Alexander IvanovHere is what the artist himself writes about his work:
The epigraph to the novel was Goethe's lines from Faust: "So who are you, at last? I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good." Good and evil, day and night, light and shadow, black and white—they cannot exist without each other. It often happens that the forces of evil, without even wanting to, create good, and good is not always good. This theme is important and interesting in the work of any artist, be it a writer, a musician, or a painter.
One spring day, at the hour of an unusually hot sunset, two citizens appeared in Moscow, at the Patriarch's Ponds. Finding themselves in the shade of the slightly green linden trees, they first of all rushed to a brightly painted booth with the inscription Beer and Waters.
On his small head was a jockey's cap, and he wore a plaid, short, and likewise airy jacket... The citizen was a fathom tall, but narrow in the shoulders, impossibly thin, and his physiognomy, if I may draw your attention to it, was sneering.
Leading the arrested man from under the columns into the garden, Ratslayer took a scourge from the hands of a legionary who stood at the foot of a bronze statue and, not swinging hard, struck the arrested man on the shoulders.
A gust of moist warmth hit Ivan, and by the light of the coals smoldering in the column stove, he made out large troughs hanging on the wall, and a bathtub, all in black, terrible spots from chipped enamel. And so, in this bathtub stood a naked female citizen, all in soap and with a washcloth in her hands.
And exactly at midnight, in the first of them, something boomed, rang, rattled, and jumped. And immediately a thin male voice cried out desperately to the music: “Hallelujah!!” The famous Griboyedov jazz band had struck up. Faces covered in sweat seemed to light up, it seemed as if the painted horses on the ceiling had come to life, as if the lamps had become brighter, and suddenly, as if unleashed, both halls began to dance, and after them, the veranda also began to dance. The clatter of the golden cymbals in the jazz band sometimes drowned out the clatter of the dishes that the scullery maids were sending down an inclined plane to the kitchen. In a word, hell.
On the jeweler's pouf, in a sprawling pose, a third person was sprawled out—specifically, a gigantic black cat with a stack of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had managed to skewer a pickled mushroom, in the other.
The fur on the black cat stood on end, and he let out a soul-rending meow. Then he bunched up and, like a panther, lunged right onto Bengalsky's chest, and from there leaped onto his head. Purring, the cat gripped the master of ceremonies' thin hair with his plump paws and, howling wildly, tore this head from his full neck in two twists.
Getting playful in the bedroom, Natasha daubed Nikolai Ivanovich with cream and was herself stunned with surprise. The face of the respectable downstairs resident was puckered into a snout, and his hands and feet turned out to have hooves. Glancing at himself in the mirror, Nikolai Ivanovich howled desperately and wildly, but it was already too late.
All of this, Margarita, frozen with fear, made out in the treacherous shadows from the candles. Her gaze was drawn to the bed, on which sat the one whom poor Ivan at the Patriarch's Ponds had been trying to convince not long ago that the devil did not exist. This non-existent one was sitting on the bed.
“I drink to your health, gentlemen,” Woland said softly and, raising the cup, touched it with his lips. Then a metamorphosis occurred. The patched shirt and worn-out slippers disappeared. Woland was in some kind of black chlamys with a steel sword on his hip.
