The White Guard, Chapters 16–20

The stars will remain when even the shadows of our bodies and of our deeds no longer remain on this earth.

This post is the fourth and last post 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 | Part 3

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Chapter Sixteen — The Cathedral and the Crowd

By Rbrechko - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

We begin in St Sophia Cathedral, Kiev. The choir sings “Long may he live!” for Petlyura. There’s an atmosphere of expectation and confusion, which Bulgakov conveys skillfully, using dialogue to emphasise the uncertainty among the crowd.

“God, if only we could get out of here now… I need some air!”

“I won’t make it; I’m going to die.”

There’s some vivid imagery:

Through the dark lancet windows of the multi-storeyed bell tower, which had once warned of the imminent arrival of the slit-eyed Tatars, the small bells could be seen thrashing about and howling like fierce dogs on a chain.

Is Petlyura in the cathedral or out on the square? Nobody seems sure.

The nationalist army arrives in the square for a parade: the Blue Division, the Galicians, a brass band, rank upon rank of soldiers, Cossack rifle regiments, Haydamak Cossack infantry. The cavalry rides in, led by Colonel Bolbotun and Kozyr-Leshko, who is in a bad mood because Nai-Turs reduced his numbers in the shoot-out that cost him his life. There’s the Black Sea Hetman Mazeppa Troop, which nearly defeated Peter the Great at Poltava. Ten cavalry regiments are followed by artillery, mortars and howitzers. Four armoured cars bring up the rear.

Nikolka finds a vantage point beside a peasant woman in felt boots. The crowd turns on two officers: Captain Pleshko and a pale-faced man.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument, Kyiv. By Star61 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The sun breaks through the clouds, bathing the scene in bright red light. Bulgakov describes the statue of Bogdan, illuminated amid the chaos, as a speaker addresses the crowd. His speech begins as an oratory to the Ukrainian People’s Republic, but it quickly devolves into Bolshevik rhetoric. The crowd surges forward to seize him, but he escapes in the confusion. We learn the speaker is Shchur, joined by Ensign Shpolyansky—the man who sabotaged the armoured vehicles with sugar—and a third, unnamed person with fair hair and a fur collar. Bulgakov gives us no further details about Shchur; he’s a parody, a mouthpiece for empty slogans. His Ukrainian name (Щур) literally means “great-grandfather”—an archaic, rural term. Bulgakov almost certainly chose it for its faintly ridiculous tone.

As for the unnamed third figure, we’re never told who he is. Scholars generally read him as a generic political hanger-on — possibly a clerk or agitator from the Petlyurist headquarters, representing the crowd of nonentities that revolution always seems to bring forward. He could even be a cypher, standing in for the countless nameless voices who follow whichever leader is ascendant.

Some commentators (e.g. L. Milne, Bulgakov: The Novelist-Playwright, 1977) have suggested he might symbolise the “everyman” whose moral void enables demagogues like Shchur, serving as a foil to the Turbins’ integrity.

We then follow “two figures in student uniforms,” one of whom we learn is Karas. The tall one says:

“Serves him right — just what was needed. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Karas: the Bolsheviks are brilliant — I mean it, absolutely brilliant.”

The speaker is almost certainly Myshlayevsky. Bulgakov deliberately leaves him unnamed, signalling the shift from individuals to types as the City changes hands. Characters are in disguise, fading into the mist as their old world disappears. They head off to Tamara’s for a drink.

Chapter Seventeen — The Body of Nai-Turs

We’re back with Nikolka as he sets off on his mission to find Nai-Turs’ family and inform them of his noble death. The crowds on St Sophia Square get in his way, forcing him to take a circuitous route to Malo-Provalnaya Street. He finds the apartment and rings the bell. He’s invited in, but he doesn’t get as far as informing Nai-Turs’ family of his news before his mother guesses why he’s come.

Nikolka accompanies Nai-Turs’ sister, Irina, to retrieve Nai-Turs’ body and ensure he receives a proper funeral. They bribe the mortuary janitor to bring them inside. Bulgakov’s gruesome description draws from his medical background:

Nikolka could dimly make out something that he had never seen before in his life: row upon row of naked human corpses lying one next to the other like stacks of wood, emitting an unbearable stench in spite of the sal ammoniac.

I won’t share the rest of the paragraph—it’s grim reading, the horrors of war writ large. They find the body, place it in a coffin, and Nikolka, overwhelmed, feels a sense of calm at having fulfilled his mission.

“That is my son. Thank you.”

When he heard this, Nikolka burst into tears again and went out of the chapel into the snow. All around him … lay the night and the snow, and overhead the Milky Way and the stars, like crosses.

