salvation from an otherworldly force!”

Woland, when meeting the Master, asks him why Margarita has such a high opinion of him. Having learned from the Master that she was delighted with his novel about Pontius Pilate, Woland wanted to see and read the work of Margarita’s chosen one. The master sadly reports that he burned it; Woland reassured him, saying the famous: “Manuscripts don’t burn!”

Woland's special affection for Margarita is manifested in giving her a golden horseshoe sprinkled with diamonds at the Spring Ball for good luck.

The role of Woland in M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” is great. He connects the three circles of time reflected in the novel, helped the Master in completing the novel about Pontius Pilate, played his role in the final fate of the procurator, appeared as a good angel and not the devil in establishing the truth in the fate of the Master and Margarita, through his perception we received information about the life of Moscow inhabitants in the 30s of the 20th century, entangled in all the sins characteristic of the underworld.

The scenes on the Sparrow Hills, on the rocky granite mountains and peaks of Eternity are fantastically presented. The picture of the departure of the transformed Woland and his retinue, when their black horses disappear, and they silently fall into the abyss, is impressive.

At the end of the novel, Satan and his henchmen are plunged into the world night; here is a contrast: darkness, gloom, night - and light, peace - to which the heroes are doomed: Woland, Pilate, Yeshua, the Master and Margarita and others.

The real appearance of Woland and his servants: “Moon chains”, “blocks of darkness” and “white spots of stars”. They were swallowed up by the boundless Universe, cosmic Chaos, until a new resurrection in the next literary masterpiece.

M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” was filmed. A series based on the plot of the novel was shown on television. The role of Woland was played by the famous actor Oleg Basilashvili. He is in this role and his interpretation literary hero I didn’t like it: it’s the same everywhere, boring and gray.

M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” is an outstanding work of our time. It is intended for the serious, thoughtful reader. Russian writers at all times have been characterized by their ability to pose and solve universal human problems: the struggle between good and evil, the purpose of human life and his purpose on earth.

Becomes unified space Moscow and Yershalaim worlds, and this happens in the eternal other world, where the “prince of darkness” Woland rules. The course of modern life coincides with the Master's novel about Pontius Pilate. Both of these heroes find life in eternity, as was predicted to Pilate - by an inner voice that spoke of immortality, and to the Master - by Woland, after reading a novel about the procurator of Judea. The novel about Pilate in the scene of the last flight is combined with the “Gospel of Woland”, and the Master himself, forgiving the procurator, at the same moment ends both his own story and the story of Satan.

The author of the novel about Pontius Pilate, hunted in earthly life, gains immortality in eternity. The time distance of 19 centuries seems to collapse, the days of the week and month in ancient Yershalaim and modern Moscow coincide with each other. Such a coincidence actually occurs in a time period of 1900 years, which includes an integer number of 76-year lunisolar cycles of the ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician Calippus - the smallest time periods containing an equal number of years according to the Julian and Jewish calendars. The day of Christian Easter becomes the day of the resurrection of Yeshua in the highest supermundaneity and the Master in the other world of Woland.

The three main worlds of M. and M. - the ancient Yershalaim, the eternal otherworldly and the modern Moscow - are not only interconnected (the role of the link is played by the world of Satan), but also have their own time scales. In the other world it is eternal and unchanging, like the endlessly lasting midnight at Satan’s Great Ball. In the Yershalaim world it is past time, in the Moscow world it is present time. These three worlds have three correlating series of main characters, with representatives of different worlds forming triads, united by functional similarity and similar interaction with the characters of their world, and in some cases, by portrait resemblance.

The first and most significant triad is the procurator of Judea Pontius Pilate - the “prince of darkness” Woland - the director of the psychiatric clinic, Professor Stravinsky. In the Yershalaim scenes, events develop thanks to the actions of Pontius Pilate. In the Moscow scenes, everything happens according to the will of Woland, who reigns supreme in the other world, penetrating into the Moscow world wherever moral and ethical principles are violated. In Stravinsky’s clinic, the characters of the Moscow world who became victims of Woland and his retinue are forced to unquestioningly obey. Pilate and Stravinsky also have their own retinues. Pilate tries to save Yeshua, but fails. Woland saves the Master, but only in his own other world, while Stravinsky unsuccessfully tried to save the author of the novel about Pontius Pilate in the Moscow world. The power of each of the three is limited in its own way. Pilate is unable to help Yeshua because of his cowardice. Woland only predicts the future of those with whom he comes into contact and awakens devilish tendencies in his victims. Stravinsky turns out to be unable to prevent the earthly death of the Master or restore complete peace of mind to Ivan Bezdomny.

There is a portrait resemblance between the characters of the first triad. Woland “appears to be over forty years old” and is “clean-shaven.” Stravinsky is “a carefully shaved man of about forty-five, like an actor.” Satan has a traditional distinguishing mark - different eyes: “the right eye is black, the left one is green for some reason”, “the right one has a golden spark at the bottom, drilling anyone to the bottom of the soul, and the left one is empty and black, kind of like a narrow coal ear, like an exit to a bottomless well of all darkness and shadows” . The professor is a man with “very piercing eyes.” Stravinsky’s external resemblance to Pilate is noted at the first meeting with the professor by Ivan Bezdomny, who vividly imagines the procurator of Judea from Woland’s story. The homeless man also draws attention to the fact that the director of the clinic, like the Roman procurator, speaks Latin.

Second triad: Afranius, first assistant to Pontius Pilate, - Koroviev-Fagot, first assistant to Woland, - doctor Fyodor Vasilyevich, first assistant to Stravinsky. The connection between Afranius and Fagot is established on the basis of the remarkable correspondence of their names. The article "Bassoon" of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary indicates that the inventor of this musical instrument there was an Italian monk Afranio. There are also external similarities between the characters. Afranius has “small eyes... under closed, slightly strange, as if swollen eyelids,” they “shone with a gentle slyness,” and in general the chief of the secret guard “was inclined toward humor.” Koroviev has “small, ironic and half-drunk eyes,” and he is truly an inexhaustible joker, punishing with his jokes those who angered Woland.

Afranius, on the unspoken order of Pilate, punishes Judas of Kiriath for betrayal with death. Individual episodes involving Afranius and Koroviev are also similar. Thus, Pilate, after hinting that Judas should be killed, recalls that Afranius once lent him money to give to a crowd of beggars in Yershalaim. This episode was invented by the procurator in order to present the reward for a future murder handed over to the head of the secret guard as the return of an old debt. Koroviev-Fagot rains money at the Variety Theater. But the chervonets, which he gives to the public at the behest of Woland, are as imaginary as the coins allegedly lent by Afranius to Pilate for the Yershalaim mob, and turn into simple pieces of paper.

The doctor Fyodor Vasilyevich, the third member of the triad, has similarities with both Afrany and Koroviev. Afrany during the execution of Yeshua and Fyodor Vasilyevich during the first interrogation of Ivan Bezdomny sit on identical high stools with long legs. Koroviev wears pince-nez and a mustache, doctor Fyodor Vasilyevich wears glasses and a mustache with a wedge-shaped beard.

Third triad: centurion Mark Ratboy, commander of a special centurion, - Azazello, demon killer, - Archibald Archibaldovich, director of the restaurant of the House of Griboyedov. All three perform executioner functions, the latter, however, only in the imagination of the narrator M. and M., when he turns from a restaurant director into the captain of a pirate brig in the Caribbean, strangling the hapless doorman. "The Cold and Convinced Executioner" Mark the Ratboy has its counterpart in modern world humorous figure.

The members of this triad also have a portrait resemblance. Mark Ratboy and Archibald Archibaldovich are both tall and broad-shouldered. When the centurion first appears, he blocks out the sun, and the director of the Griboyedov House restaurant appears before the readers as a vision in hell. Mark Ratboy and Archibald Archibaldovich have wide leather belts with weapons (the restaurant director, however, only in the imaginary guise of a pirate). Both Azazello and Ratboy have a disfigured face and a nasal voice. And all three executioners M. and M. have “mitigating circumstances.” Mark the Rat-Slayer, according to Yeshua, was made evil by those who disfigured him, and Ha-Nozri does not blame the centurion for his death. Azazello kills the traitor Baron Meigel in the other world, knowing in advance that in a month he will still have to end his earthly journey. Archibald Archibaldovich commits only an imaginary execution.

The fourth triad is animals, more or less endowed with human traits: Banga, Pilate’s favorite dog, the cat Behemoth, Woland’s favorite jester, the police dog Tuzbuben, a modern copy of the procurator’s dog. Banga, the only creature who understands and sympathizes with Pilate, in the Moscow world degenerates into a famous, but police dog. It is interesting that the name Banga is the home nickname of Bulgakov’s second wife Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya, formed through the evolution of various diminutive names: Lyuba - Lyubanya - Lyuban - Banga (all these names are found in Bulgakov’s letters to L. E. Belozerskaya and in the latter’s memoirs).

The fifth triad is the only one in M. and M. that is formed by female characters: Niza, agent Afranius, - Gella, agent and maid of Fagot-Koroviev - Natasha, maid (housekeeper) of Margarita. Nisa lures Judas from Kiriath into a trap, lures Gella to the disastrous Great Ball of Satan Baron Meigel and, together with the administrator Varenukha, who has turned into a vampire, almost destroys the financial director of the Rimsky Variety Theater. In the Bad Apartment under Koroviev-Fagot, she plays the role of a maid, striking the “unlucky visitors” with her extravagant appearance (a large scar on her neck, and only a flirtatious lace apron and a white tattoo on her head). Gella, according to Woland’s definition, “is efficient, understanding, and there is no service that she could not provide. The same qualities are inherent in Natasha, who wished to accompany her mistress even at Satan’s Great Ball.

