The White Guard

In “The White Guard,” Bulgakov shows the people and the intelligentsia in the flames of the Civil War in Ukraine. The main character, Aleksey Turbin, though clearly autobiographical, unlike the writer is not a zemstvo doctor—only formally listed for military service—but a real military medic who had seen and endured a great deal during the three years of the world war. To a much greater extent than Bulgakov, he is one of the thousands and thousands of officers who have to make their choice after the revolution: to serve either willingly or unwillingly in the ranks of the warring armies.

In “The White Guard,” two groups of officers are contrasted—those who “hated the Bolsheviks with a hot and direct hatred, the kind that can start a fight,” and “those who returned from the war to their well-worn nests, with the thought—just like Aleksey Turbin—that one should rest and rest and set up not a non-military, but an ordinary human life.” Knowing the results of the Civil War, Bulgakov is on the side of the latter.

The leitmotif of this novel becomes the idea of preserving the House, the home hearth, despite all the upheavals of war and revolution. The Turbins’ home is the real house of the Bulgakovs on Andreevsky Descent, 13.