It took me a long while to get into ‘The White Guard’ and eventually I finished it on a train. I find trains to be the best venue for getting through a difficult book. I suppose I expected something more like [b:The Master and Margarita|117833|The Master and Margarita|Mikhail Bulgakov|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327867963s/117833.jpg|876183], which I adored but probably enjoyed on quite a superficial level. ‘The White Guard’ lacks supernatural and surreal elements, whilst having the same density of allegory and reference as M&M (an abbreviation I find amusing because I am childish). The novel deals with a short period in the history of the Ukraine, shortly after the end of the First World War. As I understand it, Germany’s defeat and the rise of the USSR precipitate a sort of short, confused civil war. Kiev is full of rumour, confusion, and fighting. The Turbins, a comfortable urban family, get dragged into events and their cosy existence is upended.

As I lack knowledge of this part of history, I had to refer to the notes in order to make sense of Bulgakov’s references. This rather disrupted the flow of the book, but that is of course my fault rather than the novel’s. I think my favourite sections described the terror and confusion of street-fighting, which was vividly conveyed. Various soldier characters were swiftly introduced, without any assurance that they would live beyond the next few pages. I found the domestic sphere was less gripping, although I expect it is intended to provide a contrast, humanise the combatants, and perhaps act as a microcosm of the city populace? The writing is sometimes disjointed and often beautiful.

I was also very interested in the mini-biography of Bulgakov at the back. His stories, novels, and plays were constantly censored and banned by soviet authorities. Yet Stalin was a fan of his, sometimes spoke to him on the phone, and may have protected him from political persecution. Even being admired from afar by a dictator is artistically stifling, it seems. Thus Bulgakov’s body of work is very difficult to reconstruct as he modified and re-edited things repeatedly to try and make them acceptable to the authorities. What a frustrating, strange life that must have been.

I feel as though I did not understand this book well enough to truly appreciate it. ( )

I've seen several reviews complimenting Evgeny Dobrenko's introduction and Marian Schwartz's translation in a different edition of this novel than the one I read, and I would recommend reading that edition rather than mine. If you, like me, know very little about the history of Ukrainian politics, you're going to need a good introduction if you to avoid playing catch-up the whole novel, like I did.

That's not to say that The White Guard is just a book about Ukrainian politics. It's about honor and betrayal, dreams and nightmares, and the importance of always having a place to go and being with people who care about you. While it lacks the signature otherworldly characteristics of Mikhail Bulgakov's other works, it's definitely his most human work.

That's also not to say it's his best. The White Guard should either be 50 pages longer or shorter than it is, with characters and ideas that aren't fully fleshed out all over the place. But I do think the quality of the Turbin family and their friends more than makes up for a questionable supporting cast.

Everything I've read from Bulgakov, regardless of its quality, involves one individual in a way that I haven't seen from any other writer of the Soviet era, whether they were party members or dissidents. That individual is a present, active God. I know nothing at all about Bulgakov's personal religious beliefs, so I have no idea whether his use of God was for literary or political purposes, but in 20th century European literature, the most shocking possible ending to a novel is for a prayer to actually be answered, so at the very least The White Guard is significant for that. What made it a great ending for me was Alexei Turbin's insistence, without knowing that his own sister's prayers (These could have been to the devil! Faust was sitting on the piano stand for quite a long time! But I doubt it) had saved his life just a few weeks earlier, that his syphilitic patient refrain from his fervent prayers every night, as it was likely making his condition even worse. Bulgakov might not have hit his peak yet, but some bits in here are as delicious as anything he ever wrote.

This was worth the read, but again, brush up on your Ukrainian history before diving in. You want to figure out which of the multitude of armies you should be rooting for, and take your time with it, because they all suck.

P.S. The metaphor with the clocks and faces blows. I don't know why anyone thinks otherwise. ( )

I had been considering this book for a long time. I had so loved The Master and Margarita that when Melville House published a set of Bulgakov translations, I got all excited. I loved Heart of a Dog, but this seemed like a lot of military history I didn't know anything about.