You will learn:
Enemies and disciples of Yeshua and the Master
Three traitors
Real prototypes of the mediocre poets Bezdomny and Ryukhin

Encyclopedic YouTube

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The Master and Margarita: conversation at the Patriarchal

Subtitles

Name

Bulgakov's Woland received his name from Goethe's Mephistopheles. In the poem “Faust” it sounds only once, when Mephistopheles asks the evil spirits to part and give him way: “The nobleman Woland is coming!” In the ancient German literature The devil was called by another name - Faland. It also appears in The Master and Margarita, when the Variety show employees cannot remember the name of the magician: “...Perhaps Faland?” In the edition of the novel "The Master and Margarita" 1929-1930. the name Woland was reproduced in full Latin on his business card: “Dr Theodor Voland”. In the final text, Bulgakov abandoned the Latin alphabet: Ivan Bezdomny on the Patriarchs remembers only the initial letter of the surname - W (“double-ve”).

Appearance

“... the person described did not limp on any leg, and was neither small nor huge, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side and gold ones on the right. He was on the expensive side gray suit, in foreign shoes, matching the color of the suit. He cocked his gray beret jauntily over his ear and carried a cane with a black knob in the shape of a poodle's head under his arm. He looks to be over forty years old. The mouth is kind of crooked. Shaven clean. Brunette. The right eye is black, the left one is green for some reason. The eyebrows are black, but one is higher than the other.”

Place in the world of the novel

The novel says that Woland is the ruler of the forces of Darkness, opposed to Yeshua, the ruler of the forces of Light. The characters in the novel call Woland the Devil or Satan. However, the cosmography of Bulgakov’s world differs from the traditional Christian one - both Jesus and the Devil are different in this world, heaven and hell are not mentioned at all, and “gods” are spoken of in plural. Literary scholars have found in the world of the novel similarities with Manichaean or Gnostic ideology, according to which spheres of influence in the world are clearly divided between Light and Darkness, they are equal, and one side cannot - simply does not have the right - to interfere in the affairs of the other: “Each department must deal with its own affairs." Woland cannot forgive Frida, and Yeshua cannot take the Master to him. Woland also does not perform Pilate’s forgiveness himself, but entrusts it to the Master.

Woland, unlike the Christian “Father of Lies,” is honest, fair and even somewhat noble. Critic V. Ya. Lakshin calls it “cruel (but motivated!) wrath of heaven.” S. D. Dovlatov said that Woland personifies not evil, but justice. “Bulgakov’s Woland is deprived of the traditional appearance of the Prince of Darkness, thirsting for evil, and carries out both acts of retribution for “specific” evil and acts of retribution, thus creating a moral law that is absent in earthly existence.”

Woland fulfills his promises, and even fulfills two of Margarita’s wishes instead of the promised one. He and his courtiers do not harm people, punishing only immoral acts: greed, denunciation, groveling, bribery, etc. (for example, no one was hurt in a shootout between a cat and security officers). They are not in the business of “seducing souls.” Woland, unlike Mephistopheles, is ironic, but not mocking, prone to mischief, laughs at Berlioz and Bezdomny, at the barman Sokov (in the eighteenth chapter). At the same time, he does not show excessive cruelty: he orders the poor entertainer Bengalsky’s head to be returned; releases Frida from punishment at the request of Margarita. Many phrases of Woland and his retinue are unusual for the Christian Devil: “There is no need to be rude... there is no need to lie...”, “I don’t like him, he is a scoundrel and a rogue...”, “And mercy is knocking on their hearts.”

Thus, Woland’s role in the world of the novel can be defined as “overseer of evil.” The one who has evil in his soul is his ward. Woland himself, unlike the Christian Satan, does not multiply evil, but only monitors it, and, as necessary, suppresses and fairly judges (for example, Baron Meigel, Rimsky, Likhodeev, Bengalsky).

Symbolism

Theatricality

Many researchers of Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” note theatrical and operatic motifs in the image of Woland. His image is endowed with some bright, slightly unnatural details of clothing and behavior. Spectacular appearances and unexpected disappearances, unusual costumes, and the constant reference to his low voice - bass - add theatrical brightness to his image, an element of play and acting.

In this regard, some characters in Bulgakov’s “Theatrical Novel” echo the image of Woland [ ] . In particular, the director of the Training Stage of the Independent Theater, Ksavery Borisovich Ilchin, appears before Maksudov, illuminated by “phosphoric light.” Another character is even more closely connected with Woland, editor-publisher Ilya Ivanovich Rudolfi, whose unexpected arrival at Maksudov’s apartment to the sounds of “Faust” refers to Woland’s appearance in “The Master and Margarita”:

The door swung open and I froze on the floor in horror. It was him, without a doubt. In the darkness, high above me was a face with an imperious nose and scattered eyebrows. The shadows played, and I imagined that the tip of a black beard was sticking out under the square chin. The beret was twisted dashingly over his ear. There was no pen, however.

In short, Mephistopheles stood before me. Then I saw that he was wearing a coat and shiny deep galoshes, and was holding a briefcase under his arm. “This is natural,” I thought, “he cannot pass through Moscow in any other form in the twentieth century.”

Rudolphi,” said the evil spirit in tenor, not bass.

"Devilry"

In the description of the events taking place in the novel, words are constantly repeated that point us to dark forces. Starting from the very first chapter, the heroes repeat the name of the devil in their speech: “throw everything to hell...”, “Oh, damn!”, “What the hell does he want?”, “Damn him, ah!..” , “Damn, I heard everything.” This “devilry” is repeated throughout the novel. It’s as if the residents of Moscow are calling on Satan and he cannot refuse the invitation. However, all these motives dark forces connected rather not with Woland himself, but with Moscow and Muscovites.

Moon

Throughout the novel, Woland is haunted by the moon. Her light always accompanied the representatives of the dark forces, because all their dark deeds were committed under the cover of darkness. But in Bulgakov’s novel, the moon takes on a different meaning: it carries a revealing function. In its light, the true qualities of people are revealed, and justice is administered. The light of the moon makes Margarita a witch. Without her, even Azazello’s magic cream would not have had any effect.

Poodle

The poodle - a direct allusion to Mephistopheles - appears several times in the work. In the very first chapter, when the majestic Woland wanted to decorate the hilt of his sword cane with a dog’s head, while Mephistopheles himself climbed into the skin of a poodle. The poodle then appears on the pad on which Margarita places her foot during the ball and wearing the queen's gold medallion.

Alleged prototypes

Bulgakov himself resolutely denied that the image of Woland was based on any prototype. According to the memoirs of S. A. Ermolinsky, Bulgakov said: “I don’t want to give reasons to amateurs to look for prototypes. Woland has no prototypes." Nevertheless, hypotheses that the figure of Woland had some kind of real prototype have been expressed more than once. Most often, Stalin is chosen as a candidate; according to the critic V.Ya. Lakshin, “it is difficult to imagine anything more flat, one-dimensional, far from the nature of art, than such an interpretation of Bulgakov’s novel.”

Mephistopheles from the tragedy "Faust"

An obvious possible prototype for Woland is Goethe's Mephistopheles. From this character Woland receives his name, some character traits and many symbols that can be traced in Bulgakov’s novel (for example, a sword and beret, a hoof and a horseshoe, some phrases, and so on). Symbols of Mephistopheles are present throughout the novel, but they usually refer only to the external attributes of Woland. In Bulgakov they acquire a different interpretation or are simply not accepted by the heroes. Thus, Bulgakov shows the difference between Woland and Mephistopheles.

In addition, it is noteworthy that a direct indication of this interpretation of the image is already contained in the epigraph to the novel. These are lines from Goethe's Faust - the words of Mephistopheles in response to Faust's question who his guest is.

Stalin

No, it’s not for nothing that Bulgakov writes this novel - “The Master and Margarita”. The main character of this novel, as you know, is the devil, acting under the name Woland. But this is a special devil. The novel opens with an epigraph from Goethe: “... so who are you, finally? “I am part of that force that always wants evil and always does good.” Appearing in Moscow, Woland unleashes all his devilish power on those in power who commit lawlessness. Woland also deals with the persecutors of the great writer - the Master. Under the scorching summer sun of 1937, during the days of the Moscow trials, when another devil was destroying the devilish party, when Bulgakov’s literary enemies were dying one after another, the Master wrote his novel... So it’s not difficult to understand who was behind the image of Woland.

Stalin’s attitude towards M.A. Bulgakov himself and his work is known from Stalin’s letter in defense of Bulgakov “Response to Bill-Belotserkovsky” dated February 2, 1929, as well as from his oral speeches at Stalin’s meeting with a group of Ukrainian writers, which took place on February 12, 1929 of the year .

Second Coming of Christ

There is a version that the image of Woland has many Christian features. In particular, this version is based on a comparison of some details in the descriptions of Woland and Yeshua. Yeshua appeared before the procurator with a large bruise under his left eye - Woland right the eye is “empty, dead.” There is an abrasion in the corner of Yeshua’s mouth - Woland’s “corner of his mouth is pulled down.” Yeshua was burned by the sun on a pillar - “the skin on Woland’s face seemed to be forever burned by a tan.” Yeshua's torn blue tunic turns into dirty rags, which even the executioners refused - Woland before the ball is “dressed in one long nightgown, dirty and patched on the left shoulder.” Jesus is called the Messiah, Woland - Messire.

Also, this version is sometimes based on a comparison of some scenes of the novel with certain biblical quotes.

Jesus said: “Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them.” Woland appeared during a conversation about Jesus:

May I have a seat? - the foreigner politely asked, and the friends somehow involuntarily moved apart; the foreigner deftly sat down between them and immediately entered into conversation.

Finally, in the conversation Woland testifies about Christ: “Keep in mind that Jesus existed.”

Allusions between Woland and Christ were embodied in the novel “Burdened with Evil, or Forty Years Later” () by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, created largely under the impression of Bulgakov’s novel.

However, this interpretation of the image contains a number of inaccuracies.

1. Explicit. Levi Matvey gives Woland an order from Yeshua about future fate The Master and Margarita.
2. Woland is shown as a witness, not a participant in the Yershalaim scenes. By his own admission, during the conversation between Yeshua and Pilate, Woland is present incognito, which can be understood in two ways. However, in the evening, Pilate momentarily sees a mysterious figure among the shadows.

