The White Guard, Chapters 1–5

"Oh, Santa Claus, glistening with snow and happiness! Oh, mother of ours, glittering queen! Where are you?"

This is the first of four posts in which I’ll walk through The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov. I’m a bit behind schedule due to a family funeral, but I still intend to complete the series by the end of October and host a live video call for paid subscribers on Tuesday, 4 November at 8 p.m. UK time. My goal is to publish the second post at the start of next week.

Welcome to Kiev in December 1918, and to the Turbin family’s world amid historic upheaval. Though the city is in crisis, what makes Bulgakov’s story compelling is his focus on daily life — on emotion, loyalty and survival as the old world collapses.

At the time Bulgakov wrote, readers would have known the political background instinctively. That gap in my own knowledge made it harder to enter the novel: who was Petlyura? What was a hetman? Why were Germans in Kiev? This was an era of military fragmentation and moral confusion — whose aftershocks still echo today. Yet Bulgakov’s craftsmanship in voice and character draws even the modern reader into his lost world.

(If you missed my earlier background post on the historical setting, you might want to start there.)

---

Background for The White Guard Read-along

---

Main Characters (Chapters 1–5)

• Yelena Turbina, 24 — loosely based on Bulgakov’s sister

• Sergei Ivanovich Talberg, 31 — colonel under Hetman Skoropadsky, Yelena’s husband (inspired by Bulgakov’s brother-in-law)

• Alexei Turbin, 28 — the elder brother, medical officer (a stand-in for Bulgakov)

• Nikolka Turbin, 17 — the youngest brother (reflecting Bulgakov’s younger sibling)

Their flat is modeled on the Bulgakov family home in Kiev, now the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum.

Prymasal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Tiled Dutch Stove

One of the novel’s most memorable fixtures is the tiled Dutch stove, which Bulgakov almost turns into a character. It’s even given a name, from The Shipwright of Saardam by P. R. Furman. The stove both warms the room and anchors the narrative. On its tiles Nikolka has scrawled graffiti, including — “Thrash Petlyura!” — a quick shorthand for the Turbins’ loyalties.

“… the tiled Dutch stove continued, even in the most difficult times, to radiate warmth and life.”

The Shipwright of Saardam, (source)

The stove, like the family’s clocks and books, represents cultural continuity. These details — the smell of old chocolate, the ticking clocks, the lamplight — form a cocoon of civilization even as snow and chaos encroach outside.

The 2012 television adaptation depicts the stove wonderfully, glowing amid blizzards and fear.

The tiled Dutch stove and graffiti.

But exactly how were they to live? How?

The warmth shatters with descriptions of blizzards and death. The family turns to Father Alexander, who tells them that “despair must not be permitted,” and we end the chapter with a chilling reading from the Book of Revelation:

And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.

Chapter Two: Guitar, Gunfire and Fissures

Chapter Two opens with Alexei strumming a seven-string guitar — the instrument that dominated Russian and Ukrainian music before the six-string Spanish guitar took over in the 1920s. In Vladimir Basov’s 1976 adaptation The Days of the Turbins, that same seven-string is used, matching the period perfectly.

Gunfire interrupts the moment. Though the source isn’t yet clear, we soon learn that Nikolka has enlisted — he wears a cadet’s epaulettes — and that Talberg is late returning. He is accompanying a train carrying the Hetman’s gold reserves and state documents, the wealth of the collapsing Ukrainian government. In effect, Talberg is helping the regime — and its German backers — flee Kiev.

Yelena’s marriage to him has already fractured:

“Ever since the day of Yelena’s wedding … it was as if a crack in the vase of the Turbins’ life had formed …”

Political differences are at the heart of it. Talberg is an opportunist. In March 1917, he was the first to wear a red armband, signalling revolutionary sympathy; now he serves the Hetman, and by the chapter’s end he is preparing to desert to Denikin’s White Army on the Don. His allegiances shift with the wind.

At a quarter past ten the bell rings — not Talberg, but Lieutenant Myshlayevsky, frostbitten and furious after defending Kiev from Petlyura’s advancing troops. (He will become important later.)

