The White Guard

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Summary

Discover Mikhail Bugakov's classic literary love letter to the city of Kyiv.

Drawing closely on Bulgakov's personal experiences of the horrors of civil war as a young doctor, The White Guard takes place in Kyiv, 1918, a time of turmoil and suffocating uncertainty as the Bolsheviks, Socialists and Germans fight for control of the city. It tells the story of the Turbins, a once-wealthy Russian family, as they are forced to come to terms with revolution and a new regime.

Bulgakov's first novel, The White Guard is one of the greatest works of twentieth century Russian literature. As epic a chronicle of life and death in the Russian Empire as War and Peace.

'The tumultuous atmosphere of the Ukrainian revolution and civil war is brilliantly evoked' Daily Telegraph

Reviews

A powerful reverie...the city is so vivid to the eye that it is the real hero of the book.
New Statesman

About the author

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in 1916, but gave up the practice of medicine in 1920 to devote himself to literature. In 1925 he completed the satirical novella The Heart of a Dog, which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987. This was one of the many defeats he was to suffer at the hands of his censors. By 1930 Bulgakov had become so frustrated by the political atmosphere and the suppression of his works that he wrote to Stalin begging to be allowed to emigrate if he was not to be given the opportunity to make his living as a writer in the USSR. Stalin telephoned him personally and offered to arrange a job for him at the Moscow Arts Theatre instead. In 1938, a year before contracting a fatal illness, he completed his prose masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. He died in 1940. In 1966-7, thanks to the persistance of his widow, the novel made a first, incomplete, appearance in Moskva, and in 1973 appeared in full.

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