DeCarabas’s Reviews > The First Part of Goethe's Faust > Status Update

On Walpurgisnacht Mephistopheles calls himself Squire Voland, and it took me a ridiculously long time to convince a search engine to tell me what Goethe was referencing with that name (instead of pages and pages of results telling me Master and Margarita was referencing Goethe). Finally figured out to only search for results in German. Comes from vâlant, middle high german word for, predictably, devil.