Chapter Eighteen — Fever and Faith

Back at the Turbins’ apartment, Alexei is gravely ill with typhus. The doctor tells Yelena, “There’s very little hope.” Yelena realises this means none at all:

Yelena’s feet grew cold standing there, and for a moment she was overcome by the sense of depression and gloom pervading the purulent, camphor-ridden air in the room…

Hands up if you had to look up purulent 🙋🏻‍♂️.

Yelena prays to the Virgin Mother, and Bulgakov gives us one of his most striking scenes of spiritual realism. Whether divine or psychological, the intervention feels real — Alexei’s fever breaks, and life returns to the flat.

Chapter Nineteen — Recovery and Revelation

Peturra. His sojourn in the City had lasted for forty-seven days.

This opening line reminds us of just how short a timespan the novel covers—so much change in such a short time.

Alexei is out of his sick bed, but his illness has changed him. It’s only February and the City is beset by a blizzard. Alexei is looking out the window, his head filled with thoughts…

…grim and cheerless, but always lucid. His head seemed to him to be a light and empty vessel, as if it were some alien box sitting on his shoulders, so that these thoughts appeared to be coming from somewhere outside him, in a sequence that they themselves had determined.

He sees a patient. It’s Rusakov, remember, the syphilitic man we met in Chapter Nine? He’s come to be cured, having been sent by Father Alexander. He’s turned to God and religion, something that Alexei warns him against. Rusakov talks of the precursor of the Antichrist, whom he identifies as Shpolyansky, the one with the sugar in the fuel tanks. Seemingly, he’s gone off to Moscow to bring back a host of fallen angels (Bolsheviks), behind whom is the face of Satan (Trotsky).

“But just at this moment a time of suffering is upon us, the like of which no one has ever seen before. And it will be with us very soon.”

Alexei visits Julia, bringing her a bracelet of his mother’s to thank her for saving his life. He asks about the man in her photograph, which he first saw while recuperating at her apartment—it’s Shpolyansky. Julia says he’s her cousin, but we can read between the lines: he’s her lover. Bulgakov remarks that Shpolyansky is the chairman of the Magnetic Triolet, a fictional literary salon of the type Bulgakov loved to lampoon, marking Shpolyansky as a poseur, part of the decadent intelligentsia, a hedonist out for his own ends.

Alexei leaves, but we sense he’ll be back. He runs into Nikolka, who has just left the Nai-Turs family on the same street—he seems to be forming a relationship with Nai-Turs’ sister.

They return home and enjoy a meal as in old times.

And nobody sitting at the table was wearing epaulettes, all epauletttes having turned to dust and been blown away by the blizzard.

Vasilisa brings a letter for Yelena, and Nikolka notes how happy he seems.

“Perhaps money stops people from being nice. Take this room for example: nobody has any money and everybody’s nice.”

It’s a letter from Olya in Warsaw, telling Yelena that she saw Talberg and that he’s going to Paris and intends to remarry. Alexei is furious and tears Talberg’s photo from its frame, ripping it into pieces.

Chapter Twenty — Mars Ascendant

Great and terrible was the Year of Our Lord 1918, but the year 1919 was still more terrible.

Bulgakov mirrors the novel’s opening line: symmetry and foreboding. A Cossack soldier beats a Jew to death with a ramrod — a brief, brutal image of senseless violence. Above, Mars glows red in the night sky:

And at the very moment that the man lying on the ground died, the star of Mars in the frozen heights above the outskirts of the City suddenly exploded with a deafening roar, spattering fire.

Mars, the god of war, links the opening and closing chapters, a cosmic witness to humanity’s folly. In this second instance, ‘far off Moscow,’ presages the coming Bolshevik storm.

The Cossack soldiers ride out and the City falls quiet.

But why had it happened? What was it all for? Nobody can tell. But will anyone pay for all the bloodshed?
No. No one.

Alexei has a dream in which he dies. It makes me think of the Tears for Fears lyric from Mad World: and the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had. It certainly is a mad world. He awakens, hears Myshlayevsky and Karas’s snoring, and goes back to sleep. The City is safe… for now.

Vasilisa is also dreaming. His dream starts happily, as he watches the shoots of his vegetable plants growing in his allotment, but then monster pigs come and destroy it. Prophetic. The Bolsheviks are coming.

The spirit of sleep then flies off to a railway platform at Darnitsa, on the left bank of the Dnieper. There’s an armoured train waiting on track no. 3. It’s depicted as an armoured monster of sorts, with incandescent coals overflowing from its ‘womb’, while ‘its blunt snout was silently pointed at the forests lying along the bank of the Dnieper.’

