The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov
Welcome to the main page for the 2025 slow read of The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov. This readalong starts on 1 October 2025 and ends on 31 October.
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The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov was on my reading list in first year when I was a 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.
The novel is set in Kiev during the harsh winter of 1917–18 and follows the Turbin family. (I will be referring to the city as Kiev rather than Kyiv, as that was the spelling of the time, although throughout the novel Bulgakov refers to it only as ‘the City’). After the Germans are defeated on the western front in November 1918 and have withdrawn from Kiev, the city is under attack by the forces of Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petlyura.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: Kiev was Bulgakov’s city, and in 1918, he worked as a doctor treating the battle-wounded. The novel was written mostly in the 1920s and serialised in the publication Rossiya, but the journal ceased publication before the final part of the novel was published. The complete novel was published in Paris in 1927. A censored version of the novel was published in the Soviet Union in 1966, and the full uncensored version in 1989. 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, the Schwartz 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 the 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.
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The White Guard, Alma Classics edition, 2016.
Hope to see you in October!
Cams / Кемзчик🫡