Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

Koroviev explains Margarita's role to her: at the annual full-moon ball the hostess must be a woman named Margarita, and she must be locally born. Tonight she is the one who fits. It flatters her and binds her: she was not chosen by chance. The main condition is to endure the ball with royal dignity, single no one out, give everyone equal attention and warmth, and show neither fatigue nor fear. Whether her dearest wish is granted will depend on her endurance. So Bulgakov turns the ball into a test: the reward (the Master's return) is not given for nothing but for strength of spirit and mercy.

Ordinary apartment No. 50 suddenly holds ballrooms, colonnades, and staircases. Koroviev, with a chuckle, refers to “the fifth dimension”: for anyone familiar with it, stretching a room to any size is nothing. This is Bulgakov's signature device: joining the everyday and the impossible. Magic is not in some fairy-tale land but in a Moscow communal apartment. Endless room inside cramped Soviet living space is also subtle irony aimed at the “housing question,” which, Woland says, has spoiled Muscovites. Where people squabble over every square meter, the forces of evil throw open endless halls.

At their first meeting Woland, sick and weary, appears not as a cartoon devil but as a tired judge of the world. Telling details in his room: the living globe, which shows a real war being fought and people dying (on Woland's globe, evil is not abstract but concrete and bloody), and chess with living pieces, which he plays with Behemoth the cat, an image of someone “playing” with history and people. Here, too, the novel prepares a vital thought, one Woland will voice to Matthew Levi in chapter 29 (it echoes the “Faust” epigraph): in Woland's logic, light and shadow are linked sides of the living world; you cannot “strip the whole globe bare” of all shadows without destroying what casts them. Woland is not God's opponent but a necessary “part of the power”: the shadow that makes the light visible. This is why in the novel the “devil” does justice where earthly power is helpless.