Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.    

“THE WHITE GUARD” by Mikhail Bulgakov (Written 1923-24. First partly published in Russia in serial form 1925 before being banned; first published in complete form in Paris in 1927; first published in complete form in Russia only in 1966. There are three English translations by, respectively, Michael  Glenny, Marian Schwartz and Roger Cockerell 

            Many authors have had great difficulties in getting their work published,  but one author who suffered most from the censoring and suppression of his work must have been Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). Bulgakov was a doctor of medicine who worked for the Russian arm of the Red Cross in the First World War. Later, after the Bolshevik revolution and during the Russian civil war, Bulgakov was an army physician with one of the White armies that were fighting the Reds. When the Whites were finally defeated and the Soviet state was more fully formed, Bulgakov gave up his medical practice and turned to writing. He was a prolific playwright in the 1920s, but many of his plays were banned under the new Soviet regime. Written in 1923-24, his novel The White Guard was partly published in a Russian periodical, but then banned. The novel was for the first time published in full (and in Russian) in Paris in 1927, but was not published in Russia until 1966, long after the days of Stalin and when the USSR was trying to open up a little. Meanwhile other books by Bulgakov remained banned, some not being published until the USSR was nearing disintegration, including the novel that is now regarded as his masterpiece The Master and Margarita. But there is one strange anomaly here. Bulgakov wrote a play called The Days of the Turbins, based on his novel The White Guard, and it was extremely popular in the Soviet Union. Even Stalin loved it and was reputed to have seen it many times. Why should this be so? I’ll suggest why nearer the end of this review.

            The White Guard is set in 1918 and early 1919 in what was then known as Kiev (now, in the sovereign state of Ukraine, it is known as Kyiv). Kiev was the author’s home city. The civil war is raging, but it involves many different forces. The citizens of Kiev don’t mind the incursions of the Imperial German army because the Germans tend to keep to themselves and, as long as they are there, they provide a certain protection for the city. But the Germans withdraw, leaving the remnants of a White army as the main defence of the city. Bear in mind that the Whites are not all necessarily supporters of the Tsar – who has already been killed with his family.  Many of them are defending the pre-Bolshevik Russian republic led by Alexander Kerensky, and they take as the head of local government the Hetman, a Russian appointee. The Bolsheviks are one threat to the city, but they are far away in Moscow ( the Whites regularly curse and spit at the mention of Leon Trotsky). The more immediate threat is the nationalist Ukrainian uprising led by Petlyura, and it is against Petlyura that the Whites defend the city. And yet the “White guard” slowly and relentlessly collapses, especially when the Hetman deserts the city and runs away. Let it be noted, incidentally, that while Petlyura’s movement was a genuinely patriotic one, it was also seething with anti-Semitism. Petlyura’s forces were responsible for some pogroms. Bulgakov’s novel refers to this only obliquely in two episodes when some of Petlyura’s men, once they have broken into the city, chase and kill individual Jewish men.

That is the general situation of the novel, but as much as it can be, The White Guard focuses on the Turbin family, a middle-class Russian family living in an apartment in a respectable part of Kiev. The father died years before. The widowed matriarch dies in the opening chapter, leaving behind her three adult children. Alexei Turbin, unmarried, aged 28, is a doctor of medicine (and is clearly based on the author himself). His younger sister Elena, aged 24, is married to an officer called Sergei Talberg, but early in the novel he deserts her, saying he is going to join another White army led by General Denikin in another part of Russia. Much later in the novel, and to her despair, Elena learns that her husband has formally divorced her, remarried and has left the country. And then there is the youngest of the siblings, 17-year-old Nikolai, most commonly called affectionately as Nikolka, who is still a student. 

How this family fares is what holds the narrative together.  The Turbins try to live a reasonable domestic life in their apartment, but circumstances make for real stress. The city becomes crowded with refugees, some from the countryside, some from Bolshevik Moscow. Accepted morality is thrown aside by many. The streets swarm with prostitutes, bars are open all night, cabarets perform until the small hours and many drug themselves with alcohol or cocaine on the assumption that this will be their last pleasure before the city falls to Petlyura. This is a city filled with panicky rumour – that the Tsar is not really dead; that Denikin’s forces are on their way; that Petlyura does not really exist – in fact any nonsense born of a lack of real information.

Inspired by a lieutenant friend, the artillery instructor Victor Myshlaevsky, Alexei volunteers to join the defending forces as a medical officer. Young Nikolka, like many young cadets, also joins the White forces. But Petlyura’s Ukrainian army is advancing with little check. White outpost after White outpost is overrun and White-controlled areas get smaller and smaller. Defeatist officers tell their soldiers to give up, first doing such things as sabotaging artillery pieces so that Petlyura’s forces cannot take them, and then advising troops to rip off their regimental badges, put on civilian clothes and go home. But there are moments of desperate heroism. Young Nikolka stays till the very last moments at a cross-road under heavy machine-gun fire until his officer, Colonel Nai-Turs, is killed. Only then does the adolescent run for his life. Alexei, in streets that are now overrun by Petlura’s men, tries to carry on as a doctor – but he neglected to remove his White army officer’s badge, and he gets beaten almost to death, only recovering weeks later after a long convalescence and having suffered from hallucinations. There is some compassion in the midst of chaos and horror. Alexei is first cared for by a complete stranger called Julia Reiss before he is able to return home.