This interpretation can also be considered quite controversial, since it is necessary to take into account a number of points that are important when reading and understanding the images depicted in the novel. According to the Christian point of view, the Antichrist is a person who is not so much opposing Christ as replacing him. The prefix “anti-” has a double translation:

• denial, opponent.
• instead, substitute.

It should also be remembered that this version is very different from the full context of the Bible. The New Testament says about the coming of Christ: “When the Pharisees asked when the Kingdom of God would come, he answered them: The Kingdom of God will not come in a noticeable way. For behold, the kingdom of God is within us” (Luke 17:20, 21). “If they say to you, “Behold, He is in the wilderness,” do not go out; “Behold, He is in the secret chambers,” do not believe it; For just as lightning comes from the east and is visible even to the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24: 26-27).

It is also worth remembering that Ivan Bezdomny defends himself from Woland with an icon of an unknown saint.

The image of Woland in art

To the cinema

• Alain Cuny - The Master and Margarita, 1972
• Gustav Holubek - television series 1989 (Poland)
• Valentin Gaft - film 1994 (Russia)
• Mikhail Kozakov - “Fatal eggs, Feature Film, 1995 (Russia-Czech Republic)
• Oleg Basilashvili - television series “The Master and Margarita” 2005 (Russia)
• Sergey Grekov - short film 2005 (Hungary)
• Musical:
• Ivan Ozhogin, Kirill Gordeev, Rostislav Kolpakov - musical "The Master and Margarita"

• Band song

Woland is the devil, Satan, “prince of darkness,” “spirit of evil and lord of shadows” (all these definitions are found in the text of the novel). Bulgakov's devil is in many ways focused on Goethe's Mephistopheles, including in his operatic form created by Charles Gounod. The name Woland itself is taken from Goethe’s poem, where it is mentioned only once and is usually omitted in Russian translations. This is what Mephistopheles calls himself in the Walpurgis Night scene, demanding that the evil spirits give way: “The nobleman Woland is coming!” In the prose translation by A. Sokolovsky, with the text of which Bulgakov was familiar, this passage is given as “Mephistopheles. Look where it took you! I see that I need to put my rights as a master into action. Hey you! Place! Mr. Woland is coming! In the commentary, the translator explained the German phrase “Junker Voland kommt!” as follows: “Junker means a noble person (nobleman), and Woland was one of the names of the devil. The basic word “Faland” (which meant deceiver, crafty) was already used by ancient writers in the sense of devil.” Bulgakov also used this last name: after a session of black magic, the employees of the Variety Theater try to remember the name of the magician: “In... It seems, Woland. Or maybe not Woland? Maybe Faland."

In the first edition, Woland’s name was reproduced in full Latin on his business card: “Dr Theodor Woland.” In the final text, Bulgakov abandoned the Latin alphabet: Ivan Bezdomny on the Patriarchs remembers only the initial letter of the surname - W (“double-ve”). This replacement of the original V (“fau”) is not accidental. The German “Voland” is pronounced like Foland, but in Russian the initial “ef” in this combination creates a comic effect, and is difficult to pronounce. The German “Faland” would not be suitable here either. With the Russian pronunciation - Faland - things were better, but an inappropriate association arose with the word “halyard” (it denotes the rope used to raise sails and yards on ships) and some of its slang derivatives. In addition, Faland did not appear in Goethe’s poem, and Bulgakov wanted to associate his Satan with “Faust,” even if he had a name not very well known to the Russian public. A rare name was needed so that the average reader, not experienced in demonology, would not immediately guess who Woland was.

The initial letter of the name Woland unexpectedly turns out to be connected with one interesting literary source. In the story of the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink (Meyer) “J.M.”, translated into Russian in the 1920s, main character Georges Mackintosh, a man with obvious infernal traits, returns to his native provincial Austrian town and, under the pretext of discovering a large gold deposit, provokes his fellow countrymen to demolish houses along certain streets, and in the end it turns out that the destroyed areas form his initials in the city plan - Z and M. It is interesting that the streets of Moscow, on which Woland’s henchmen set fire to four buildings, when continued, form a figure reminiscent of his initial - “double-ve” (W).

E.S. Bulgakova recorded in her diary the reading of the initial chapters of the latest edition of “The Master and Margarita” on April 27, 1939: “Misha read “The Master and Margarita” - from the beginning. The impression is enormous. They immediately insistently asked to set a day for continuation. Misha asked after reading - who is Woland? Vilenkin said that he had guessed, but would never tell. I suggested that he write, I’ll write too, and we’ll exchange notes. Done. He wrote: Satan, I am the devil. After that, Fayko wanted to play as well. And he wrote on his note: I don’t know. But I took the bait and wrote to him - Satan.” Bulgakov was undoubtedly quite satisfied with the experiment. Even such a qualified listener as Fayko did not immediately guess Woland. Consequently, the mystery of the foreign professor who appeared on the Patriarch's Ponds will keep the vast majority of readers of the novel in suspense from the very beginning. Let us note that in early editions Bulgakov tried the names Azazello and Veliar for the future Woland.

Woland's literary pedigree is extremely multifaceted. For example, he has an obvious portrait resemblance to Eduard Eduardovich von Mandro, the infernal character in Andrei Bely’s novel “The Moscow Eccentric,” which was given to Bulgakov by the author.

A number of Mandro's traits can also be found in Woland. At his first appearance, Eduard Eduardovich looks like a foreigner (“it seemed as if he had jumped out of an express train that had rushed straight from Nice”), dressed in everything foreign and dapper - “an English gray hat with a twisted brim,” “a well-tailored suit, dark blue”, “pique vest”, and in his gloved hands he clutches a cane with a knob. Mandro is a clean-shaven brunette, his face contorts with a grimace of anger, and when he met the professor’s son Mitya Korobkin, “he raised his eyebrows, showing bared teeth,” and took off his hat.

Woland appears before the writers at the Patriarch's in approximately the same form:

“As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side and gold crowns on the right. He was in an expensive gray suit, with foreign shoes that matched the color of the suit. He cocked his gray beret jauntily over his ear and carried a cane with a black knob in the shape of a poodle's head under his arm. He looks to be over forty years old. The mouth is kind of crooked. Shaven clean. Brunette. The right eye is black, the left one is green for some reason. The eyebrows are black, but one is higher than the other. In a word - a foreigner." The hero of “The Moscow Eccentric” “had his eyebrows shriveled, with the corners not downwards, but upwards, moving above his nose in a mimic gesture reminiscent of hands joined with palms up, three wrinkles merged between them like a trident, raised and cutting the forehead.” Woland’s face in a similar way “was slanted to the side, the right corner of the mouth was pulled down, deep wrinkles parallel to the sharp eyebrows were cut on the high bald forehead.” Both also have Masonic attributes: Mandro has an enamel ring with a ruby ​​and the sign of “free masons”; and a cigarette case with a Masonic sign - a diamond triangle - from Woland.

Both Mandro and Woland are endowed with a number of features traditional for the appearance of the “prince of darkness”, in particular, the predominance of the costume gray and conspicuous facial irregularities.

At the same time, Mandro only symbolizes the devil, appearing during the action in the form of a normal financial businessman, although distinguished by the unprecedented scope of his plans. His infernal nature is only implied, but Woland is a real devil, posing as a foreign professor and artist.

According to the definition given by Bely in the preface to the novel “Masks” from the same epic “Moscow” as “The Moscow Eccentric”, Mandro is a combination of “a kind of Marquis de Sade and Cagliostro of the 20th century.” In the preface to “The Moscow Eccentric,” the author argued that “in the person of Mandro, the theme of the “Iron Heel” (the famous novel by Jack London - B.S.) (the enslavers of humanity) is becoming obsolete.” White disguises the infernality of his character in every possible way, leaving the reader in the dark whether Mandro is Satan. Bulgakov hides Woland’s true face only at the very beginning of the novel in order to intrigue readers, and then directly declares through the mouth of the Master and Woland himself that Satan (the devil) has definitely arrived at the Patriarch’s.

The version with hypnotists and mass hypnosis, which Woland and his companions allegedly subjected Muscovites, is also present in The Master and Margarita. But its purpose is not camouflage. Thus, Bulgakov expresses the ability and desire of ordinary Soviet consciousness to explain any unexplained phenomena surrounding life, up to mass repressions and the disappearance of people without a trace. The writer seems to be saying: even if the devil himself came to Moscow with his hellish retinue, the competent authorities and Marxist theorists, like the chairman of MASSOLIT, would still find a completely rational basis for this, not contradicting the teachings of Marx - Engels - Lenin - Stalin, and most importantly, they would be able to convince in this for everyone, including those who have experienced the influence of evil spirits.

Like Mandro, Woland, according to Koroviev-Fagot, owns a villa in Nice. This detail reflected not only acquaintance with the “Moscow eccentric” and symbolic meaning Nice as a resort where rich people from all over the world vacation, but also the circumstances of Bulgakov’s biography - a trip to France that did not take place in the spring of 1934 with a possible visit to Nice. After a humiliating refusal to travel abroad, Bulgakov fell into depression. I had to give up the dream of Nice forever. But Woland now received a villa at this resort.

Woland's unconventionality is manifested, in particular, in the fact that he, being a devil, is endowed with some obvious attributes of God. The already mentioned book by F.V. Farrar, “The Life of Jesus Christ,” obviously dates back to the episode when the bartender of the Variety Theater Sokov learns from Woland about his incurable illness and imminent death, but still refuses to spend his considerable savings. From Farrar we read: “How rich, for all its brevity, is the little parable He told... about the rich fool, who in his greedy, self-confident self-interest to the point of forgetting God, intended to do this and that and who, completely forgetting that death exists and that the soul cannot eat bread , thought that his soul would have enough of these “fruits,” “goods,” and “breadbaskets” for a long time and that it only had to “eat, drink and be merry,” but to which, like a terrible echo, a stunning and full of irony sentence thundered from the sky: “ Insane! this night your soul will be taken from you; Who will get what you have prepared?’ (Luke 12:16-21).” In The Master and Margarita, Woland discusses the future of the barman as follows when it turns out that “he will die in nine months, in February next year, from liver cancer in the clinic of the First Moscow State University, in the fourth ward”:

“Nine months,” Woland thought thoughtfully, “two hundred and forty-nine thousand... Does that work out to be twenty-seven thousand a month?” (For comparison: Bulgakov’s salary as a librettist consultant Bolshoi Theater at the end of the 30s it was 1000 rubles per month. - B.S.) Not enough, but with a modest life it’s enough...

