The White Guard, Chapters 11–15

"Clearly, once you have your epaulettes ripped off that spells disaster."

This post is the third of four discussing Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. I intend to host a live video call for paid subscribers on Tuesday, 4 November at 8 p.m. UK time.

Part 1 | Part 2

Chapter Eleven

Nikolka leads the Third Detachment to the crossroads as ordered by the voice on the phone. There’s nobody there. Gunfire sounds all around. Suddenly, a group of soldiers comes running towards Nikolka’s detachment. Are they the enemy? No—it turns out to be cadets from the Constantine Military Academy. They drop down and fire, then throw away their weapons, tear off their officer’s epaulettes and run, urging Nikolka’s men to do the same.

Nikolka reminds me of Nikolai Rostov in War and Peace, particularly in this scene:

Nikolka stood still for a moment, totally stupefied. Then, immediately, he took a grip on himself, one thought flashing through his brain like lightning: “This is my chance to become a hero.”

It’s interesting that they share a name and are about the same age.

Colonel Nai-Turs tears off Nikolka’s epaulettes and orders him to run. He responds, “I don’t wish to, Colonel.” Nai-Turs rattles off machine-gun fire at the Petlyurists, and Nikolka stays with him. Nai-Turs is hit and dies in Nikolka’s arms. His dying words are, “Stop being so damned heloic… I’m dying … Maro-Plovarnaya Street.” So now Nikolka now knows his address. Crawling to safety, he takes Nai-Turs’ Colt pistol.

As he’s escaping through the courtyards, a caretaker with a ginger beard attacks him; Nikolka fights back. The pistol won’t fire—later he realises the safety catch was on—so he beats the man with the butt of it, coolly and decisively:

The rage that had been enveloping Nikolka’s brain like a red blanket suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by an extraordinary sense of total control. He grinned like a young wolf, the wind and frost gushing into his hot body.

That’s some good translation right there!

He makes it to the crossroads that lead to the lower part of the City in Podol, after discovering that he’d had the safety catch on on the Colt pistol when it fires unexpectedly.

We get scenes of the chaos as the locals lock themselves away from the fighting. Nikolka bumps into another cadet:

A young cadet in a grey greatcoat with white epaulettes emblazoned with the gold letter V emerged solemnly from the entrance to a grey stone building.

The letter V here depicts a cadet from the Vladimir Military Academy in Kiev. Bulgakov tells us earlier in the text that there were four Imperial Military Academies in the city before the Revolution. The Vladimir Military Academy was an officer-training school for young men just like Nikolka.

The four academies were:

Kiev’s officer class was drawn from these schools: sons of landowners, professionals and middle-class families, trained in the Imperial spirit of honour and service. Many of them, disorientated by the collapse of the old army, formed the core of the White Guard units Bulgakov describes in the novel.

So when you see the white epaulettes with the gold V, Bulgakov is evoking not just one school, but an entire lost world of these young cadets, the last generation of Imperial officers.

Back Home

As Nikolka nears home, he sees boys tobogganing down the hill, oblivious to advancing Petlyurist troops:

“Look at them, tobogganing like that, without a care in the world,” thought Nikolka in astonishment…

When he asks what’s happening, they say they’re “getting their own back on the officers.” Children echoing Revolution.

Nikolka reaches the flat but Alexei hasn’t returned. Certain he’s dead, Nikolka tells Yelena he wants to go up to the square by St Andrew’s Church—” You can see all of Podol from there.”

The Turbins’ flat sits on St Alexei’s Hill (Andriyivskyy Descent), the slope between Kiev’s Upper and Lower City. The boys toboggan down that same hill. Bulgakov places the family literally between the cultured upper world of the intelligentsia and the rougher, popular world below—a metaphor for their historical predicament.

The Captain with the long, pointed nose

A staff captain in an abandoned hut five miles from the city receives a call to open fire on the woods. His troops have deserted. He destroys the weapons and walks for hours, only to be killed by passing cavalry, one of many remnants of the old guard—abandoned and hopeless.

Nikolka’s nightmare

Nikolka sleeps. He dreams of being caught in a nightmare cobweb, and he can’t break free. He awakens to an apparition that turns out not to be an apparition at all, but Lariosik. He’s been sent by his mother and has brought a letter for Yelena. We learn at the beginning of Chapter Twelve that he’s Talberg’s nephew. He tells Nikolka that he arrived at the same time as Alexei. They send for the doctor. Alexei’s got a fever, but his wound isn’t too bad—no bones broken or arteries severed. Wait, what wound? We haven’t covered that in the book yet, have we?

Chapter Twelve

Alexei is in bed, ill. He asks who Lariosik is. They decide to let him stay, despite his clumsiness—he smashes the blue dinner service by accident—and he has a canary. It’s an odd detail to have a guest turn up with a canary.

