The Book Cafe
Wonderful Woland! But is He Stalin, or the Devil Himself?
Since I absolutely love him, he’d better be the Devil!
In the reading of a good book, there’s a moment when you recognise you’re in safe hands with your storyteller, and you relax into the magic of the story. Meeting Woland in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was that moment for me.
Meet Woland
Woland appears in the opening chapter, ironically titled Never Talk To Strangers; ironic, because it’s Woland, the suspicious-looking foreigner, who inserts himself into Berlioz and Bezdomny’s conversation.
Imagine it.
The pair of writers are sitting on a park bench at Patriarch’s Ponds in Moscow. Berlioz, Bezdomny’s editor, is lecturing him about the lack of atheistic context in a poem about Jesus, one Berlioz commissioned Bezdomny to write. Woland approaches them, then butts into their debate — to argue against Immanuel Kant’s moral argument for God, and then to demonstrate the Seventh Proof!
(Now, Woland’s Seventh Proof (of God) is of interest to me, because when I was in my mind-opening teen years, it formed part of my personal conviction of the existence of God. I have since ditched all religious persuasion, but hope never…