“Yes, I wouldn’t advise you to go to the clinic,” the artist continued, “what’s the point of dying in a ward under the groans and wheezes of hopeless patients.” Isn’t it better to throw a feast for these twenty-seven thousand and, having taken poison, move to another world to the sound of strings, surrounded by drunken beauties and dashing friends?

Unlike the hero of the Gospel parable, Sokov does not enjoy earthly joys, but not for the sake of saving his soul, but only because of natural stinginess. Satan ironically invites him to become like the “rich fool.”

Through Farrar's book it turns out to be possible to comprehend one of the meanings of the diamond triangle on Woland's cigarette case. The author of The Life of Jesus Christ wrote:

“To show them (the priests and scribes who made up the Sanhedrin - B.S.) that Scripture itself prophesiedly convicts them, Christ asked if they had never read in Scripture (Ps. 117) about the stone that was rejected by the builders, but who, nevertheless, according to the wonderful purposes of God, became the head of the corner? How could they continue to remain builders when the entire plan for their construction was rejected and changed? Doesn't ancient messianic prophecy make it clear that God will call other builders to build his temple? Woe to those who stumbled, as they did, over this rejected stone; but even now there was still time to avoid final death for those on whom this stone might fall. To deny Him in His humanity and humility was already to suffer a lamentable loss; but to be found rejecting Him when He comes in glory, would not this mean “to be completely destroyed before the Lord?” To sit on the seat of judgment and condemn Him would mean to bring destruction upon oneself and the people; but to be condemned by Him—would this not mean to be “ruined into dust” (Dan. 2:34–44)?”

Woland's triangle symbolizes precisely this cornerstone - a rejected stone that has become the head of the corner. And the course of events in The Master and Margarita fully corresponds to the parable interpreted by Farrar. Berlioz and Bezdomny, sitting on a bench (“seat of judgment”), again, nineteen centuries later, judge Christ and reject his divinity (Bezdomny) and his very existence (Berlioz). Woland’s triangle is another warning to the chairman of MASSOLIT, a reminder of the parable about the builders of Solomon’s Temple, especially in combination with the words: “A brick will never fall on anyone’s head for no reason at all... You will die a different death.” Berlioz did not heed the warning, did not believe in the existence of God and the devil, and even decided to destroy Woland by denunciation, and paid for it with a quick death. Likewise, the listeners of Christ and their descendants, as Farrar emphasized, did not escape a painful death during the capture of Jerusalem by the troops of Titus in 70 AD. e., which is what the procurator Pontius Pilate predicts to the chairman of the Sanhedrin, Joseph Kaifa.

After the death of Berlioz, the homeless man believed in Woland and the story of Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri, but then agreed with the official version that Satan and his retinue are only hypnotists. And the poet Ivan Bezdomny turned into professor Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, parodically finding his home - “ small homeland"(the surname is associated with the Ponyri station in the Kursk region) and, as it were, becoming a “different” builder. In the same context, we must take Woland’s words about the new building, which will be built on the site of the burnt Griboyedov House - a symbol of modern Soviet literature. However, the temple of new literature will have to be built according to the providence not of God, but of Woland. The new builder Ponyrev completely renounced poetry and believed in his own omniscience.

In Masonic symbolism, the triangle goes back to the legend that develops the parable of Solomon's Temple. Woland's triangle can therefore be interpreted as a Masonic sign. Note that Mandro is also a Freemason. Like Eduard Eduardovich, Woland, through literary sources, is associated with the image of the famous adventurer, occultist and alchemist of the 18th century, Count Alessandro Cagliostro, whom the Italian Giuseppe (Joseph) Balsamo pretended to be. The episode with the burning of the Griboedov House and Woland’s words about the inevitable future construction of a new building in its place is very reminiscent of one of the scenes in Mikhail Kuzmin’s fictionalized story “The Wonderful Life of Joseph Balsamo, Count Cagliostro,” which in many ways served as a model for Bulgakov when writing the biography of Moliere. At Kuzmin's, an unknown young man in a gray cloak meets young Joseph Balsamo and asks him, pointing to a beautiful pink building:

“Would you like to have a house like this?

The boy did not like it when strangers spoke to him on a first-name basis, and, moreover, he was not at all prepared for such a question; so he remained silent and only turned his eyes to the pink building. The stranger continued:

But how much more beautiful is it to build such a house than to own it?

The boy remained silent.

How nice it would be to build a beautiful, bright house that could accommodate all the people and where everyone would be happy.

Masons build houses!

Yes, my child, masons build houses. Remember what I tell you, but forget my face.

At the same time, the stranger leaned towards Joseph, as if precisely so that he could take a better look at him. His face was beautiful, and the boy seemed to understand for the first time that there are ordinary, ugly and beautiful faces. The young man muttered:

No matter how much you stare, you will still forget what you don’t need to remember!”

Punishment overtakes the Griboyedov House, where MASSOLIT is located, because the writers who occupied it do not unite, but separate and corrupt people with their deceitful opportunistic writings, making the brilliant Master unhappy. Kuzminsky's Man in Gray is clearly infernal, and in full accordance with the tradition of depicting the devil, Woland appears either in a gray suit or in the black tights of the operatic Mephistopheles. On the Patriarchs, in a conversation with Woland, Bezdomny is endowed with the same traits of a naive child as the boy Balsamo in a conversation with an unknown person. In the finale, he forgets the meeting at the Patriarch's, and the Master in the last refuge forgets his earthly life. The words about masons building houses here also make us remember Freemasonry, since Freemasons are free masons, builders of Solomon's Temple. However, Woland's goal is not only to build a new temple of literature, where everyone will unite and be happy, but to awaken writers to creativity, the fruits of which may be pleasing to both God and the devil.

The same Count Cagliostro became the hero of the famous poem by Carolina Pavlova (Janisch) “Conversation in Trianon”. As L.E. Belozerskaya told us, the name of the poetess was well known in the circle where the writer moved in the 20s. “Conversation at Trianon” is structured in the form of a conversation between Count Honore Mirabeau and Count Cagliostro on the eve of the Great French Revolution. Cagliostro is skeptical about Mirabeau's Enlightenment optimism:

Overthrowing ancient laws,

Millions of people will rise up

The bloody deadline is coming;

But I know these storms,

And four thousand years

I remember a sad lesson.

And the current generation

The menacing ferments will subside;

Believe me, count, the crowd of people,

Bonds will be needed again

And these same French will leave

Inheritance of the proceeds of rights.

Like Cagliostro, Woland points out the unpredictability of human actions, often leading to results directly opposite to those intended, especially in the long term. The devil convinces the writer that man is not given the ability to foresee his future. But Berlioz, a devout Marxist, leaves no place in life for unpredictable, random phenomena, and pays for his vulgar determinism in in every sense words with your head.

There is a portrait resemblance between Cagliostro from “Conversation at Trianon” and Woland. Cagliostro "was a son of the south, / By appearance a strange man/ Tall figure, like a flexible sword, / Mouth with a cold smile, / A well-aimed gaze from under quick eyelids.” Woland, “he was... simply tall,” repeatedly fixed his piercing green eye on Berlioz and laughed with a strange chuckle. At some point, it seems to the homeless man that Woland’s cane has turned into a sword, and Woland leans on the sword during the ball, when Margarita sees that “the skin on Woland’s face seemed to be forever burned by a tan.” This really makes Satan look like he comes from a warm southern climes.

Like Woland at the Patriarchal, K. Pavlova’s infernal Cagliostro recalls being present at the trial of Christ:

I was in distant Galilee;

I saw how the Jews came together

Judge your messiah;

As a reward for words of salvation

I heard screams of frenzy:

“Crucify him! Crucify him!”

He stood majestic and silent,

When the pale hegemon

He asked the mob, timidly:

“Who am I sending you according to the regulations?”

“Let the robber Barabbas go!” -

A mad roar erupted from the crowd.

In the story of Woland, who was secretly present both during Pilate’s interrogation of Yeshua and on the platform during the announcement of the verdict, the procurator is called the hegemon and contains the motive of Pilate’s “timidity” (cowardice), although he is afraid here not of the cries of the crowd, but of Caiaphas’s denunciation to Caesar Tiberius.

In the 1929 edition, the vocabulary of the dialogue between Woland and Berlioz was even closer to Cagliostro’s monologue:

“Tell me, please,” Berlioz asked unexpectedly, “so, in your opinion, there were no cries of “crucify him!”

The engineer smiled condescendingly:

Such a question would be appropriate in the mouth of a typist from the Supreme Economic Council, of course, but in yours?.. For mercy! I would like to see how some crowd could interfere with a trial carried out by a procurator, and even one like Pilate! Let me finally explain with a comparison. The trial is going on at the Revolutionary Tribunal on Prechistensky Boulevard, and suddenly, can you imagine, the public begins to howl: “Shoot him, shoot him!” She is instantly removed from the courtroom, that’s all. And why would she howl? She really doesn’t care whether someone is hanged or shot. The crowd is always a crowd, a mob, Vladimir Mironovich!”

