And when I bought them, my salary was around $40K/year, so yeah, I had the money to spare since I rent and don't own any property.

Do you want me to list my pending reviews to make you feel better? Wonder why you're reading Bulgakov in Spanish? Romance languages are even more distant than Germanic ones from works written in Russian and other Slavic languages, I've found. Or at least that's the case with Goran Petrovi?'s work. He's not yet available in English, so I've been reading in parallel text the Serbian (in Cyrillic script, no less!) and Spanish his 2000 book, La mano de la buena fortuna. Very good, but the way each language structures the adjectives and sentence order is vastly different. His Spanish translator took a lot of liberties in order to create a coherent text. Wouldn't be surprised if the same is true for Bulgakov's translator.