Well, I still know hardly anything about Ukranian military history, and I'm sure there was a lot that I missed, or was bewildered by, because I didn't understand the context, but to some level, some of that seemed appropriate. In much of this book, what is going on around the City (Kiev) is unknown, rumor, conjecture, made up on the spot. Even when the fighting is in the city itself, so much of what is going on is guesswork, as each person has to feel out for themselves when the right time is to show up for duty, to rip off one's badges, to retreat, to comply, to hide. Which power to align oneself to and to what cost.

Much more realist than both Master and Dog, it is the bewilderment of war itself that is compelling here.

Also, now I want to visit Kiev. Though perhaps now is not the time. ( )

There is a sense in which – like Tolstoy’s happy families – all Russian novels are alike. A blizzard of polysyllabic names potentially confusingly embellished with the corresponding patronymics not to mention the seemingly obligatory diminutives, with always a sense of foreboding in the background, if not the foreground. You certainly don’t turn to them for sweetness and light. Then again, love, sex and death are the wider novel’s perennial preoccupations.

To be sure there isn’t much focus on love in The White Guard, no sex at all, and I can recall only three actual deaths described in the text; but the prospect of death hangs over everything. Here there can be, too, as I also noticed when reading War and Peace, a sudden lurching through time from a particular chapter to the next. One surprising thing I discovered from it is that a Ukrainian clock seems to make the sounds tonk-tank rather than tick-tock.

The novel is set in Ukraine, in “the city” (only once identified as Kiev,) amid the turmoil that followed the 1917 revolution and centres round the affairs of the Turbin family and those who live in the same building. During the novel the city starts out under the rule of the Hetman - in whose army the male Turbins serve as officers - but is threatened by Ukrainian Nationalist forces led by Simon Petlyura; and beyond that, the Bolsheviks. The disorganisation and unpreparedness of the defending forces is well portrayed – a bit like Dad’s Army but without the laughs – and the mist of rumour and counter-rumour accompanying the situation when the city falls to Petlyura conveys the commensurate sense of febrility.

Bulgakov’s first novel and the only one to be published in the USSR in his lifetime, The White Guard is an insight into an all-but forgotten moment in an interregnum of upheaval and change and is worth reading for that alone. But a marker of the futility of it all is the thought that, “Blood is red on those deep fields and no one would redeem it. No one.”

While it has touches of the fantastic, including several dream sequences, The White Guard does not (cannot) touch the heights of the same author’s The Master and Margarita but it is well worth reading on its own terms. ( )

While I love Bulgakov's the Master and Margherita, I just couldn't get into the White Guard. I didn't find it political enough, but it wasn't really personal enough either. I couldn't imagine why he would be writing this or why Stalin would see the book as a threat. ( )

Right from the opening words, Mikhail Bulgakov leaves the reader in no doubt where and when his novel takes place, nor does he minimize the menace: Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter with snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds' star, eventide Venus; and Mars --- quivering, red. He immediately introduces the Turbin family: the siblings Alexei, Elena and seventeen year old Nikolka, their maid Anyuta, and Elena's new husband Captain Sergei Talberg.

Pausing only to give a detailed description of their warm and comfortable apartment, a picture worthy of a Merchant - Ivory set designer, Bulgakov immediately moves on to hint once more at the subject of his novel. It may be cosy inside, but outside, The snow-storm from the north howled and howled, and now they themselves could sense a dull, subterranean rumbling, the groaning of an anguished land in travail. As 1918 drew to an end the threat of danger grew rapidly nearer.

The danger he alludes to was the Ukrainian Revolution. In December 1918, Ukraine was part of Russia. Russia itself was in turmoil following its own revolution and the murder of the Tsar and his family. Russia, along with Ukrainians, had been fighting the Germans on Ukrainian soil. The Treaty of Brest - Litovsk, which theoretically had awarded Ukraine its independence had just collapsed. Ukrainian nationalists were fighting Russia. White Russians and reds were fighting each other in Ukraine and eastward to the Pacific. At the heart of the Ukrainian turmoil was Kiev. Bulgakov himself was from Kiev. His minutely detailed descriptions of the city throughout the novel show his deep love of his birthplace. However, despite his immersion in the heart of Ukraine, he considered himself Russian.

