Барон Майгель

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Role

The "dear baron Meigel, an employee of the Spectacles Commission", entered the ballroom quite alone. In his function as guide he acquaintd people with places of interest in Moscow. Margarita recognized this Meigel. She had come across him several times in Moscow theatres and restaurants. As soon as the baron had learned of Woland's arrival in Moscow, he offered him "his expertise".

But Woland saw through Meigel. He said that rumours have spread about the baron's "extreme curiosity". In other words: he's a spy. He suspects that Meigel had tried to manoeuvre himself in his favour in order to eavesdrop on him as much as possible. And he kills him at the spot.

Background

The real prototype for Baron Meigel's character is, without any doubt, Baron Boris Sergeevich Shteiger (1892-1937). In the '20's and '30's he worked in Moscow at the People's Commissariat for Enlightening, Department Visual Arts, the Наркомпрос (Narkompros), and simultaneously as an agent of the NKVD. In 1937 he was arrested and shot. Shteiger is mentioned several times in the diary of Elena Sergeevna. He was often found at US Embassy functions and reported on foreigners connected with the theater, and on Soviet citizens having contact with the embassy. Shteiger was often at the excentric receptions ambassador William Bullitt organised in the years 1934-1936. One of these parties, the 1934 Christmas party, became the basis for Satan's Grand Ball in the novel.

When the Bulgakov's went to one of these parties, on April 23, 1935, they were taken back home with a car of the embassy, and Shteiger suddenly accompanied them. Elena Sergejevna said that they didn't know him, but that he was famous in Moscow and always found "around foreigners".

Shteiger had good connections abroad. His brother was the poet baron Anatoly Sergeevich Shteiger (1907-1944) and his sister was the poetess baroness Alla Sergeevna Shteiger-Golovina (1909-1987). Both escaped during the revolution. They lived successively in Turkey, Czechoslovakia, France and Switzerland. Sister Alla moved to Brussels in 1955. Their father, baron Sergey Edwardovich Shteiger (1868-1937) was, before the revolution, deputy in the Duma for the Kanev district in Ukraine.



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