People in furs and greatcoats run across the busy platform. We follow an anonymous soldier as he struggles with the cold while he’s on sentry duty; he dreams of the warm bunk that awaits him on the troop carrier when his sentry duty ends. We learn the armoured train’s name—Proletarian. The soldier looks up at the stars and sees the five-pointed star of Mars. He lowers the butt of his rifle from exhaustion and falls into a dream. Exhausted, he lowers his rifle and drifts into a dream of his home village. An inner voice tells him he’ll freeze to death, and he resumes pacing. Moonlight shines on the five-pointed star of his uniform.

History’s wheel is turning again. While the Turbins sleep, the next chapter is about to begin: February 1919, when the Bolsheviks crossed the Dnieper and took Kiev. In Bulgakov’s time, Darnitsa rail station was a relatively new junction, linking Kiev with the Moscow-Bryansk line and connected by the Darnitsa Bridge (built in 1868–1870 and destroyed by the Soviets in 1941). A modern bridge now stands in its place.

The NEW Darnytskyi auto-rail bridge in Kiev, not to be confused with the old, railroad-only Darnytskyi Bridge, by Leonid Andronov - Untitled, CC BY 3.0

Book of Revelation

We join Rusakov as he reads from the Book of Revelation. We get a quotation about the apocalypse, once again mirroring a quotation from early in the novel. Bulgakov employs symmetry again, underscoring the novel’s central theme as the horsemen of the apocalypse descend on the City, destroying the old Orthodox, Imperial, civilised order. Yet Revelation also offers a test of faith and endurance. Talberg and the Hetman failed where the Turbins stood firm. The passage Rusakov reads brings him peace:

instead of fear, he felt awe and the wisdom of submissiveness. He felt at peace.

Yelena then has a nightmare of bloodshed and death, and she awakens shouting for Nikolka.

Finally, Petka Shcheglov, the boy from next door, dreams of a diamond globe raining droplets and bursts out laughing with joy. There’s hope that the children will see a better world.

Bulgakov ends the novel under the canopy of stars, highlighting the insignificance of man’s petty wars and struggles. If only we would look up and reflect for a moment.

The stars will remain when even the shadows of our bodies and of our deeds no longer remain on this earth. […] Why then do we not wish to direct our gaze towards them? Why?

It’s a powerful question with which to end the novel and one that I find comforting—when I remember to do it. I get a similar feeling when I’m hiking in Scotland’s mountains.

Translators’ Choices

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

Purulent was too good a word to ignore, so let’s see how the others translated it.

Original: Еленины ноги похолодели, и стало ей туманно-тоскливо в гнóйном, камфарном, сытном воздухе спальни. Но это быстро прошло.

Cockrell: Yelena’s feet grew cold standing there, and for a moment she was overcome by the sense of depression and gloom pervading the purulent, camphor-ridden air in the room, but this soon passed.

Glenny: Elena’s legs turned cold and she felt overcome with a moment of dull despair in the reeking, camphor-laden air of the bedroom, but the feeling quickly passed.

Schwartz: Elena’s feet were cold, and she felt a vague melancholy in the bedroom’s thick, purulent, camphorous air. This passed quickly, however.

The close

Let’s take a look at the novel's closing to get a feel for the different translations. It’s such a powerful ending.

Original: Но он не страшен. Все пройдет. Страдания, муки, кровь, голод и мор. Меч исчезнет, а вот звёзды останутся, когда и тени наших тел и дел не останется на земле . Нет ни одного человека, который бы этого не знал. Так почему же мы не хотим обратить свой взгляд на них? Почему?

Cockrell: But it is not to be feared. Everything will pass — suffering, torment, blood, hunger and plague. The sword will disappear, but the stars will remain when even the shadows of our bodies and of our deeds no longer remain on this earth. There is not a single person who does not know this. Why then do we not wish to direct our gaze towards them? Why?

Glenny: 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 still 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?

Schwartz: But this isn’t frightening. All this will pass. The sufferings, agonies, blood, hunger, and wholesale death. The sword will go away, but these stars will remain when even the shadows of our bodies and our affairs are long gone from this earth. There is not a man who does not know this. So why are we reluctant to turn our gaze to them? Why?

Final Thoughts

This was my second time reading the novel in as many months. My biggest challenge was my lack of historical context, something Bulgakov’s contemporary readers would have had no trouble with. The plot covers just forty-seven days, set during one of the most turbulent and complex periods in modern European history. Its repercussions continue into the present day, so reading deeply, as we have here, has given me more context for understanding the current conflict in the region.

Historical fiction is one of my favourite genres: it places me in the midst of history through its characters in a way that non-fiction cannot, truly bringing it to life.

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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?