His world was about to change. In 1918 Kiev was changing before both his eyes and those of the Turbins, as refugees from the Russian Revolution flocked to the city. Again there is that feeling of hurry and urgency:

Among the refugees came grey-haired bankers and their wives, skilful businessmen who had left behind their faithful deputies in Moscow with instructions to them not to lose contact with the new world which was coming into existence in the Muscovite kingdom; landlords who had secretly left their property in the hands of trusted managers; industrialists, merchants, soldiers, politicians. There came journalists from Moscow and Petersburg, corrupt, grasping and cowardly. Prostitutes. Respectable ladies from aristocratic families and their delicate daughters, pale depraved women from Petersburg with carmine-painted lips; secretaries of civil service departmental chiefs; inert young homosexuals. Princes and junk-dealers, poets and pawnbrokers, gendarmes and actresses from the Imperial theatres. Squeezing its way through the crack, this mass of people converged on the city.

Then, inevitably, all the turmoil from the fighting in the surrounding countryside came to Kiev. Petlyura, leader of Ukraine's fight for independence, overran the city. Alexei Turbin, like Bulgakov a former White Guard doctor, and Nikolka the young cadet, joined the forces of resistance. Street fighting from corner to corner provides gripping action. There is treachery, personal betrayal, and settling of scores, but Bulgakov skilfully intersperses these dramatic scenes with quieter domestic ones, or humorous ones from the life of the Turbins' landlord, Lisovich.

The battle for Kiev is fast and furious. Alexei was gravely wounded, again like Bulgakov himself. The reader sees the world of the noncombatants struggling through the turmoil as Alexei struggles for his life.

[The White Guard] was initially serialized, starting in 1925, in the magazine Rossiya, which ceased publication before the last episodes of the novel had been published. Permission was not given to publish in book form, but the story was made into a highly successful play, The Days of the Turbins. For reasons never fully understood, the play was a great favourite of Stalin's. There are those who feel this may have saved Bulgakov's life when so many of his peers were being purged.

There isn't much of the magical realism here* of Bulgakov's later [The Master and Margarita], but this first novel does have the same wonderful way with language. It seems more in line with those other masters of adventure, Dumas and Scott. It was not until 1966 that [The White Guard] was published in novel form in Russia.

_________________

* I just discovered when checking the publishing history, that the first English translation, the 1971 Michael Glenny one that I read from my TBR pile, actually omitted dream flashbacks. These might have given it a different feel altogether. There is a newer 2008 translation from Yale by Marian Schwartz, which has the complete novel. It also has background on the political situation which would have been much appreciated. I'll have to get this new edition. I'd certainly have no hesitation in reading it again.

1918 in Kiev when Petlyura took over the city. The hero of the book, Dr. Turbin is wounded during the fighting. He was an officer of the Tsar's army. It is the story of his comfortable family life in their lovely apartment. He has a married sister whose Geman husband escapes to Germany. His younger brother is a cadet, and avoids the slaughter through luck and fast running. The miniseries is wonderful. ( )

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It's 1918, and I am in Kiev (the city of my birth but so distant now...) - Bulgakov ingeniously "places" me there during this incredibly turbulent year after the revolution. I am mesmerized by the fact how unpredictable every single day is, as Kiev copes with the influx of forces fighting for the domination of the city, the oldest of all Russia's cities. The legendary bravery of some, the utter treachery and cowardice o​f others... One family, the Turbins, is caught in this mess and trying to make sense of it all....

I have the Russian copy of the book in front of me, but my hat goes off to translators who undertook and accomplished the prodigious task of translating Bulgakov. Not a stranger to translation work myself, while reading it I often wondered: now, how in the world would you translate this or that... It would take the most intimate knowledge of both English and Russian, plus there are snippets of Ukrainian there too...

