Five years later, when passed the passions of a two-year secret affair and the clarification of relations with her husband, armed with a gun, a forced one-and-a-half-year separation and a new meeting forever, Bulgakov, working on a play about the last days of Pushkin, puts in the mouth of Natalia Nikolaevna not peculiar to that era self-justification:

      Why has no one ever asked me if I am happy? They only know how to demand from me. But has anyone ever taken pity on me? What more do you want from me? I gave birth to his children and all my life I hear poems, only poems…

      Moreover, to Pushkin’s drama, it turns out, involved completely different forces:

      The death of a great citizen was committed because the country’s unlimited power is handed over to unworthy persons who treat the people like slaves…

      Unlike Dantes, who, according to the assurances of his adoptive father, «loves no one» and «seeks pleasure,» Bulgakov was truly in love, and the Red Army commander with a generous nobility under the influence of trends about women’s freedom, unlike bretteur Pushkin could afford to let his wife go to another man, since she had «born a serious and deep feeling».

      In his phantasmagorical novel, painting a picture of «faithful, eternal love,» Bulgakov solves the Pushkin-Dantes collision by concentrating genius creativity, irresistible passion, and thirst for true love in one character, the Master, and putting out of brackets the events surrounding the fateful meeting with her, adorned with «disturbing yellow flowers,» of both the jealous bretteur and the noble husband. And what would have been different and most necessary in a woman who would have epitomized such love? No, she would not shine with porcelain beauty, as Natalie, but only if in her eyes «always burned some incomprehensible light», and she would need «not a Gothic mansion, and not a separate garden, and not money», but «him, the Master.» The Master as a companion, leading the way in life. Her lover must see another, «resting» life and be one of its earthly creators, even if doomed to a thorny path. Then there will be an unshakable respect for him, an inexhaustible desire to support his work, an inexorable desire to participate in his grand design, and an unwavering willingness to fight for her love.

      How can Margarita-Natalie save her high love when through the ages the same «unworthy persons» continue to rule the fate of people? Only by making a deal with those who have much more power, but not there, in the bright world, but here, on the sinful earth. To get back her Master, crushed by critics and denunciations of «good people», Margarita goes to «replace her nature» – becomes a witch. But neither service to Satan at the «great ball» nor revenge on the Master’s offenders are the main feats of the loving Margarita. The strength gained in love allows her not only to «share the fate» of the Master, who hated his novel, which brought only misfortune, filled with fear and cowardice, but also to start thinking for him, assuring «that everything will be dazzlingly good».

      However, what does Bulgakov deduce as the ultimate metaphysical goal of faithful love? Is it «an eternal home» with «a Venetian window and curly grapes», silence, and in the evening – music by Schubert, walks «with my friend under cherry trees» and sleep «with a smile on my lips?» Why not, for it looks like a royal gift. But still the main thing is different – love sets the Master free.

      Someone was letting the Master go free, just as he himself had just let go of the hero he had created.

      What remains to be deciphered is what the Master has freed himself from through the magical power of love. The novel states that «the Master’s memory, the restless, needle-stabbed memory began to fade.» It is known that Pontius Pilate suffered because of his own cowardice, «the most grievous vice,» and this sin was eventually forgiven him. Then for lack of direct evidence, we can only assume what imperfections of his own nature and sins burdened the Master. About himself, Bulgakov said that in the past «made five fatal mistakes4», of which two due to «an attack of unexpected, struck like a faint of timidity.» And he, it must be assumed, would give a lot for «someone» to forgive him these weaknesses of human nature, freeing the restless memory for full happiness in the light of found love.

      Let us note one more feature that Bulgakov emphasizes in the bargain with the wicked force to «replace one’s nature» for the sake of love. Margarita retains a mercy uncharacteristic of a witch towards the infanticide Frida and the infamous Pontius Pilate. Her mercy, however, is not pity spewed from a weak soul, but a struggle for her own dignity – responsibility for the one to whom she has given hope. And she knows that he who violates this rule, who drops his dignity, will not «have rest all his life.» In the case of Pontius Pilate, the voice of reason speaks in her, telling her that there is no justice in the punishment of eternal loneliness for once shown cowardice. And the higher powers are coming her way.

      «Well, well,» will think some of the novel’s most persistent readers,» what is the Master’s special merit, what justifies his unearthly love and his release from the torments of memory?» Most likely, in the fact that he managed to «guess» what was going on in the soul of Pontius Pilate, when he was forced to make a fatal decision about the fate of the «wandering philosopher», as well as what was needed by the woman, in whose eyes lurked «an unusual, unseen loneliness», and in her hands were «disgusting, disturbing yellow flowers». In this quality – to understand the soul of the person closest to you – lies the main characteristic of true love, because it is a part of divine providence, able even to free from the seemingly most serious sins5.

      With his true story of eternal love, reflecting his own third, successful attempt, Bulgakov gives a clear illustration of the analytical observations of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset6 over the zigzags of true love, who believed that those who are inherent in «characters restless and generous, characters of inexhaustible possibilities and brilliant destinies,» during life undergo «two or three transformations, the essence of the various phases of a single soul trajectory». And these transformations coincide with the «deep feeling of love» that «embraces any normal man two or three times in his life», and «a new feeling of life corresponds to a new type of woman». It may be noted, however, that to the elegant theoretical constructions of the Spanish philosopher the Russian writer adds the necessity at each «new stage» to release «restless memory» in some way and at a deliberately high price.

      Let us note that the unreality of the events described by Bulgakov leads the heroes of the novel to a madhouse. There, the Master tells the bad poet how he met his true love, and the poet, determined to change his life, shares the details of his meeting with Satan. In Bulgakov’s novel it is only an episode, and in other contemporary writers, the attempt to portray high love typically ends either with madness or death of the characters seized by fatal passion, and sometimes brings to a nervous breakdown even the writers