Here, through the mouth of Woland, Bulgakov polemicizes with “Conversation at Trianon.” The author of "The Master and Margarita", having the experience of revolution and Civil War, came to the conclusion that the mob by itself does not decide anything, because it is directed by leaders pursuing their own goals, which K. Pavlova and other Russian intellectuals of the mid-19th century, who considered the people, the crowd, as a self-sufficient spontaneous factor in the course and outcome of historical events, were not yet aware of. . “Engineer” Woland also parodies numerous calls at public meetings and in newspapers to apply capital punishment to all defendants in the rigged trial of a group of engineers accused of sabotage (the so-called “Shakhty case”). This trial took place in Moscow in May - July 1928. Then five of the defendants were sentenced to death.

In the preparatory materials for “The Master and Margarita” there is an extract dedicated to Count Cagliostro: “Cagliostro, 1743–1795, was born in Palermo. Count Alexander Joseph Balsamo Cagliostro-Phoenix." Initially, in the 1938 version, Cagliostro was among the guests at Satan’s ball, but Bulgakov removed Count Phoenix from the final text of the corresponding chapter so that the prototype would not duplicate Woland. Let us note that none of the literary or real prototypes of Satan are mentioned or appear as characters in The Master and Margarita.

The image of Woland is polemical in relation to the view of the devil that P. A. Florensky defended in “The Pillar and Ground of Truth”:

“Sin is fruitless because it is not life, but death. And death drags out its ghostly existence only through life and about life, feeds from life and exists only insofar as life gives it nourishment from itself. What death has is only the life it has spoiled. Even at the “black mass,” in the very nest of the devil, the Devil and his fans could not come up with anything other than to blasphemously parody the secret actions of the liturgy, doing everything the other way around. What emptiness! What beggary! What flat “depths”!

This is further proof that there is neither in reality, nor even in thought, either Byron’s, Lermontov’s, or Vrubel’s Devil - majestic and regal, but there is only a pitiful “monkey of God” ... ".

In the first edition of the novel, Woland was still in many ways such a “monkey,” possessing a number of degrading traits: he giggled, spoke “with a roguish smile,” used colloquial expressions, calling, for example, Bezdomny a “pig liar,” and falsely complaining to the barman of the Variety Theater Sokov: “Oh, the bastard people in Moscow!” and tearfully begging on his knees: “Don’t destroy the orphan.” However, in the final text of the novel, Woland became different, “majestic and regal,” close to the tradition of Byron and Goethe, Lermontov and Mikhail Vrubel, who illustrated him.

Woland gives different characters, in contact with him, different explanations for the purposes of his stay in Moscow. He tells Berlioz and Bezdomny that he has come to study the recovered manuscripts of Herbert of Avrilak, a medieval scholar who, even after becoming Pope Sylvester II in 999, combined his duties with an interest in white, or natural, magic, as opposed to black magic. aimed at benefiting people and not harming them. In the 1929–1930 edition, Woland directly called himself a specialist in white magic, like Herbert of Avrilak (in the final text we are talking about black magic). To the employees of the Variety Theater and the manager Nikanor Ivanovich Bosom, Satan explains his visit with the intention of performing a session of black (in early editions - white) magic. After the scandalous session, Satan tells the barman of the Variety Theater Sokov that he simply wanted “to see the Muscovites en masse, and the most convenient way to do this was in the theater.” Margarita Koroviev-Fagot informs that the purpose of the visit of Woland and his retinue to Moscow is to hold a ball, whose hostess must certainly bear the name Margarita and be of royal blood. According to the assistant of the “foreign professor”, out of one hundred and twenty-one Margaritas, no one is suitable except the heroine of the novel.

Woland has many faces, as befits the devil, and in conversations with different people he puts on different masks and gives completely different answers about the goals of his mission. Meanwhile, all the above versions serve only to disguise the true intention - the extraction from Moscow of the brilliant Master and his beloved, as well as the manuscript of the novel about Pontius Pilate. The session of black magic itself was partly needed by the devil so that Margarita, having heard about what happened at the Variety Theater, would already be prepared to meet his messenger Azazello. At the same time, Woland’s devilish omniscience is completely preserved: he and his people are well aware of both the past and future lives of those with whom they come into contact, they also know the text of the Master’s novel, which literally coincides with the “Woland gospel”, the very thing that was told to the unlucky writers at the Patriarch's. It is no coincidence that Azazello, when meeting Margarita in the Alexander Garden, quotes her a fragment of the novel about Pontius Pilate, which ultimately prompts the Master’s beloved to agree to go to the powerful “foreigner.” Woland's surprise when, after the ball, he “learns” from the Master the theme of his novel is just another mask. The actions of the devil and his retinue in Moscow are subordinated to one goal - a meeting with the creator of the novel about Yeshua Ha-Nozri and Pontius Pilate and with his beloved to determine their fate.

The appearance of Satan and his people at the Patriarchal Palace was given by Bulgakov in the tradition of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. Woland, Koroviev-Fagot and Behemoth literally “weaved out of thin air.” Here I recall the feuilleton “The Capital in a Notebook,” where there is a specific reference to a literary source: “... A policeman was woven out of thin air. “Positively, it was something Hoffmannian,” (the scene at the Patriarch’s echoes Hoffmann’s novel “Elixirs of Satan.” Here the narrator, the publisher of notes compiled by the Capuchin monk Medard, invites the reader to share his company on a stone bench under the shade of plane trees: “They looked with inexplicable languor if only you and I could go to the blue, whimsical masses of the mountains." He claims that "our, as we usually call them, dreams and fantasies are, perhaps, only a symbolic revelation of the essence of the mysterious threads that stretch through our entire life and tie together all of our lives. manifestations; I thought that anyone who imagines that this knowledge gives him the right to forcibly break the secret threads and grapple with the gloomy force that rules over us is doomed to death.”

Woland warns Berlioz about these “mysterious threads” over which a person has no control: “... Someone who until recently believed that he controls something suddenly finds himself lying motionless in a wooden box, and everyone around him, realizing that there is no point in lying there is no more, they burn it in the oven. And it happens even worse: a person has just decided to go to Kislovodsk... a seemingly trivial matter, but he cannot do this either, because for some unknown reason he suddenly slips and gets hit by a tram! Are you really going to say that he managed this on his own? Isn’t it more correct to think that someone completely different dealt with him?” The chairman of MASSOLIT denies the existence of both God and the devil, and the living things themselves, which do not fit into the framework of theories, the foundations of life. In addition, Berlioz, not accustomed to unusual phenomena, did not understand who was in front of him at the Patriarch's.

Hoffmann’s narrator admonishes the reader: “You are completely filled with mysterious awe, inspired by the miracles of lives and legends embodied here; you already imagine that all this is really happening before your eyes - and you are ready to believe everything. In such a mood, you would begin to read Medard’s story, and you would hardly consider the strange visions of this monk to be just an incoherent play of a heated imagination ... "

In “The Master and Margarita” the events begin “at the hour of an unprecedentedly hot sunset”, “when the sun, having heated Moscow, fell in a dry fog somewhere beyond the Garden Ring.” Before the appearance of Woland, Berlioz is overcome by “inexplicable languor” - an unconscious premonition of imminent death. In the 1929 edition, Woland said that “the daughter of the night Moira has spun her thread,” hinting that the “mysterious thread” of the fate of the chairman of MASSOLIT would soon be interrupted.

In a letter to Elena Sergeevna on August 6–7, 1938, Bulgakov said: “I accidentally came across an article about Hoffmann’s fiction. I'm saving it for you, knowing that it will amaze you as much as it did me. I'm right in The Master and Margarita! You understand what this consciousness is worth - I’m right!” The discussion here was about the article by literary scholar and critic Israel Vladimirovich Mirimsky, “Hoffmann’s Social Fiction,” published in No. 5 of the magazine “Literary Studies” for 1938 (this issue is preserved in the Bulgakov archive). The writer was amazed at how applicable the characteristics of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann's work were to The Master and Margarita.

S.A. Ermolinsky recalled how the writer played a prank on him with Mirimsky’s article: “One day he came to me and solemnly announced:

Wrote! You see, they wrote it!

And from a distance he showed me an issue of a magazine, one of the articles of which in a number of places was thickly underlined by him in red and blue pencil.

“The general public willingly read him, but the highest critics remained arrogantly silent regarding him,” Bulgakov quoted and, moving from one excerpt to another, continued: “Names are attached to his name and become current, such as spiritualist, visionary and, finally, , just crazy... But he had an unusually sober and practical mind, and foresaw the rumors of his future critics. At first glance, his creative system seems unusually contradictory, the nature of the images ranges from monstrous grotesque to the norm of realistic generalization. He has the devil walking through the streets of the city...” - Here Bulgakov even stretched out his arms in delight: - What a critic! It was as if he had read my novel! Don't you think so? - And he continued: “He turns art into a battle tower, from which the artist carries out satirical reprisals against everything ugly in reality...” Bulgakov read, slightly changing the text...”

According to Ermolinsky, this article “contained remarks that piercingly offended” Bulgakov. In the work of Mirimsky, Bulgakov was also attracted by the definition of the style of the German romantic. The writer noted the following words: “Hoffmann’s style can be defined as real-fantastic. The combination of the real with the fantastic, the fictional with the real...” Bulgakov clearly correlated this statement by Mirimsky with his Master: “... If a genius makes peace with reality, then this leads him into the swamp of philistinism, the “honest” bureaucratic way of thinking; if he does not fully surrender to reality, he ends in premature death or madness” (the latter option is realized in the fate of Bulgakov’s hero). Bulgakov also emphasized the idea that “Hoffmann’s laughter is distinguished by the extraordinary mobility of its forms, it ranges from good-natured humor of compassion to embittered destructive satire, from harmless caricature to cynically ugly grotesque.” Indeed, in “The Master and Margarita” the devil comes out onto the streets of Moscow, and good-natured laughter at worthy of compassion by the audience at a session of black magic at the Variety Theater, where the severed head of the thoughtless entertainer Georges Bengalsky eventually returns safely to its place, is combined with a satirical denunciation of the Soviet literary workshop, the head of which disappears without a trace.