Vladimir Lakshin claims that the canary, as well as the guitar and the lampshade, serves as a symbol of nostalgia for pre-revolutionary peace and a gentle, secure way of life, a world that the characters desperately long for amid civil war.¹

Three bugbears of the time—signs of vulgarity: a guitar, a lampshade and a cage with a canary, like some quintessence of “philistinism”—are restored by Bulgakov to the rank of legitimate, and even poetic, possessions. Nikolka’ s guitar thrums alluringly; Lariosik, newly arrived from Zhitomir, needs “only a little seed for the bird” for his happiness to be complete. And the lampshade is accorded a status worthy of an ode: “Never, never take the shade off a lamp. A lampshade is something sacred” (Bulgakov 1,196; WG, 26).

Lariosik recounts his journey from Zhitomir by train, where he successfully passed through the checkpoint by claiming to be an ornithologist.

Clock imagery

Screenshot from 2012 TV Adaptation, depicting Nikolka and Anyuta with a clock between them

Lariosik recounts his journey from Zhitomir, claiming to be an ornithologist at the checkpoint. Bulgakov then describes each character’s mood through clock imagery—Yelena’s half-past five melancholy, Nikolka’s tense twenty-to-one, Anyuta’s twenty-five-to-five longing, and Lariosik’s bright noon optimism.

Alexei’s fever and delirium are rendered through shifting metaphors of mercury and time:

This feeling of anxiety had come and squatted on the blanket in a great, grey lump, but now it had turned into yellowish strands, drifting around like seaweed in water.

The description of Alexei’s delirium is beautifully done. He hallucinates a mortar in his room and a mysterious woman, Julia. After the doctor’s injection, the fever recedes, taking the time on the faces from a dangerous half-past five to twenty to five.

The sentries walked up and down on guard, for man has unwittingly brought towers, alarm bells and weapons into the world for one purpose only: to maintain peace among men and to preserve hearth and home.

Nikolka wipes off some of the graffiti from the tiled Dutch stove. He then, with Lariosik’s ‘help’, hides the pistols, epaulettes, and a photo of Tsarevich Alexei in an old tin and, with a piece of sugar-cane cord, hangs it from a hook in the wall between the two buildings. It’s ostensibly inaccessible from outside ‘to anyone but a small boy’. The revolver has been fired six times—a quiet bit of foreshadowing.

Chapter Thirteen

We now learn how Alexei was shot. Leaving Madame Anjou’s shop, he steps into deserted Kreshchatik:

Empty streets in general leave a very unpleasant impression, and this one in particular gnawed away at him, filling him with a nasty premonition.

He’s making his way home. The narrator tells us that all he had to do was turn to the left and make his way along the back streets, but he doesn’t.

There is this force in life that sometimes impels you to look down from a great height into an abyss. You’re drawn towards the cold, towards the steep drop.

He has an urge to take a look at the museum and soon runs into Petlyurist troops. They recognise him as an officer and give chase, yelling at each other in Ukrainian. How is the language dealt with? See the section on Translators’ Choices below. He runs, firing his Browning pistol as he goes. He escapes around a corner but soon realises that he’s been hit in the arm. He’s almost certainly done for, until a voice calls out to him. It’s a young woman, beckoning him to safety. This is the Julia that he mentioned in his delirium. She leads him through a labyrinth of courtyards, a description that evokes a portal fantasy or a Homeric epic.

Slipping and sliding a little in his felt boots … he staggered … towards the woman’s outstretched arms… he practically fell through a narrow gateway in the black wooden wall. The situation was immediately transformed.

She takes Alexei into her home and nurses him until he’s well enough to make his way home. It’s a calming and somewhat romantic scene in Julia’s home. They even kiss. It’s like a warm oasis from the chaos of the city streets.

Chapter Fourteen

Myshlayevsky returns in civilian clothes. Anyuta is overjoyed. Shervinsky arrives soon after, and the two men quarrel about the Hetman’s cowardice.

“If I were to come across His Excellency and His Highness, I would grab one by the left leg and the other by the right, turn them upside down and bang their heads on the road until I got tired of it.”

Karas manages to de-escalate the situation, reminding them both of Alexei’s condition. They hear voices coming from Vasilisa’s apartment below. He has guests? We shall see.

They have a game of cards, and some interesting banter goes down, including a line about how Leo Tolstoy would have made a good artillery officer.

You can write a novel out of sheer boredom… Nothing to do in the winter…

Bulgakov must have smiled while writing that. He and Tolstoy overlapped by two decades, though they never met.

The Turbins seek comfort “behind the cream-coloured curtains,” an image echoing Lakshin’s point about the sanctity of domestic peace—the guitar, the canary, the lampshade.

A knock breaks the calm. It’s only a telegram from Lariosik’s mother. Relief—until another knock follows. This time, Vasilisa from the flat below.

Foreshadowing

It’s interesting to note the underlying sense of fear that permeates life in Kiev and how it foreshadows the culture of fear that came with the Soviet period. Even under the Tsars, there was the Okhrana, the secret police created in 1881 following the assassination of Alexander II. Bulgakov, writing in the early 1920s, captures how that sense of peril had already seeped into daily existence.

