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A review by jpegben
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
4.5
Everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will 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?
Bulgakov is a writer I love more and more as I spend more time with his oeuvre. The White Guard is a monument to the power of storytelling. It's also an exceptional work among what Bulgakov has written as his most personal, most tragic novel. A book which almost bursts with yearning for times which were easier and simpler, places he knew and loved, and people who truly understood and accepted him.
This novel is undoubtedly deeply political and historical. Bulgakov's prose is grand and searching in the best way possible. He meshes the epic language of the ancient chronicle with the personal, incidental, and mundane. In doing so, he catalogues the decaying, corrupt splendour of the bankrupt Tsarist state, the blood and the iron of Petlyura's uncompromising nationalism, and the dawning red sun of Bolshevik revolutionary fervour. Yet, it is fundamentally the story of the Turbin family, of Alexei, Nikolka, and Elena, and everyone they love and respect. These three are some of the most universal characters you will encounter because they're fundamentally ordinary people. And what this book is really about is chaos and fear, betrayal and deceit, confusion, bewilderment, shifting allegiances. It's about what it's like to become caught up in a historical rupture, how it completely fractures your view of the world, but also fractures your world. And how it sometimes draws you in with a sort of magnetic pull:
There is a kind of power which sometimes makes us turn and look over a mountain precipice, which draws us to experience the chill of fear and the edge of the abyss.
The more I read of Bulgakov the more I realise he's a writer of the apocalypse. His experience of not only war and revolution, but Stalinism as well is closer to the apocalypse than most of us will ever come. The imagery which predominates across his works is borrowed from hell because he struggles to find the language to adequately describe and grapple with his own reality. The sense of infernal paranoia, of the chasm opening up, always lurks in the background and I think it may be what sets him apart as a writer:
Dressed in black, his hindquarters encased in leather like a broken beetle, a legless man wriggled between the legs of the crowd, clutching at the trampled snow with his sleeves to pull himself along. Crippled beggars displayed the sores on their bruised shins, shook their heads as though from tic douloureux or paralysis, rolled the whites of their eyes pretending to be blind. Tearing at the heart-strings of the crowd, reminding them of poverty, deceit, despair, hopelessness, and sheer animal misery, creaking and groaning, they howled the refrain of the damned.
Above all though, this book is sad, even heart-rending at times. Elena's desperate entreaties to a higher power during Alexei's illness, Nikolka's grim pilgrimage to the family of his slain superior Colonel Nai-Turs, and the tenderness and humanity of Julie are all episodes which are indelibly imprinted in my mind. Bulgakov, in spite of his distrust of history and utopian promises, is an unerring defender of human dignity and his characters are a potent reminder that while the worst circumstances typically reveal people's base instincts, they also evince moments of true courage and resolve, of real heroism and self-sacrifice.
I closed this book yearning for more which is rare. I wanted to know the fate of the Turbin family, but I got a sense of impending doom. The overwhelming tone of this book is, sadly, one of nostalgia for times past, but also one of defeat. The defeat of a world and a cause and a city and a way of life by history and circumstance and the ruthless mechanics of power:
Only someone who has been defeated knows the real meaning of that word. It is like a party in a house where the electric light has failed; it is like a room in which green mould, alive and malignant, is crawling all over the wallpaper; it is like the wasted bodies of rachitic children, it is like rancid cooking oil, like the sound of women's voices shouting obscene abuse in the dark. It is, in short, like death.
It is controversial, perhaps even heretical to say, but I actually prefer The White Guard to the The Master and Margarita. No question I'll revisit this at some point.