Woland is the bearer of fate, and here Bulgakov is in line long tradition Russian literature, which linked fate, fate, fate not with God, but with the devil. This was most clearly demonstrated by Lermontov in the story “Fatalist” from “A Hero of Our Time.” There, Lieutenant Vulich argues with Pechorin, “can a person arbitrarily dispose of his life, or is a fatal moment assigned to each of us in advance,” and as proof he shoots himself with a pistol, but it misfires. Pechorin predicts Vulich's imminent death, and that same night he learns that the lieutenant was hacked to death by a drunken Cossack, who had previously chased a pig and cut it in two. The maddened killer locked himself in the hut, and Pechorin, deciding to try his luck, bursts into his room. The Cossack's bullet tears off the epaulette, but the brave officer grabs the killer by the hands, and those who burst in after him disarm him.

However, Pechorin still does not become a fatalist: “I like to doubt everything: this disposition does not interfere with the decisiveness of character; on the contrary, as for me, I always move forward more boldly when I don’t know what awaits me.” Here, as it were, a continuation of the Gospel parable about demons that, having emerged from a man (“possessed”), entered a herd of pigs. The flock then jumped off a cliff and died (Luke 8:26–39). Having cut the pig, the Cossack released the demon from it, which entered him, made him insane (possessed) and pushed him to senseless murder. It is the demon who demands the soul of the fatalist Vulich, when in response to the lieutenant’s question: “Who are you, brother, looking for?” the Cossack answers: “You!” - and kills the unfortunate man. Thus, Lermontov tells us that the hand of fate that brings death to man is controlled not by God, but by the devil. God gives free will in order to ward off the devil’s fate through his bold, decisive and calculating actions, as Pechorin succeeds in the finale of “The Fatalist.”

In Bulgakov, Woland, like the previously infernal Rokk in “ Fatal eggs", personifies the fate punishing Berlioz, Sokov and others who violate the norms of Christian morality. This is the first devil in world literature who punishes for non-observance of the commandments of Christ.

Woland has another prototype - from Bulgakov's contemporary version of Faust. Written by E.L. Mindlin “The Beginning of the Novel “The Return of Doctor Faustus”” (there was no continuation; after World War II, Emilius Lvovich wrote new edition of this novel, still unpublished) was published in 1923 in the same second volume of the anthology “Renaissance” as the story “Notes on Cuffs” (a copy of the almanac is preserved in Bulgakov’s archive). In The Return of Doctor Faust, the action takes place at the beginning of the 20th century, and Faust, who in many ways served as the prototype for the Master of the early edition of The Master and Margarita, lives in Moscow, from where he later leaves for Germany. There he meets Mephistopheles, on whose business card it is written in italics in black and white: “Professor Mephistopheles.” In the same way, Woland’s business card says: “Professor Woland.”

Woland’s portrait largely repeats the portrait of Mephistopheles from Mindlin’s novel: “The most remarkable thing about her figure was her face, and the most remarkable thing about her face was her nose, for it had an unusually precise shape and is not very common among noses. This shape was a rectangular triangle, the hypotenuse upward, and the right angle was above the upper lip, which was in no way combined with the lower lip, but hung on its own... The gentleman had extremely thin legs in black (whole, without darning) stockings, shod with black velvet shoes, and the same cloak on the shoulders. It seemed to Faust that the color of the master’s eyes was constantly changing.” In the same operatic guise, Woland appears before visitors to the “bad apartment”, and his face retains the same irregularities as Mindlinov’s Mephistopheles, as well as the different eye colors that were present in Myshlaevsky’s “The White Guard”: “The right one with green sparkles , like a Ural gem, and the left one is dark..."

For Mindlin, Mephistopheles is his surname, and the name of the professor from Prague (the same foreigner in Germany as Woland in Russia) is Conrad-Christopher (“Christopher” in Greek means “Christ-bearer”). In the 1929 edition, Woland’s name was Theodor (“God’s gift” in Greek), and this name was on his business card. But in The Return of Doctor Faustus, Mephistopheles is not connected with God and invites Faustus to participate in organizing the collective suicide of humanity, for which they must return to Russia. Perhaps the suicide was referring to the First World War. A hint of the October Revolution cannot be ruled out. In Bulgakov, Woland is closely connected with Yeshua Ha-Nozri, who decides the fate of the Master and Margarita, but asks Woland to carry out this decision.

This “complementarity” of God and the devil goes back, in particular, to Heinrich Heine’s “Travel Pictures.” It allegorizes the struggle between the Conservative and Liberal parties in Great Britain as a struggle between God and the devil. Heine ironically notes that “The Lord God created too little money” - this explains the existence of world evil. Woland imaginarily makes up for the imaginary lack of money, presenting the crowd with chervonets, which later turn into simple pieces of paper. “Travel Pictures” paints a vivid picture of how God borrowed money from the devil at the creation of the world on the security of the Universe. As a result, the Lord does not prevent his creditor from “spreading confusion and evil. But the devil, for his part, is again very interested in ensuring that the world does not completely perish, since in this case he will lose the pledge, so he is careful not to over-extend, and the Lord God, who is also not stupid and understands well that The devil’s selfishness contains a secret guarantee for him, often going so far as to transfer him dominion over the whole world, that is, he instructs the devil to form a ministry.” Then “Samiel takes over the infernal host, Beelzebub becomes chancellor, Vitzliputzli - secretary of state, old grandmother receives colonies, etc. These allies then begin to manage in their own way, and since, despite the evil will, in the depths of their hearts, for their own benefit, they are forced to strive for the world's good, they reward themselves for this compulsion by The most vile means are used for good purposes.”

In the early edition of Bulgakov’s novel, the chancellor of evil spirits was mentioned, and in the preparatory materials for the novel, the names of various demons and Satan were copied from M.A. Orlov’s book “The History of Relations between Man and the Devil,” including those mentioned by Heine Samiel, Beelzebub, as well as “ Addramalech is the great chancellor of hell." One of the demons named in “Travel Pictures” - Vitsliputzli - was preserved in the final text of the novel, where he turns out to be closely connected with Koroviev-Fagot.

In Heine, otherworldly forces are forced to strive for good goals, but use the most unsuitable means for this. The German romantic laughed at modern politicians who proclaim a desire for the world's good, but in their daily activities they look very unsympathetic. In Bulgakov, Woland, like Goethe’s hero, while desiring evil, must do good. To get the Master with his novel, he punishes the opportunist writer Berlioz, the traitor Baron Meigel and many petty crooks like the thief-bartender Sokov or the grabber-house manager Bosogo. However, the desire to give the author of the novel about Pontius Pilate to the power of otherworldly forces is only a formal evil, since it is done with the blessing and even on the direct instructions of Yeshua, who personifies the forces of good. However, like Heine, good and evil in Bulgakov are ultimately created by the hands of the person himself. Woland and his retinue only give the opportunity to manifest those vices and virtues that are inherent in people. For example, the cruelty of the crowd towards Georges Bengalsky at the Variety Theater is replaced by mercy, and the initial evil, when they wanted to tear off the unfortunate entertainer’s head, becomes a necessary condition to show goodness - pity for the artist who lost his head.

Bulgakov could also have come across the idea of ​​the “good devil” in A.V. Amfiteatrov’s book “The Devil in Everyday Life, Legend and Literature of the Middle Ages.” It says:

“It is impossible not to notice that the concept and image of an evil spirit, different from good ones, is defined in biblical myth-making no earlier than the captivity (we are talking about the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. - B.S.). In the Book of Job, Satan still appears among the angels of heaven and is by no means recommended as the sworn enemy of God and the destroyer of his creation. This is only a skeptical spirit, a spirit of little faith, a future Mephistopheles, whose closeness to human doubt and protest against fate will subsequently seduce so many poets and philosophers. His power is still by proxy from the deity and, therefore, of the same character with him: it is only a service, flowing from the highest will. In Job's troubles he is nothing more than a tool. The deity, with his own lips, assumes responsibility for the necessity of the incomprehensible and sudden suffering of the righteous in the famous chapter, which even made our reasoner Lomonosov a poet. The Devil of the Book of Job is a skeptic who thinks ill of man and envies him in the face of the Supreme Holiness, but, in the end, he is only a servant on these kinds of commissions, which the Supreme Holiness cannot, so to speak, directly touch, for this would degrade the idea her perfection. This is heaven's factotum on evil deeds. The role of such a factotum is even more expressive in the famous episode of the Book of Kings about the spirit who received an order from God to destroy King Ahab by deceit. This spirit does not even bear the nickname of evil, dark, devil, etc. He is an angel, like everyone else, like that terrible angel who in one night commits the necessary countless massacres: the beating of the firstborn of Egypt, the extermination of Sennacherib’s hordes, etc.”

In Bulgakov, Woland also fulfills an order, or rather a request, for Yeshua to take the Master and Margarita to himself. Satan in Bulgakov's novel is the servant of Ha-Notsri "on commissions of this kind that the Highest Holiness cannot... directly touch." No wonder Woland remarks to Levi Matvey: “It’s not difficult for me to do anything.” The high ethical ideal of Yeshua can only be preserved in the supermundane; in the earthly life of the brilliant Master, only Satan and his retinue, who are not bound by this ideal in their actions, can save him from death. A creative person, like the Master (like Goethe's Faust), always belongs not only to God, but also to the devil. Amphitheaters paid special attention to the apocryphal Book of Enoch, where “in particular... in its most ancient part the idea of ​​the closeness of the devil with man is first heard, and his guilt is portrayed as apostasy from the deity towards humanity, a betrayal of heaven for the earth. Enoch's devils are angels who fell through love for the daughters of men and allowed themselves to be shackled by matter and sensuality. This myth... carries a deep idea - the absence in nature of creatures by their very origin that are evil and demonic; such beings, that is, thoughts and actions in images, are the fruits of human evolution.”

