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.

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* 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.