Slow-read Announcement for October: The White Guard

Join me in reading The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov in October.

The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov was on my reading list in first year when I was student of Russian at the University of St Andrews in 1993/94. I managed to avoid reading it then due to a quirk in the system, and have continued to avoid it … till now!

It’s a short novel, fewer than 300 pages, so a month should be enough to get through it at an easy, slow pace.

The novel is set in Kyiv during the harsh winter of 1917–18 and follows the Turbin family. After the Germans are defeated on the western front in November 1918 and have withdrawn from Kyiv, the city is under attack by the forces of Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petlyura. The Turbins oppose the nationalists and take part in the resistance of the Whites, the same forces that oppose Trotsky’s Communist Red Army in Russia.

This is a historical fiction novel that’s partly biographical: Kyiv was Bulgakov’s city and in 1918 he was working as a doctor treating the battle wounded. The novel was written mostly in the 1920s but wasn’t published until 1966. In his introduction, Cockrell writes the following:

The story that Bulgakov tells is a largely authentic reconstruction of these historical events. Many of the details relating to the setting and the characters, furthermore, possess a strongly autobiographical element, an evocation of Bulgakov's own family circumstances. Yet his use throughout of the term "the City" to refer to Kiev reminds us that The White Guard is primarily neither autobiography nor history, but a visionary novel springing from a highly original and creative imagination. As in his short story The Fatal Eggs (1925), the last of Bulgakov's prose works to be published during his lifetime, facts jostle with fiction to portray an alternative universe that diverges from historical reality in seemingly random and therefore unsettling ways.

Given my love of historical fiction, and of The Master and Margarita, I have a feeling I’m going to enjoy this novel!

My primary reading copy is Roger Cockrell’s translation, which they had in my local bookshop here on Arran! I also have the Glenny translation and the original text in a beautiful volume I received as a gift when I spent a year in Ukraine. That will give me the opportunity of comparing at least a couple of different translations as I go, something I enjoy doing as a former translator myself. I did the same with my slow-read of Crime and Punishment and came away recommending Cockrell’s translation out of eight different ones.

Join me!

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Buy the book

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The White Guard, Alma Classics edition, 2016.

Hope to see you in October!

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