When Talberg finally appears, he announces that he’s leaving the city with the retreating Germans. As he packs, Bulgakov gives us one of the novel’s great lines:

“Never ever remove a shade from a lamp! A shade is sacred. Never scuttle like a rat into the unknown and away from adversity. Sit by the lampshade and doze or read. Let the storm howl outside and wait for people to come to you.”

Talberg, of course, does the opposite. He scuttles into the storm while the Turbins stay behind by the lamplight.

The “Baggy Trousers”

Bulgakov writes:

“When … people had begun to appear on its streets without boots, but wearing wide baggy trousers under their grey military coats …”

This refers to the Petlyurist troops — the populist, largely peasant Ukrainian forces replacing the disciplined German and Hetmanite soldiers. Their loose sharovary (traditional Cossack trousers) contrasted sharply with the polished boots of officers. For the Turbins’ middle-class, Russophone world, these “baggy trousers” symbolised the collapse of order and the rise of the masses — civilization giving way to chaos.

By Ф.Г.Солнцев (1801—1892) - [1], Public Domain

Manuscripts don’t burn

Later that night, we see the tattered piano score of Gounod’s Faust. It’s a beautiful scene that reminds me of that famous line from Bulgakov’s later masterpiece, The Master and Margarita: ‘manuscripts don’t burn.’

Goodness! Never again will Talberg hear the aria ‘Oh, Almighty God’, or listen to Yelena accompanying Shervinsky! And yet, long after the Turbins and Talberg have departed this earth, pianos will be played, the magnificently costumed Valentin will come onto the stage, the scent of perfume will be redolent in the theatre boxes, and in domestic living rooms women, bathed in lamplight, will play the accompaniment — for Faust, just like the Shipwright of Saardam, will never die.

People perish; art endures. Faust and The Shipwright of Saardam will outlive every regime. Bulgakov’s faith in artistic immortality feels prophetic: here we are, reading him nearly a century later.

And, just like that, while sparks and snowflakes whirl, Talberg is gone.

Chapters 3–5: Secrets, Dreams and Return

Vasilisa and the Hidden Cache

In Chapter Three, we meet Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich, called Vasilisa, the Turbins’ landlord. We witness him carefully hiding a package in a wall. Bulgakov’s brief vignette of hoarding and fear captures the mood of a city without trust or stability.

There’s a scene here that depicts a ‘grey, unkempt, lupine figure [who] climbed down from the acacia branch on which he had been sitting for the last thirty minutes.’ This figure had been observing Vasilisa as he hid his package in the wall. Keep this scene in mind as you read the novel!

Vasilisa pulls a wad of banknotes from his drawer in denominations of 50 Karbovantsy.

The front of the notes depicted a peasant with a drooping moustache armed with a spade, together with a peasant woman carrying a sickle. The reverse side featured the same couple, their reddish faces magnified within an oval frame, the man sporting the same drooping moustache, in the Ukrainian style.

The Karbovanets was the Ukrainian currency from 1917–1920. It was reinstated twice after that, in the periods 1942–45 and 1992–96. I lived and worked in Odesa from 1995 to 1996 and this was the currency in use at that time. The currency was subject to hyperinflation and I used to be paid in millions for my teaching job. Matches and chewing gum were often used as change when buying items from the street kiosks. The Karbovanets was replaced by the hryvnia in 1996, at a rate of 100,000 karbovantsiv to 1 hryvnia.

Let’s get back to Vasilisa. It turns out he’s got quite the horde of cash, bonds and treasure squirrelled away in various places. It must have been a scary time.

A Toast to the Tsar

Back upstairs, Shervinsky and Karas join the Turbins for a night of drinking and debate. Myshlayevsky, drunk and sentimental, raises a toast echoing Emperor Paul I:

“Russia can be sustained by only two things: the Orthodox faith and autocracy!”

Nikolka reports that the Bolsheviks have murdered the imperial family — news from July 1918 that still hasn’t reached everyone in the chaos of December.

