Interesting passages and hidden meanings

The novel opens with an epigraph from Goethe's “Faust”: words addressed to Mephistopheles, and his reply that he is part of the power that always wants evil and always does good. This is not decoration but the key to the meaning of the whole book. Why this matters. The epigraph announces in advance that Bulgakov's devil is no crude villain. Woland will punish scoundrels, protect love, and restore justice where earthly power is helpless. Goethe's formula, “the power that does good while wanting evil,” is the formula of Woland himself. The name “Woland” also comes from “Faust”: in one scene Mephistopheles demands to be let through with a cry in which this name is heard (Junker Voland). Later Berlioz painfully tries to recall the name of the figure Goethe mentions, and cannot. So from the very first page Bulgakov links his Moscow to the German legend of a man's pact with the devil.

The action begins “one spring, at the hour of an unprecedentedly hot sunset” at Patriarch's Ponds. Notice the details that are easy to miss. — Abnormal heat and stifling air. This is a traditional sign of the approaching forces of evil, of “hellfire.” The heat is underlined by the apricot water that later gives the characters hiccups, and by the hot air that thickens into a figure. — A deserted path. In the very center of Moscow, suddenly not a soul: the space seems cleared for Woland's arrival. — The very name “Patriarch's.” It is deeply symbolic that, for a conversation about the absence of God, the devil picks a place whose name, “Patriarch's,” has a church meaning. These touches create an atmosphere in which the ordinary suddenly turns mystical. Bulgakov does not announce the miracle outright: he prepares the reader through small things.

Two men of letters, the editor Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz and the poet Ivan Bezdomny (his pen name means “Homeless”), are discussing an anti-religious poem. Berlioz is trying to convince the young poet that Jesus never existed as a person at all. This is a typical scene of Soviet atheism of the 1930s. Then a foreigner (Woland) steps in with a paradox: if there is no God, who governs human life and “the whole order of things on earth”? He reminds them of the five proofs of God's existence and of Kant's sixth, and promises a “seventh.” Then he names the exact date and circumstances of Berlioz's death: he will be beheaded, and his head will be cut off by “a Russian woman, a Komsomol girl” (a member of the Young Communist League). Why this matters. The whole novel is built as an answer to the godless: the devil proves that higher powers exist by the very fact of his presence. The logic is simple and terrible: if there is a devil, there is a God. Berlioz, sure that he controls his evening, will not live to the end of the day. Here, too, we first hear the motif that man is “suddenly mortal” and so cannot control anything.