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A trip to Kiev cannot be complete without a little Bulgakov. A museum dedicated to the master lies just off of St. Andrew’s Descent, a cobblestone street passing from St. Sophia’s cathedral down to the Dneiper. The museum is contained in House No. 13 where, at one time, Mikhail Bulgakov and his family lived. While “The White Guard�� is not as widely known as “The Master and Margarita�� (which Salman Rushdie drew upon heavily for “Midnight’s Children��), it provides a better sense of Ukraine and, particularly, Kiev.

House No. 13 in Kiev provides the place, while 1918 and Ukrainian civil war provides the setting. The story is about the survival of the Turbin family in the midst of this upheaval. Bulgakov’s writing is transcendent:

For many years before her death, in the house at No. 13 St. Alexei’s Hill, little Elena, Alexei the eldest and baby Nikolka had grown up in the warmth of the tiled stove that burned in the dining-room. How often they had followed the story of Peter the Great in Holland, ‘The Shipwright of Saardam��, portrayed on its glowing hot dutch tiles; how often the clock had played its gavotte; and always towards the end of December there had been a smell of pine-needles and candles burning on evergreen branches..…But clocks are fortunately quite immortal, as immortal as the Shipwright of Saardam, and however bad the times might be, the tiled Dutch stove, like a rock of wisdom, was always there to radiate life and warmth. (p.10)

The tiled stove, upon which many political and apolitical messages are written, is nearly a character in its own right. The life it gives is not only comfort, but humor too:

Then printed [on the stove:] in capitals, in Nikolka’s hand:
I herby forbid the scribbling of nonsense on this stove. Any comrade found guilty of doing so will be shot and deprived of civil rights. Signed: Abraham Goldblatt,
Ladies, Gentlemen’s and Women’s Tailor.
Commissar, Podol District Committee.
30th January 1918.

Bulgakov’s mastery of these slices of life make this an ideal book for reading while in Kiev. The city comes alive with a personality that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Reading how things were, while seeing how things are makes both the past and the present striking.

This book has not only history, but action too. The stakes are incredibly high. Characters are shot, they are robbed; characters live, they die. The politics of the novel provide a roiling backdrop, though I do not think politics is the point. The intersection of politics and daily life, particularly when politics has brought war, is a fascinating topic and one that Bulgakov explores, but never in a heavy-handed manner. The political is merely backdrop to the personal:

Something had settled in Alexei’s chest like a stone and he whistled as he breathed, drawing in through bared teeth a sticky, thin stream of air that barely penetrated to his lungs. He had long ago lost consciousness and neither saw nor understood what was going on around him. Elena stood and looked. The professor took her by the arm and whispered:
‘Go now, Elena Vasilievna, we’ll do all there is to do.��
Elena obeyed and went out. But the professor did not do anything more. (p. 275)

This moment, to me, was perfect. Bulgakov has captured the essence of this type of situation. The only thing the professor could do for Alexei was to reassure Elena.

Bulgakov brilliantly sketches even minor characters. Outside of House No. 13, a war is raging. Several family members are involved and, in this way, the reader is provided a view of the wider world and the characters that inhabit it. Perhaps my favorite is this troubling scene in which the janitor, drafted into service as coroner, is helping Nikolka, the younger brother, find Colonel Nais-Turs, Nikolka’s fallen comrade-in-arms.

Moving carefully in order not to slip on the floor, Fyodor grasped Nais-Turs by the head and pulled hard. A flat-chested, broad-hipped woman was lying face down across Nai’s stomach. There was a cheap little comb in the hair at the back of her neck, glittering dully, like a fragment of glass. Without stopping what he was doing Fyodor deftly pulled it out, dropped it into the pocket of his apron and gripped NaiTurs under the armpits. As it was pulled out of the pile his head lolled back, his sharp, unshaven chin pointed upwards and one arm slipped from the janitor’s grasp. (p.271)

Bulgakov keeps the plot taut and the reader engaged. This book requires little suspension of disbelief. The White Guard is realist, unlike the much more fanciful “The Master and Margarita.�� Bulgakov does, however, add a touch of the supernatural. And while the book is political enough to have been suppressed by Stalin, the question of which of the three sides fighting the war is “right�� is never really posed, much less answered. The interesting questions all pertain to the individual and, more, to a family trying to survive a civil war. The primary loyalties are personal which, in Ukraine as elsewhere, reflects reality. The book is ambivalent toward political loyalties and the revolutions borne of having putting those loyalties before the personal. The author, as surely as the characters, must have had little enthusiasm for revolutionary politics.

In the end, perhaps the highest praise I can give is that it would be difficult to read “The White Guard�� without becoming attached to the Turbin family. Perhaps, this, more than any overt politics, is why the novel was banned in the Stalinist Soviet Union.