Chapter Fifteen

We’re in Vasilisa’s apartment eating brains, not my idea of a good time. Nor is it Vasilisa’s. There’s a paragraph about how much he wants to punch his wife, but he knows better. What’s that about? Is it just a device to let us know how unhappy their marriage is? Perhaps it’s meant to indicate the stress ordinary people are under. They’re sticking banknotes to the underside of the kitchen table, and Vasilisa asks his wife if she knows about the officer searches that are going on in the City.

There’s a knock at the door. Uh oh. Remember back in my first post, I suggested that you remember the scene from Chapter Three where the ‘grey, unkempt, lupine figure’ was watching from the acacia tree? Well, here he is, the wolf-like man with the wolfish voice, along with two others. They claim to be Petlyurists from HQ with a warrant to search the flat. One of them has a well-greased Browning pistol. Ring any bells? Nikolka’s tin, hanging from the hook in the gap between the buildings that was inaccessible, except ‘to a small boy’? It looks like it wasn’t so inaccessible after all. These are thieves who come to rob Vasilisa after seeing his cache. Vasilisa thinks he’s going to be killed, but he isn’t. Then the wolfish man picks up a clock:

“Clocks are necessary things — to be without a clock is like having no arms,” the wolf remarked to the disfigured man. […] In the middle of the night you need to be able to see what the time is.”

After they leave, Myshlayevsky, Lariosik and Karas check on Vasilisa. He’s shaken but alive. As they share brandy and preserves, Vasilisa muses:

“No alarm system can put a stop to the corruption and decadence that is now infecting the hearts of human beings. … I am a Constitutional Democrat, but when I see with my own eyes the way everything is going I become … convinced that only one thing can save us… Autocracy.”

It’s a fascinating political discussion that rings true. From the Tsars to the Communists to Putin, it’s a region that always seems to fall back into the hands of autocratic leaders. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to go into that in any depth; I find it fascinating that Bulgakov would put these words into the mouth of a character.

Translators’ Choices

I have three translations of the novel and always enjoy comparing.

The Petlyurists speak Ukrainian in the novel, and it’s interesting to see how the translators deal with this.

Schwartz explains:

The Ukrainian vocabulary is simple and limited; what is imporant is when Ukrainian is and isn’t spoken. For a Russian speaker, the Ukrainian is entirely understandable and poses no obstacle, so the English reader, too, should both understand and easily pass through those occurrences, which are many. To recreate the Ukrainian’s effect of otherness but not absolute foreignness, I have put the Ukrainian words in italics and quotation marks, since the words are always spoken. (Italics without quotation marks indicate thoughts.)

Idiom

An idiom in Chapter Fifteen offers a good comparison:

Original: Твое поведение в последнее время достигло геркулесовых столбов.

Literally: your recent behaviour has gone beyond the Pillars of Hercules. This is a reference to the promontories on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar, which mythology tells us were created when Hercules split a mountain. Beyond these pillars lies the unknown sea, so Vasilisa’s behaviour has literally gone beyond the pillars into the unknown.

Final Thoughts

These chapters weave chaos and intimacy: battles, fevers, thefts and quiet acts of care. Bulgakov keeps the domestic world alive amid ruin—the lampshade, the guitar, the canary, the clock. The Turbins’ apartment remains a fragile refuge of civilisation in a disintegrating city.

Which translation are you reading? I’d love to hear your thoughts on these chapters in the comments below—what struck you most, or what details lingered after you closed the book?

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Video call

I’m hosting a video call for paid subscribers on Tuesday, 4 November at 8 p.m. UK time. Here is a list of questions for you to consider after our introductions:

1. Opening & Historical Context

   What did you know about Kiev and Ukraine in 1918 before starting The White Guard and how has the novel changed your sense of that time and place?

2. Did the novel help clarify who the various factions were — Hetmanites, Petlyurists, Whites, Reds — or did it make things even more confusing?

3. The Turbin Home
   What role does the Turbin apartment play in the novel — a refuge, a symbol, or something else? What does the tiled Dutch stove represent to you?

4. Family and Loyalty
   How do the Turbins differ from Talberg in terms of their loyalties and moral compass? Do you think Bulgakov is holding Talberg up for judgement?

5. The City as Character
   How does Bulgakov make “the City” feel alive — or dying? What emotions does his portrayal of Kiev evoke?

6. How effectively does Bulgakov draw you into Kiev in December 1918? Did you find it easy to visualise the city and its atmosphere of collapse?

7. Chaos and Cowardice
   Talberg flees while Alexei stays. What does the novel suggest about courage, cowardice and duty in a time of collapse?

8. The Populist Uprising
   How does Bulgakov depict the Petlyurists and the social upheaval they represent? Do you think his portrayal is sympathetic or critical?

9. Dreams and Visions
   What do you make of Alexei’s dream sequences and Bulgakov’s blend of realism with the fantastic? Do they add insight or distraction?

10. Closing Reflections
    Reading The White Guard today, do you see any parallels with the world’s current political and cultural divisions?

11. What do you think Bulgakov wanted readers to feel by the end — despair, faith, survival, or something else?

1. https://www.scribd.com/document/763243384/Bulgakov-The-Novelist-Playwright-Edited-by-Lesley-Milne