Watching Mikhail Lokshin’s film “The Master and Margarita” led me to some new thoughts about the novel, which for many decades I have considered the finest novel of the twentieth century.
The question: what does the Master — Bulgakov’s writer, or any other Master — need in order to fulfil his calling? He needs a Reader, of course, who binds him to the world of people; he needs a Woman, who brings his spiritual and physical worlds into harmony; he needs a refuge — a space and a time in which he can create. Is that all? It seems so. But why does a writer need Woland? Is he a chance visitor from another world who has unexpectedly called on the Master? It seems to me that Woland is no chance visitor but a figure as necessary to the Master as his Reader and his Woman. All readers are real people, with their own histories, characters, hopes, and sympathies and antipathies held in advance. Woland is not like that. He is the ideal reader, who reads not only the novel but the Master’s soul. Unlike the real Reader he is not envious, not malicious, does not seek to play along with the authorities, is not jealous, is not greedy. Every maker dreams of such a reader. As a rule the Master does not find such an interlocutor, and then an Aloisy Mogarych or a Baron Meigel appears… Recall Mandelstam: “A reader! An adviser! A doctor! On the thorny stair — a word with someone!” This is that very search for the “Hamburg reckoning” (and note that both that reckoning and its reckoner, Woland, are bound up with Germany).
So Woland is not a bird blown off course but an archetype, a necessary member of the maker’s closest circle. The Master, Margarita and Woland are not real beings but astonishing images created by Bulgakov, who closed the family quartet with himself.