​ ​It doesn't surprise me that Bulgakov also wrote a play based on this book - called "Days of the Turbins" (in the Soviet Union at the time, it became more popular than the book and it was set on stage to much praise -​ before, of course, all of his writing got censured and banned) - ​while reading, I got the feeling that the structure of the novel did​ indeed ​vaguely ​resemble a play: it was as if Bulgakov was setting the stage for each episode, doing it in present tense, describing the way his characters feel before starting each dialogue; it's hard to put a finger on it, but it did read like a play at times.

Another point worth mentioning is the speech of the characters (and it's not only in Bulgakov's work, but most Russian writers before the revolution) - the beauty of a dialogue, the way educated people conversed on a daily basis, addressed each other (​p​lus, not a single swear word in this​ novel​; no matter how justifiably angry the characters were Bulgakov just hinted at it, but never used actual foul language - I found it refreshing, unlike some of the modern writing...).​ All this beautiful language​ is lost now, after years of Soviet rule, after most of the intelligentsia fled the country following the revolution. The Russian ​language suffered tremendously as a result.​ ( )

Stálin se impressionou tanto com essa história da guarda branca que foi vê-la no teatro mais de cinqüenta vezes – e essa é apenas uma das contradições que marcaram a vida de Bulgákov. Os personagens de Bulgakov s��o cativantes: Aleksei turbin, Elena, Myshlaevsky, Karas, Lariosik, Shpolyanski, Nai-Turs, Nikolka. Bulgakov consegue nos emocionar profundamente não só com os dramas inevitáveis, como a quase morte de um dos protagonistas, mas também com a perda do revólver de Nai-Turs, ou com a simples lembrança do fogão em que eles escreviam lembranças.
Adorei o prefácio de Viktor Nekrassov contando como descobriu a casa que pertenceu ao escritor (hoje Museu Bulgakov de Kiev) ainda habitada pela filha de Vasilisa. ( )

"Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, the second since the revolution had begun." So begins Mikhail Bulgakov's tale of Kiev in the chaos of the Russian civil war. In the Ukraine, not only are Bolsheviks, the "Whites" (a loose conglomeration of anti-Bolsheviks of various stripes), and the Ukrainian nationalists under Petylura competing for control, but the Germans, who had put their puppet leader (the Hetman) in charge during the just ended World War I, are still hanging around. In the space of a few years, Kiev was to go back and forth among the warring factions at least eighteen times.

The story focuses on two brothers and a sister, Alexei, Elena, and Nikolai Turbin. Their mother has just died; Alexei, a doctor like Bulgakov, has recently returned from serving in the army; and Elena's new husband, Talberg, is on the verge of leaving to join a White general far away. The family lives in a large, cozy apartment, filled with books and memories; the beauty of the city of Kiev is lovingly described. But, as quoted in the introduction to the edition I read by Evgeny Dobrenko, Bulgakov wrote, in an essay on Kiev, "The legendary times came to an abrupt end, and history intruded, suddenly and menacingly."

In the novel, Bulgakov shows what happens when Petlyura's army of peasants from the countryside take over the city. In advance, the Germans and the Hetman flee, as do many of the army's officers and soldiers, leaving the city to scattered groups of eager but inexperienced and under-armed individual soldiers who are incapable of fighting the forces arrayed against them. Both Alexei and Nikolai become involved in the doomed fighting, along with some of their friends. The bulk of the novel covers just a few dramatic days. Throughout, we see not just the Turbins and their friends, but also the broader picture, the epic sweep of the nationalist forces (the countryside versus the city, the peasants versus the intelligentsia), the rumor-mongering within the city and the easy acceptance of the people of their new rulers, the antisemitism of the nationalists (heralding a pogrom under a later nationalist regime), and the abandonment of the city by the leaders and military. The courage and noble acts of the Turbins cannot stop the tide of history.

