Who really rules the world? Can good people be free? Is it possible to make a deal with the devil and win? The cult book “Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov asks these questions. It was made into a TV miniseries and shown in Russia some time ago, to immense public interest. It’s a complicated story, which mixes together life in Moscow in the 1930s, Jerusalem from the times of the bible, and fantastic events which happen in other dimensions. The author wrote and rewrote it several times up until his death in 1940, since most of his other work had been banned, Bulgakov may not have expected this novel ever to be published.
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Of course, when a favourite book is made into a film, the first thing that people do is to compare it with images they have in their own minds from reading the book. Well – how do you imagine the devil? Probably everyone has their own idea. In the story too, it seems as though people who meet Woland (that’s the devil’s name in Master and Margarita) all get different impressions. The police take a description from one witness that says “he was small with gold teeth and a limp in his right leg” and another who says “very big, with platinum crowns and a limp in his left leg”. Everyone agreed that he was a well-dressed foreigner in a dark suit, dark-haired, clean-shaven, and a little over 40 years old.
In the TV series he is played by an older actor, over 60 with grey and white hair. This is a little strange because, in other ways, the TV version is very faithful to the book. Also it’s one of the criticisms which I have heard about the programme – that the devil should be more attractive, sexier. My theory about this is that the devil in a suit may still be a controversial image in Russia, especially if people think that the story might also contain an element of political satire.
The Bulgakov description sounds to me much more like the devil played by my favourite actor, Al Pacino, in the film “The Devil’s Advocate.” In that film, the devil is not a magician but the head of a mysterious law firm “Milton, Chadwick, Waters.” Like Woland, Pacino’s John Milton is an excellent linguist. We hear him speak to a passenger in the underground in Spanish , and later he holds a telephone conference quite convincingly in Korean and Russian. In Master and Margarita, people are sure that Woland is a foreigner. At the start of the story two characters are sitting on a park bench when they see him walk past. The first says he’s German, the second an Englishman - because he is wearing gloves even though it’s an unusually hot day in May. Woland seems foreign because he begins the conversation in such a formal and polite way:
“Please excuse me, we haven’t been introduced, but the subject of your learned discussion is so interesting that I…, would you mind if I sat down?”
He speaks with a slight accent but absolutely correctly.
That beginning became the start of the famous song by the Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil”… “Please allow me to introduce myself I’m a man of wealth and taste.” Mick Jagger sings this song from the devil’s point of view, as a figure always present in key moments of history: right up to the shooting of the Kennedy brothers. The chorus goes “What’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.” All three of these works explain evil in the same way, the devil’s game is making US do bad things…as John Milton says “I only set the stage. You pull your own strings.”
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