In 1920, Lyubov Belozerskaya left Soviet Russia with this suitcase. She spent several months in Constantinople, moved to Paris and then to Berlin. At that time, she was married to journalist Ilya Markovich Vasilevsky (he wrote under the pseudonym Ne-Bukva) and later wrote a memoir about her emigration entitled “At a Foreign Threshold”.

At the end of 1923, she returned to Moscow, and in January 1924, she met Mikhail Afanasyevich at an event held by the Berlin newspaper “Nakanune”. Bulgakov wrote articles about life in Moscow for this émigré publication. Belozerskaya, a refined lady who had just returned from Europe, found the writer’s appearance a little ridiculous.

Lyubov Yevgenievna recalled about her acquaintance with Bulgakov, “He was wearing a black hoodie with no waistband, a ‘vest’. I was not accustomed to such a men’s silhouette; it struck me as slightly comical, as did the lacquered boots with bright yellow tops, which I immediately dubbed ‘chicken shoes’, and laughed. When we got to know each other better, he said to me not without bitterness, ‘If the dressed up and perfumed lady knew how hard it was to get these shoes, she would not laugh…”

In the spring of 1925, Lyubov Belozerskaya became the wife of Mikhail Bulgakov, and the next year he began work on the play “The Flight”, which at the time was called “Knight of Seraphima”. The writer himself was banned from traveling and never saw either Paris or Constantinople with his own eyes, but he portrayed them amazingly vividly and authentically in the play “The Flight”. Lyubov Yevgenievna recalled that it was her stories and emigrant experience that provided the basis for the play,

During Bulgakov’s lifetime, the play “The Flight” was never allowed to be staged.