Bulgakov's writing is a delight. He paints a portrait of a beautiful, if legendary, city, and the stars and planets above, and displays deep familiarity with its streets and routes around and through it; he evokes the sounds of the phones and doorbells ringing, of cannons booming, of guns going off; he refers to Russian literature; he inserts a somewhat comic character in the form of a downstairs neighbor; he recounts his characters' dreams; and above all he brings to life the cold, the turmoil, the danger, the bravery and cowardice, the fear and love, of a confusing and frightening time. Like The Master and Margarita, it has religious references, in particular to the Book of Revelation (helpfully footnoted by the translator). This may be Bulgakov's first novel, but he is fully in control of the diverse techniques he uses to make this chaotic world real to the reader.

Although this novel could not be published in Russia until the 1960s, an adaptation of it became a play, "The Days of the Turbins," that became a Moscow hit and a favorite of Stalin's -- it must have been quite an adaptation, because there is no way that the book I read would have been acceptable to Stalin. I understand that this edition is the first complete translation into English of the novel.

And in the end?

"Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, but more terrible still was 1919."

"What had it all been for? No one could say. And would anyone pay for the blood?

No. No one would.

The snow would melt, the green Ukrainian grass would come up and plait the earth, lush sprouts would emerge, the heat would shimmer above the fields, and no trace would remain of the blood. Blood is cheap in these dark red fields, and no one would ever redeem it.

No one."

It is December 1918 in Kiev, and it is a time of turmoil. The Germans have occupied the city, the Socialists are camped outside waiting for their moment, and the Bolsheviks are in attention, ready to dig up their buried armaments. The Turbin family, Tsarists and wealthy once, has lost their matriarch, and the three siblings - Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka face the unknowable as they suddenly find their world shrinking. We see the disintegration of a society into chaos through the prism of this family's experiences -- Elena's abandonment by her German officer husband, Alexei and Nikolka's brief and frustrating stint with the army, Alexei's being shot by the rebellious forces.

But terror has arrived, and nobody would be spared. And a worse terror it was because on the eve of its arrival, there was nobody to defend the city. The army had been abandoned by their leaders, officers had simply walked away, soldiers had started to disappear on duty -- and it is the likes of Alexei and Nikolka, young, inexperienced, eager and patriotic foot soldiers who were left to look the enemy in the eye. The White Guard had lost the war even before firing a single shot. The victors would celebrate, and the entire city is a well of instant support and adulation for the mysterious, invisible Socialist leader, Petlyura. Amidst the chaos and insanity of the world around them, we see small and ultimately feeble attempts by the Turbins, to continue as before -- there is still the lace on the table, the late parties with close friends, but we know that theirs was already a doomed world.

Bulgakov portrays those terrifying days masterfully -- he conveys us through the city and more than through what our eyes tell us, we become aware of what is happening through its sounds and smells. There is the smell of fear, the unforgettable smell of the dead and decaying bodies in the city's mortuary (this has to be one of the most graphic description in literature!). And simply through snatches of conversations and exchanges, we are able to imagine the parade of the victors to its tiniest detail, sense the mood of the crowds, feel the crush of bodies as the masses move from church to plaza. I could swear I was there, as spectator and eavesdropper.

The White Guard is said to be based partially on Bulgakov's life. Although with slight variation, the home of the Turbins (the exact address is given in the book) describes the Bulgakov's residence in the city. Alexei, the eldest son, was a doctor who specialised in venereal diseases. Bulgakov was one in real life. The book itself has has a dramatic story. Bulgakov could only publish it in parts in 1926. As he could not publish it under Stalin, he adapted it as a play called "The Days of the Turbins." Interestingly, though the play was centered on the life of a bourgeois family, Stalin liked it so much he went to see the play at the Moscow Art Theatre at least 15 times! The book was only published in full 26 years after Bulgakov's death in 1940.

