The photo shows Elena Afanasyevna Bulgakova, married name Svetlaeva, the youngest child of Varvara Mikhailovna and Afanasy Ivanovich. In 1923, Lyolya (Elena Bulgakova’s nickname) moved to Moscow to live with her sister Nadezhda. In the capital, she studied philology and then got a job as a librarian.

The writer and poet Valentin Petrovich Kataev fell in love with Bulgakov’s younger sister. He later described this relationship in his autobiographical novel “My Diamond Crown”. Among the heroes of the work are Mikhail and Elena Bulgakov, whom Kataev calls “blue-eyed man” and “blue-eyed girl”.

Lyolya shared his feelings, but then, as witnesses later recalled, Mikhail Bulgakov intervened.

“She had an affair with Kataev. She began to come to us often, and Kataev immediately wanted to get married, but Bulgakov refused, went to Nadia, who pressured Lyolka, and she stopped coming to us. Mikhail and Kataev argued so much because of this that they stopped talking. Especially after Kataev wrote a feuilleton about Bulgakov, — that he believes that to get married a person should have this many pairs of long underwear, this much money, many other things… such a vile feuilleton,” Bulgakov’s first wife Tatiana Lappa later recalled.

Kataev included this feuilleton entitled “Copper that Triumphed” in his book “Eduard the Idler” and presented it to Bulgakov with the following inscription:

Elena and Valentin met various fates: Kataev married the artist Anna Sergeyevna Kovalenko, and Lyolya Bulgakova married the philologist Mikhail Vasilyevich Svetlaev. In 1929, Elena and Mikhail had a daughter, Varvara.

When Mikhail Bulgakov became terminally ill in the autumn of 1939, Lyolya Svetlaeva often wrote letters to him, called and visited. She managed to read the manuscript of the novel “The Master and Margarita”, but did not see it in print. Elena Svetlaeva died on May 3, 1954.