This is a book by a literary critic and teacher of literature, dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of Russian classic texts. The first section of the book examines the text of M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. It contains a rather tough polemic with the general approach to understanding the figurative system of the novel, established in Bulgakov studies. The author, based on a scrupulous analysis of the text, literally at the “cellular” level, demonstrates new meanings of one of the most popular Russian novels. The study combines a purely philological approach with a historical and philosophical one, which makes the book interesting both for professional philologists and for a wider range of readers who are not indifferent to humanitarian problems. The second section of the book is devoted to an analysis of some of the works of Pushkin and Lermontov. It was compiled by the author from previously published scattered articles, which, in fact, represent a single holistic study. It is devoted to identifying the phenomenon of the hero’s “personal secret”. Based on a detailed analysis of the texts, it is shown that “personal secret” is a kind of mechanism, the work of which forms the compositional and plot basis of many works.