This book was a joy to read, not for the subject which god knows, could not have been more grim, but for the way Bulgakov bridges the epic and the historic, and the familiar and the graspable. It is very much literature as I understand how it should be. ( )

Bulgakov’s brilliant novel of war in city of Kiev following the Russian Revolution. The introduction by Evgeny Dobrinko in this edition is outstanding and somewhat necessary to explain the many forces vying for Kiev at this time: Germany, who had installed a puppet ‘Hetman’ after the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian nationalist forces under Petylura, the Bolsheviks out of Moscow, and lastly the “Whites”, for whom the title “White Guard” derives. It is the Whites who are either monarchists or those most in favor of maintaining the provisional government, and this is the side that the Turbin family are on, whose two brothers and sister are at the heart of the novel.

Bulgakov describes the chaos and cruelty of war and its effect on this genteel family, taking a page from Tolstoy, and he reminds one of Dostoevsky in his nationalism. Dostoevsky was against nihilist forces in the middle of the 19th century and Bulgakov is against the forces which threaten the status quo in the early part of the 20th, but the unstated difficulty morally for both of them is that it’s hard to defend “the system” that Russians were living under. As Dobrinko says in the introduction, “The heroes’ high-minded blindness prevents them from seeing that the main enemy is not the Germans, Hetman Skoropadsky, Petlyura, or the Bolsheviks, but rather the Russian state itself, founded upon an age-old contempt for the individual and for freedom – the main spark that set off ‘Russian rebellion’. Russia was the only state founded simultaneously upon European values and Eastern despotism. … No other state ever held almost ninety percent of its own population in slavery for centuries.”

All is chaos, and few are admirable. The Germans are cruel and of course on foreign soil, Petylura carries out a brutal Jewish pogrom, the Reds will eventually install an autocratic government that is a parody of Marxism, and the Whites, while portrayed favorably at least in the form of the individuals in the novel, are defending autocracy. All of the leaders involved have a tendency to look out for themselves over their cause, fleeing when necessary, and sacrificing the soldiers or the people. It reminds one of Buffalo Springfield, “nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong”, though the individual acts of humanity and the decency of the Turbin family do stand out as exceptions.

Great imagery, great historical fiction, and underrated novel.

Quotes:
On careers:
“Thus, actually, does it most often happen in our lives. Someone can do something a full twenty years – lecture on Roman law, for instance – and in the twenty-first suddenly realize that Roman law is neither here nor there, that he doesn’t even understand or like it, and in fact he is a subtle gardener and burns with a passion for flowers.”

On defeat:
“Only someone who has himself been beaten knows what that word means! It’s like an evening in a home where the electric lights are out. It’s like a room where green mold, full of diseased life, is climbing the wallpaper. It’s like demon children with rickets, like rancid vegetable oil, like obscenities sworn by women’s voices in the dark. In short, it was like death.”

On modernity:
“At four o’clock in the afternoon lights went on in building windows, in round electric globes, in the gas streetlamps, in the house lights and flame-red rooms, and in the solid glass windows of the power plants, which led people to thoughts of humanity’s terrible and empty future, in those solid windows where you could see machines tirelessly turning their desperate wheels, shattering the earth’s very foundation to its roots.”

On religion; speaking to God in a dream:
“’How can it be, Lord,’ I say, ‘your priests are saying the Bolsheviks are going to hell, aren’t they? So what’s this, I say? They don’t believe in you, and look what quarters you have ready to cheer them.’
‘So what if they don’t believe?’ He asks.
…
‘…there’s no gain or loss to me from your faith. One man believes and another doesn’t, but all your actions are identical. At each other’s throats, and as for the quarters, Zhilin, you have to understand that as far as I’m concerned, Zhilin, all of you are identical – men killed on a battlefield.’
...
‘you’d do well not mentioning the priests to me. I have no idea what I’m going to do with them. There are no fools on earth to compare with your priests. I’ll tell you a secret, Zhilin. They’re not priests, they’re a disgrace.’”

On transience:
“But this isn’t frightening. All this will pass. The sufferings, agonies, blood, hunger, and wholesale death. The sword will go away, but these stars will remain when even the shadow of our bodies and our affairs are long gone from this earth. There is not a man who does not know this. So why are we reluctant to turn our gaze to them? Why?”