In The Master and Margarita, Woland and the demons subordinate to him exist as a reflection of human vices, manifested in contact with Behemoth, Koroviev-Fagot, Azazello. A.V. Amfitheatrov, in his book about the devil, quotes a German popular print story about Faust, where he “conducts a long theological conversation with Mephistopheles. The demon talks very thoroughly and truthfully about the beauty in which his master Lucifer was clothed in heaven and which he lost for his pride in the fall of the rebellious angels; about the temptations of people by devils; about hell and its terrible torments.

F aust If you were not the devil, but a man, what would you do to please God and be loved by people?

M e f i s t o f e l (grinning). If I were a person like you, I would bow before God and pray to Him until my last breath, and would do everything in my power so as not to offend Him and not cause His indignation. I would keep His teaching and law. I would call upon, praise, and honor only Him and, through this, would deserve, after death, eternal bliss.”

Woland is just as respectful of Yeshua, allowing himself to mock only his limited and narrow-minded student Levi Matthew. Amphitheaters also mentions “a wonderful Little Russian story about a devil who, having fallen in love with a young girl, who became a witch not of her own accord, but by inheritance from her mother, not only helps this poor woman get divorced, but also sells herself as a sacrifice for her to her vengeful comrades... Thus, people's trait Even the highest level of Christian love and the readiness to lay down one’s soul for one’s friends turns out to be accessible. Moreover, there are devils whose good qualities are significantly superior to people, and the spectacle of human meanness and cruelty leads them into sincere indignation and horror.” Woland and his retinue, like Amfitheatrov’s “good devils,” punish evil, punishing Berlioz, Poplavsky, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeev, Aloysius Mogarych and others, far from the best representatives of the Moscow population.

According to Amfiteatrov, “the most respectable, sweet and amiable of the devils who ever crawled out of hell into the light, of course, is Astaroth” from Luigi Pulci’s knightly parody poem “The Great Blink” (1482). Here good magician Malagigi, in order to help Roland (I almost made a mistake - Woland) and other paladin knights, calls the devil Astaroth, who “let slip from his tongue that God the Son does not know everything that is known to God the Father.” Malagigi is puzzled and asks why.

Then the devil makes a new, long, very long speech, in which he very learnedly and quite orthodoxly talks about the Trinity, about the creation of the world, about the fall of the angels.

Malagigi notes that the punishment of fallen angels does not really fit in with the endless goodness of God. This objection leads the demon into furious indignation: “It’s not true! God has always been equally good and fair to all his creatures. The fallen have no one to complain about but themselves.” To the knight Rinaldo, Astaroth explains “the darkest tenets of faith,” and insists that

Only the faith of Christians is right.

Their law is holy and just and firmly established.

Upon arrival in Roncesvalles, Astaroth says goodbye to the knights with words that are completely justified by them:

Believe me: there is no corner in the world without nobility,

It exists in hell, among our ugliness.

Rinaldo regrets the separation from Astaroth, as if he were losing his own brother in him.

“Yes,” he says, “there is nobility, friendship, and delicacy in hell!”

Probably in connection with Pulci's poem as narrated by Amfitheatrov, Bulgakov, in the preparatory materials for the early edition of The Master and Margarita, left the name Astaroth as one of the possible names for the future Woland. Satan in Bulgakov's novel treats Christianity with respect, does not fight against it, but performs those functions that Yeshua and his disciple cannot perform, which is why they are entrusted to otherworldly forces. In relation to the Master and Margarita, Woland and his retinue behave nobly and quite gallantly.

Bulgakov also took into account Amphitheatrov’s interpretation of the following passage from Goethe’s “Faust”: “What the devil is in the role of a preacher of morality in worldly wisdom, Mephistopheles showed in Goethe’s “Faust,” devilishly fooling a student who came to Faust for teaching and advice on choosing a career... Following the devil’s advice, the student - in the second part of “Faust” - turned into such a vulgar “privat-docent” that the devil himself I felt ashamed: what a “professor by appointment” he brought out.” In “The Master and Margarita,” the god-fighting poet Ivan Bezdomny turns from a student (“student”) of Berlioz into a student of Woland and the Master (whose prototype was Faust). Following the advice of Satan, in the finale he really turns into the self-confident “most vulgar professor” Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, unable to repeat the feat of the brilliant Master.

The Amphitheater's "Devil" lists the definitions of Satan given in the Middle Ages: "the son of sorrow, mystery, the shadow of sin, suffering and horror."

A.V.Amphiteatrov created his “Devil” in 1911, even before the First World War and October revolution in Russia. Before the First World War, M.A. Orlov’s book was also written. Bulgakov was working on “The Master and Margarita” already when the dawn of socialism had risen over Russia and all the delights of the new system became obvious, right down to political processes, reminiscent of medieval witch trials (participants in one of these trials are present at Satan’s Great Ball). Yeshua Ha-Nozri speaks about the kingdom of truth and justice, but Pontius Pilate interrupts him with a cry: “It will never come!” When was Bulgakov's last novel written? Soviet Union, like no other country before, represented a kingdom of fear renewed by socialism, and therefore it is quite appropriate that the devil should appear in Moscow. The Moscow scenes of “The Master and Margarita” take place exactly nineteen centuries after the execution of Christ, and Bulgakov is not at all as optimistic as A.V. Amphiteatrov, A. Graf, M.A. Orlov or the American Charles Lee, on whose “History of the Inquisition” relied on the author of “The History of Man’s Relations with the Devil” and looked at the disappearance of the social roots of mysticism.

The complementarity of good and evil is most fully revealed in Woland’s words addressed to Matthew Levi, who refused to wish health to the “spirit of evil and the lord of shadows”: “You pronounced your words as if you do not recognize shadows, as well as evil. Would you be so kind as to think about the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows come from objects and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But there are shadows from trees and from living creatures. Don't you want to rip it all off? Earth, having swept away all the trees and all living things because of your fantasy of enjoying the naked light? You are stupid". Here, in addition to Heine’s Travel Pictures, Anatole France’s philosophical treatise “The Garden of Epicurus” comes to mind, which states: “Evil is necessary. If it did not exist, then there would be no good. Evil the only reason existence of good. Without death there would be no courage, without suffering there would be no compassion.

What would self-sacrifice and self-denial be good for in the context of universal happiness? Is it possible to understand virtue without knowing vice, love and beauty, without knowing hatred and ugliness? Only to evil and suffering do we owe the fact that our earth can be inhabited and life is worth living. Therefore, there is no need to complain about the devil. He created at least half of the universe. And this half merges so tightly with the other that if you touch the first, the blow will cause equal harm to the other. With every vice eradicated, the corresponding virtue disappears.”

This place in the Garden of Epicurus was obviously written not without the influence of Travel Pictures. However, it has another much more exotic source, known, apparently, to Heine, but certainly not known to Bulgakov - the novel of the scandalously famous and highly revered Marquis de Sade by Anatole France, “New Justine,” where, together with Voltaire, the author rhetorically asked:

“...Don’t people with a more philosophical mindset have the right to say, following the angel Ezrad from “Zadig” (Voltaire’s story “Zadig, or Fate.” - B.S.) that there is no such evil that does not give rise to good, and that, based on this, they can do evil whenever they please, since it is essentially nothing more than one of the ways of doing good? And will they not have reason to add to this, that in a general sense it makes no difference whether a man is good or evil; that if misfortune pursues virtue, and prosperity everywhere accompanies vice, since all things are equal in the eyes of nature, it is infinitely wiser to take a place among evildoers who prosper, rather than among virtuous people who are destined to fail?”

Voltaire, to whom de Sade referred, still put good above evil, although he admitted that there are much more villains in the world than righteous ones: “Well,” asked Zadig, “it means that it is necessary that there be crimes and disasters and that they were the lot good people? “The criminals,” answered Ezrad, “are always unhappy, and they exist to test the few righteous people scattered throughout the earth. And there is no evil that does not give rise to good.” “What,” said Zadig, “if there were no evil at all and there was only good?” “Then,” answered Ezrad, “this world would be another world, the connection of events would determine another wise order. But this other, perfect order is possible only where the supreme being eternally resides, to whom evil does not dare to approach. This creature created millions of worlds, none of which are like the other. This infinite variety is one of the attributes of his immeasurable power. There are no two leaves of wood on the earth, no two luminaries in the infinite space of the sky that would be the same, and everything that you see on the small atom on which you were born must be in its place and in its time, according to the immutable laws of the all-encompassing. People think that this child fell into the water by accident, that that house burned down just as accidentally, but there is no chance - everything in this world is either a test, or punishment, or reward, or foresight.”

Voltaire, who stylized his work as an “eastern story” from “Persian life”, took the dualism of good and evil from the ancient Persian religion - Zoroastrianism, where the god of light Ormuzd, or Ahuramazda, mentioned in the story, is in constant complex interaction with the god of darkness Ahriman, or Angramainyu. Both of them personify the two “eternal principles” of nature. Ormuzd cannot be responsible for the evil that is generated by Ahriman and is fundamentally irremovable in this world, and the struggle between them is the source of life. Voltaire places the righteous under the protection of a supreme being - the creator of another perfect world. De Sade made good and evil equal in nature. A person, as he proves in “New Justine” and his other novels, can be persuaded to a good beginning not thanks to his original predisposition to goodness, but only by instilling an aversion to the horrors of evil. Almost all the heroes who are ready to do evil to achieve their own pleasure die in de Sade’s novels. France, like de Sade, excluded the supreme being from Voltaire’s concept, and equated good and evil in their meaning. The same equality of good and evil is defended by Woland in Bulgakov, who, unlike Voltaire, was not a rigid determinist, so Woland punishes Berlioz precisely for neglecting the random.

Woland fulfills the requests of Yeshua Ha-Nozri - thus in an original way Bulgakov realizes the complementarity of good and evil principles. This idea, in all likelihood, was suggested by a passage about the Yezidis from the work of the Italian missionary Maurizio Garzoni, preserved among the materials for Pushkin’s “Journey to Arzrum.” It was noted there that “Yazidis think that God commands, but entrusts the execution of his commands to the power of the devil.” Yeshua, through Levi Matthew, asks Woland to take the Master and Margarita with him. From the point of view of Ga-Notsri and his only student, the reward given to the Master is somewhat flawed - “he did not deserve light, he deserved peace.” And from Woland’s point of view, peace surpasses “naked light”, because it leaves the opportunity for creativity, which is what Satan convinces the author of the novel about Pontius Pilate: “...Why chase in the footsteps of what is already over?” (i.e. continue an already completed novel).

