It all started when Akhmatova met Bulgakov in 1933, who was visiting Leningrad at that time. However, according to some reports, the writer and poetess met long before that, at a meeting of representatives of literary circles held in the Northern Capital in 1926. In the mid-1930s, Mikhail Afanasyevich gave Anna Andreevna advice when writing a letter to Stalin, in which the poetess asked for the release of her arrested loved ones, and during the evacuation years in Tashkent, she read the manuscript of The Master and Margarita and predicted immortality and glory for this novel.

Bulgakov's third wife settled in an apartment on the second floor of a house on Nikitsky in the postwar years. Archival manuscripts of Bulgakov himself were also kept here for a long time. Elena Sergeevna was visited not only by Akhmatova, but also, for example, by literary critic Abram Vulis, the author of the first works about Mikhail Bulgakov.

At an evening in her apartment dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Bulgakov's death, Anna Andreevna recited a poem she had written in memory of the outstanding Russian writer. The last time Akhmatova saw Elena Sergeevna was in the same apartment, where her friends read aloud excerpts from The Master and Margarita and recalled the days spent in the Tashkent evacuation.