On war:
“What had it all been for? No one could say. And would anyone pay for the blood?
No. No one would.
The snow would melt, the green Ukrainian grass would come up and plait the earth, lush sprouts would emerge, the heat would shimmer above the fields, and no trace would remain of the blood. Blood is cheap in these dark red fields, and no one would ever redeem it.
No one.” ( )

Fin 1918, en Ukraine. La guerre civile commence. Nous allons la vivre à travers les membres d'une famille de l'intelligentsia : les Tourbine. L'aîné, Alexis : vingt-huit ans. Héléna, sa sœur : vingt-quatre ans. Nikolka, leur frère, dix-sept ans. L'autre personnage principal, c'est la maison de la famille, rue Alexéievski, la maison elle-même, mais aussi son jardin couvert par la neige, ses lilas nus, le bruit de la canonnade par-dessus les murs. Les Allemands quittent Kiev, l'hetman de l'Ukraine aussi. Les bandes de Petlioura, des anarchistes, sont aux portes de la ville. Dans ce micmac des pouvoirs, les Tourbine ont au moins une position claire : ils veulent la Russie de naguère, la monarchie. C'est cette cause, perdue d'avance, qu'ils vont défendre. Il leur faudra quitter pourtant le grand poêle de faïence, les vieux livres sentant, on ne sait pourquoi, le chocolat, et refermer derrière eux la porte de cette fabuleuse maison. Nikolka aura eu le temps de vivre une grande aventure, dans le sous-sol de la morgue, pour retrouver à tout prix ce courageux garde blanc qui s'appelle Naï-Tours. Alexis, lui, connaîtra la mort de plus près. Qui sont-ils, ces gardes blancs ? Que voulaient-ils ? « Tout passe, dira Boulgakov pour nous rassurer (ou pour autre chose), tout passera. » Alors pourquoi cette tragédie ? Pourquoi cette tragédie personnelle de tant de Russes ?

Mikhail Bulgakov is best known for his Soviet-era satire The Master and Margarita, although he also has the infamous distinction of writing a favorite play of Stalin’s, The Days of the Turbins. This play and Bulgakov’s 1924 debut, White Guard, were both based on the author’s personal experiences in Kiev during the tumultuous years of the Revolution. While Stalin blessed The Days of the Turbins, White Guard was kept from publication until 1966, 26 years after Bulgakov’s death. The book was then quietly picked up by Russian scholars, meticulously studied, and inserted into its proper place among other works of Russian revolutionary literature. Many years later it has crossed the scholarly seas, and is now translated into English for the first time, bravely offered by Yale University Press. Is White Guard worth the wait? Most definitely.

For the rest of this review, see the the spring 2009 edition of The Quarterly Conversation. http://quarterlyconversation.com/white-guard-by-mikhail-bulgakov-review ( )

This was a little tougher/sloggier read than Heart of a Dog and Master and Margarita. Mainly because I am not a historian about the politics of the Tsarists vs. the Communists. Set in St. Petersburg I believe - not Moscow, follows the characters within and outside a family as the city is plunged into terrorism then war. Overall, a good history, good character development, and a good ending about a typically Russian epoch of bloodshed, grim conditions, with a Russian drill-down into a bed-ridden illness and a tightly wrapped story of love and loss mostly played outside inside a small house a la Checkhov. ( )

A wonderful story about a family in Kiev during the revolution. There is a great scene where the city is gathered in the square trying to see the new leader. All the reader gets is bits and pieces of conversations overheard in the crowd. It was a great way to see the different opinions as well as to see how fast rumors spread. ( )

A kaleidoscopic, gripping story about a family in Kiev, still faithful to the Tsarist regime, as they and their city are overrun by civil war in the wake of the Russian Revolution. ( )

I chose this for it's beautiful cover, and because I did enjoy The Master and Margarita. Still to read

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