And the Turbins’ apartment gets more crowded. It is not only some servants who remain with them, but a quarrelsome man called Vasily Lisovich (nicknamed Vasilisa), who lives in an adjoining department and who takes refuge with the Turbins after thugs have ransacked his apartment.

Bulgakov has some interesting literary quirks. More than once we are given the outcome of an event before we are told about the event itself – in other words, Bulgakov writes against linear sequential time. But what I found most engaging in this novel were its self-contained vignettes. The milk vendor being castigated because, under siege, the price of milk has risen steeply. The mustering of the young cadet volunteers who are completely untrained in soldiering and whose officers know they lack essential materiel. The freezing winter weather which has sentinels dying. The family hastily hiding mementoes of the former regime – such as a framed photo of the murdered Tsarevich – lest they be denounced by Ukrainian nationalists when they come ransacking homes. The crowds witnessing the triumphal march of Petlyura’s forces into the city, the mass celebrated in the cathedral for their victory, and then the crowd’s horror when, amid this apparent triumph, one orator pipes up with a Bolshevik tirade. The strange and upsetting scene where Alexei, back in medical practice, has to deal with a syphilitic man who has also been ruined by excessive use of cocaine. (For the record, Bulgakov began his medical career as a venerologist.) And, most horrific of all, the sequence where young Nikolka visits the family of the slain Colonel Nai-Turs and guides the colonel’s mother to the morgue where the colonel’s body is stored – a filthy, nightmarish journey through pervasive stench, past rotting corpses packed together and indifferent curators. 

Whether or not he was religious, Bulgakov was aware of the importance of religion in the society he was depicting. The great cathedral and the gigantic statue of Saint Vladimir loom over the city and are often referenced. When Elena fears (with reason) that her husband has left her for good, she prays fervently to the Virgin Mary before a candle-lit icon. The syphilitic man whom Alexei examines is filled with remorse and keeps calling upon God to forgive him for his debauched ways. And, in finishing the novel, Bulgakov turns to John’s Apocalypse (“Book of Revelation” if you prefer). The closing words of the novel read thus : “But the sword is not fearful. Everything passes away – suffering, pain, blood, hunger and pestilence. The Sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?” This suggests a degree of fatalism but, more importantly, it says that evil can and will pass away.

Which brings me to that anomaly I mentioned in the first paragraph of this review. Why was the play The Days of the Turbins such a success in Soviet Russia and admired by Stalin when the novel it had been based upon, The White Guard, was so vigorously banned? Two reasons. First, it could be presented as the ending of a conservative bourgeois family. Being mainly set in the Turbins’ apartment (the sweeping outdoor events of the novel could not be presented on stage) it could appear as at most a piece of harmless nostalgia showing decadent people who were, as the Soviet regime saw it, "on the wrong side of history" [to use a current cliche]. Second, Petlyura’s forces held Kiev for only 47 days – not even two months -  before the Red Army invaded, crushed Ukrainian nationalism, and re-incorporated Ukraine into Russia. Stage performances of The Days of the Turbins often concluded with the triumphant music the Internationale, signalling that the whole story was just a prelude to Soviet victory, and giving the Bolshevik's tirade which, in the novel, is presented as unpopular with the people of Kiev

Of course this is not the way I read The White Guard. To me, it is elegiac in the same way that Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard is. It is about the ending of a way of life that is about to be expunged. The Turbins may be too optimistic about their possible future, but according to their lights they are decent people and are presented sympathetically. There is no other way to see them.

Footnote: If you have read my account of Serhii Plokhy's book The Russo-Ukrainian War, you will see that I noted the "White" General Anton Denikin, an opponent of the Bolsheviks, who wrote very Russian propaganda for all Russia's vassal states to be incorporated into one authoritarian Russian state. Denikin's work is among Vladimir Putin's favourite reading.  Denikin is briefly referenced in Bulgakov's novel The White Guard. While admiring the Turbin family in the novel, I am aware that they are Russians who, on the whole, regard the Ukrainians as their inferiors, even though Russians were very much the minority in Ukraine. A bit like so-called "Anglo-Irish" landowners looking down on the Irish people.

Second footnote: When the Red Army drove Petyula and the Ukrainan nationalists out of Kiev, they were assisted by Makhno's Anarchist forces. But or course once the city was taken, the Red Army proceeded to eliminate the Anarchists too. Totalitarian utopians always act that way.