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. ( )

Entroncado en la gran tradición narrativa rusa y heredero natural de Gógol, Bulgákov narra la trágica disgregación de la familia Turbín en la guerra civil. Los hermanos Turbín, intelectuales monárquicos de Kiev, asisten incrédulos a las consecuencias de la caída del zar.
La guardia blanca, novela de trazos autobiográficos, tiene un carácter casi documental. Fue concebida como parte de una trilogía inacabada que daba constancia de la ferocidad de la revolución y la guerra, y que fue prohibida por el régimen estalinista. ( )

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. ( )

Entroncado en la gran tradición narrativa rusa y heredero natural de Gógol, Bulgákov narra la trágica disgregación de la familia Turbín en la guerra civil. Los hermanos Turbín, intelectuales monárquicos de Kiev, asisten incrédulos a las consecuencias de la caída del zar. En uno de los inviernos más crudos del conflicto, iniciado con una revolución que aborrecen, y bajo la despiadada ocupación alemana, Alexéi, Elena y Nikolái tratan de sublimar su desesperación creando un fresco épico. La guardia blanca, novela de trazos autobiográficos, tiene un carácter casi documental. Fue concebida como parte de una trilogía inacabada que daba constancia de la ferocidad de la revolución y la guerra, y que fue prohibida por el régimen estalinista ( )