Woland largely expresses the ideas of Immanuel Kant in the novel. Of Kant's works, the closest parallels in the text of The Master and Margarita can be found with the treatise The End of All Things. Here the philosopher asserted: “There is such an expression - it is used mainly by pious people who say about a dying person that he departs from time into eternity. This expression loses its meaning if by eternity we mean infinite time; in this case, a person would never leave the boundaries of time, but would only move from one time to another. Consequently, we must have in mind the end of all time, despite the fact that the duration of human existence will be continuous, but this duration (if we consider human existence as a magnitude) is thought of as a magnitude completely incomparable with time (duratio noumenon), and we can have about it only a negative concept. Such a thought contains something frightening, bringing us closer to the edge of the abyss, from where there is no return for those who plunge into it... and at the same time it attracts us, because we are unable to take our frightened gaze from it... It is monstrously sublime; partly due to the darkness that envelops her, in which the power of imagination operates more powerfully than in daylight. Finally, amazingly it is also intertwined with the ordinary human mind, therefore, in one form or another, at all times it can be found among all peoples who embark on the path of reflection.”

Kant believed that people are waiting for the end of the world because the existence of the world, from the point of view human mind, “has value only insofar as rational beings correspond in it to the ultimate goal of their existence; if the latter turns out to be unattainable, then created being loses its meaning in their eyes, like a performance without a denouement or plan.” The philosopher believed that the end of the world inspires fear due to the prevailing opinion “about the hopeless depravity of the human race, the terrible end of which seems to the overwhelming majority of people to be the only one consistent with the highest wisdom and justice.” Kant explained the anxious anticipation of the Day of Judgment by the fact that “in the course of the progress of the human race, the culture of talent, skill and taste (and, as a result, luxury) naturally overtakes the development of morality, and this circumstance is the most painful and dangerous for both morality and physical welfare , because needs are growing much faster than the means to satisfy them. But the moral inclinations of humanity, which always trail behind... someday, nevertheless (in the presence of a wise ruler of the world) will overtake it, especially since in its hasty running it now and then creates obstacles for itself and often stumbles. Based on the clear evidence of the superiority of morality in our era compared with previous times, we should cherish the hope that the Day of Judgment, signifying the end of all things on earth, will rather come as an ascension to heaven than as a chaos-like descent into hell.”

In Bulgakov, the problem of time and eternity, the question of the Day of Judgment are connected primarily with the image of Woland. At a session of black magic at the Variety Theater, Satan comes to the conclusion that the Moscow public has changed little over the centuries: “Well... they are people like people. They love money, but this has always been the case... Humanity loves money, no matter what it is made of, whether leather, paper, bronze or gold.

Well, they are frivolous... well, well... and mercy sometimes knocks on their hearts... ordinary people... In general, they resemble the previous ones ... the housing problem only spoiled them ... "The “depravity of humanity" is here reduced to the “housing question”, which was very relevant for Bulgakov’s Moscow, and the desire for luxury, which, according to Kant, is one of the signs of the imminent end of the world, turned into a focus with newfangled Parisian toilets, after the session, like Woland's ducats, turned into nothing. Thus, the denouement of the performance at the Variety Theater is moved beyond its scope. Bulgakov is not as optimistic as great philosopher, looked at the moral progress of humanity in the present and future, stating that since the emergence of Christianity, little has changed for the better. And the miracles demonstrated to gullible viewers by Koroviev do not leave a trace and are subsequently attributed to the power of hypnotic suggestion, in accordance with Kant’s thought: “...Would there be a lack of signs and wonders where the imagination is excited by continuous expectation?”

The author of The End of All Things criticized the “monstrous system” of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism. In this system, the highest good “should represent nothingness, that is, the consciousness of dissolving oneself in the bosom of the deity through merging with it and thereby destroying one’s personality; Chinese philosophers, closing their eyes, in a dark room create a premonition of such a state, thinking and feeling their nothingness. Hence the pantheism (of the Tibetans and other eastern peoples), and the Spinozism that arose as a result of its metaphysical sublimation; both of them are close relatives of the ancient doctrine of emanation human souls from the deity (and their eventual absorption by the latter). And all this is only so that people can finally enjoy the eternal peace that will come with the blissful end of all things - a concept that marks the cessation of rational activity and all thinking in general.”

For Bulgakov, the Master is an “intellectual inhabitant of the earth”, awarded eternal peace during the transition from earthly time to eternity. It is no coincidence that it was endowed, especially in the 1936 version, external resemblance with Kant. Then Woland said to the Master in the finale: “The candles will burn, you will hear quartets, the rooms of the house will smell like apples. In a powdered braid, in an old familiar caftan, tapping your cane, you will walk, stroll and think.” Here the portrait of the hero in the last shelter clearly goes back to the portrait of Kant in Heinrich Heine’s book “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany”: “He lived a mechanically measured, almost abstract life of a bachelor in a quiet, remote street of Konigsberg... I don’t think that the big clock on there Council they performed their daily external duties more dispassionately and evenly than their fellow countryman Immanuel Kant. Getting up, morning coffee, writing, lecturing, lunch, walking - everything took place at a certain hour, and the neighbors knew for sure that it was half past three, when Immanuel Kant in his gray frock coat, with a reed cane in his hands, left the house and headed to a small linden alley, which in memory of him is still called the Alley of Philosophy. Eight times he walked it back and forth every day at all times of the year, and when it was cloudy or gray clouds foreshadowed rain, his servant, old Lampe, appeared, following him with anxious solicitude, with a long umbrella under his arm, as a symbol of providence. What a strange contrast between this man’s outer life and his destructive, world-shattering thought.”

In full accordance with Kant’s statement that “those principles of our way of life that guide us right up to our death... will remain the same after death,” Woland says to Berlioz’s temporarily revived head: “You have always been an ardent preacher of the theory that after cutting off head, life in a person ceases, he turns into ash and goes into oblivion. I am pleased to inform you, in the presence of my guests, although they serve as proof of a completely different theory (about posthumous otherness. - B.S.), that your theory is both solid and witty. However, all theories are worth one another. Among them there is one according to which everyone will be given according to their faith. May it come true! You are going into oblivion, but I will be happy to drink from the cup into which you are turning into being!”

Bulgakov did not believe in Kant’s “wise ruler of the world”, under whom moral qualities humanity will eventually be overcome by the desire to satisfy ever-increasing needs.

Woland, like Yeshua, understands that only the devoted but dogmatic Levi Matthew, and not the brilliant Master, is able to enjoy the “naked light”. It is Satan, with his skepticism and doubt, who sees the world in all its contradictions (as a true artist sees it), who can best provide the main character with a worthy reward.

Woland’s words at the Variety Theater: “The townspeople have changed a lot... outwardly, I say, like the city itself, however. There’s nothing to say about the costumes, but these... what’s their name... trams, cars appeared... But, of course, I’m not so much interested in buses, telephones and other... equipment... but in a much more important question: have these townspeople changed internally? - are surprisingly consonant with the thoughts of one of the founders of German existentialism, Martin Heidegger, expressed in his work “The Source of Artistic Creation,” which Bulgakov certainly did not read: “Airplanes and radios, however, are now among the closest things, but when we think about the last things, we remember something else. The last things are Death and Judgment." In Bulgakov, Woland literally revives the Master's burned novel; a product of artistic creativity, preserved only in the head of the creator, materializes again, turns into a tangible thing.

These ideas were literally in the air in the 30s. One can, for example, recall the following entry by Ilya Ilf in his notebooks: “The main thing in science fiction novels was the radio. With him, the happiness of mankind was expected. There’s a radio, but there’s no happiness.”

Woland, unlike Yeshua Ha-Nozri, considers all people not good, but evil. The purpose of his mission in Moscow is precisely to identify the evil principle in man. The devil and his retinue provoke Muscovites to commit unseemly acts, convincing them of complete impunity, and then they themselves parodically punish them.

An important literary prototype for Woland was “Someone in Gray, Called He” from Leonid Andreev’s play “A Man’s Life.” In the prologue of the play, Someone in Gray, symbolizing Fate, Rock, as well as the “prince of darkness,” says about Man: “Uncontrollably drawn by time, he will inevitably go through all the stages of human life, from bottom to top, from top to bottom. Limited by vision, he will never see the next step to which his unsteady foot is already rising; limited by knowledge, he will never know what the coming day, the coming hour or minute brings to him. And in his blind ignorance, tormented by forebodings, excited by hopes and fear, he will obediently complete the circle of iron destiny.” Woland predicts the death of “limited knowledge” Berlioz, tormented alarming premonitions, and provides the “last refuge” to the “limited vision” Master, who is not given the opportunity to see the light of Divine Revelation and meet Yeshua Ha-Nozri. In the 1936 version, Woland warned him: “You will not rise to the heights...”

Woland’s words “Manuscripts do not burn” and the resurrection from the ashes of a “novel within a novel” - the Master’s narrative about Pontius Pilate - is an illustration of the well-known Latin proverb: “Verba volant, scripta manent”. It is interesting that it was often used by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of Bulgakov’s favorite authors. Translated, it sounds like this: “Words fly away, but what is written remains.” The fact that the name of Satan in Bulgakov’s novel practically coincides with the word “volant” is most likely not accidental. It is no coincidence that a noise similar to the flapping of bird wings occurs during the chess game between Woland and Behemoth after the latter’s scholastic speech about syllogisms. Empty words actually did not leave a trace and were needed by Behemoth only to distract the attention of those present from the fraudulent combination with their king. With the help of Woland, the Master’s novel is destined to have a long life.