The Bonnet and the Dream

Yelena, grieving her husband’s flight, places her red bonnet over the lamp. Bulgakov animates it:

“The bonnet listened … its cheeks suffused with a deep-red colour.”

When she sighs “My husband…,” Alexei mutters the novel’s bluntest verdict:

“He’s simply a bastard, that’s all there is to it.”

Unable to sleep, Alexei reads Dostoyevsky’s The Devils:

“For a Russian, the concept of honour is merely an unnecessary burden.”

He dreams — of absurd figures and of Kiev transformed — in a surreal passage foreshadowing The Master and Margarita.

The City

Chapter Four offers Bulgakov’s panoramic portrait of Kiev at its peak under the Hetman: theatres, cafés, brothels, refugees, officers — a last shimmering moment before collapse.

“The City expanded and swelled, like leavened dough escaping from the pot.”

Among those returning are the Turbin brothers — veterans of the Imperial Russian Army, now adrift. Alexei had served as a medical officer on the South-Western Front against Germany and Austria-Hungary; Nikolka was likely a cadet. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), the front dissolved, the Germans occupied Ukraine, and ex-soldiers flooded home — displaced, hungry and with uncertain futures.

Peasants, Petlyura and the Countryside

Chapter Five brings a jarring scene of Vasilisa’s lust for a milkmaid, then a shift outward to the “myth of Petlyura.” Symon Petlyura, recently released from prison by the Hetman, will soon lead the Directory that overthrows him. Bulgakov captures the peasants’ fury at the Germans, the Hetman and “Moscow.”

Critic Evgeny Dobrenko, in his introduction to Marian Schwartz’s translation, notes that The White Guard is not a simple Reds vs. Whites novel but one of deeper oppositions:

“The central opposition … is city versus countryside: the city as the center of civilization, and the peasantry and the steppe as the embodiment of barbarism.”

It’s a populist cycle: one oppressive order replaced by another. Or, as The Who put it, “Meet the new boss — same as the old boss.”

Following Petlyura’s release came the second great event: Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication (9 November 1918) and the armistice two days later — the signal for the Germans’ withdrawal and the Hetman’s imminent fall.

Alexei’s Dream and Later Editions

The mystical “Alexei’s Dream” scene was omitted from Michael Glenny’s 1971 English translation and restored only in editions published after 1990. In it, Colonel Nai-Turs and Sergeant-Major Zhilin appear to Alexei in heaven, where the Apostle Peter foretells the fall of the Bolsheviks at Perekop (1920) — an event that chronologically lies beyond the novel’s 1918 setting. The episode blurs time, casting the Civil War as a spiritual cycle of suffering and redemption.

Translators’ Choices

I have three translations of the novel and always enjoy comparing. This sentence starts Chapter Two and it’s interesting to see how different translators deal with the word ‘mokhnatiy / мохнатый’.

Original: Итак, был белый, мохнатый декабрь. Он стремительно подходил к половине.

Glenny’s ‘hoar frost’ works, but it’s a common phrase. According to the Woodlands Trust, the word ‘hoar’ comes from old English and the way the ice crystals form makes it look like white hair or a beard¹. But according to my bilingual dictionary, there is a direct translation into Russian of hoar frost, and that would be иней. Translation is always about choices and there are no right or wrong ways of doing it. Maybe a native Russian speaker could tell us if мохнатый sounds as weird as shaggy to describe a winter frost.

Bishop or Rook?

At the start of Chapter Five, translators diverge again:

Original: а за ферзем приходит стремительный легкий слон — офицер…

Here слон means “bishop” in a chess game. Cockrell’s “rook” is likely an error or an interpretive slip, since rook would be ладья. Schwartz and Glenny correctly give “bishop.”

Which translation are you reading?

Let me know in the comments below.

Sources & Further Reading

• Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (esp. Part Four, ch. 12)

• Evgeny Dobrenko, Introduction to Marian Schwartz’s translation (Vintage, 2008)

1. https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2019/02/what-is-hoar-frost/