The White Guard

10 hrs. 5 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Mikhail Bulgakov

Narrator Georgy Arsenyev

Description

The White Guard is a novel by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov describing the events of the Civil War in Ukraine in late 1918. …And finally, my last traces—in the doomed plays—"Days of the Turbins," "The Flight," and in the novel "The White Guard": the stubborn portrayal of the Russian intelligentsia as the best layer of our country. In particular, the depiction of an intelligent-noble family, cast by the unyielding will of fate during the years of the Civil War into the camp of the White Guard, in the traditions of "War and Peace." Such a portrayal is quite natural for a writer closely connected to the intelligentsia by blood. But in the USSR, this kind of depiction leads the author—along with his heroes—to receive, despite his great efforts to remain impartial between Reds and Whites, an attestation of a White Guard enemy. And once that happens, as everyone understands, he can consider himself finished in the USSR. — A letter from M. A. Bulgakov to the government of the USSR, 1930.