The White Guard

Originally published in 1925, ‘The White Guard’ is an engrossing book in which a Kyiv family is caught up in the Ukrainian War of Independence. Written by Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian writer, medical doctor, and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is acclaimed for his novel The Master and Margarita, which has been called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century and was published posthumously.\ Reds, Whites, German troops, and Ukrainian nationalists battle for control of the city of Kyiv as the war becomes more cataclysmic in Mikhail Bulgakov’s debut novel. Drawing laboriously from the author’s own backgrounds in Ukraine during the period of the Russian Civil War—he witnessed ten changes of government himself—the novel is told from alternating points of view and takes an unusual angle in the conflict between Russian Whites (with whom the Turbin family identify) and Ukrainian nationalists. It elegantly portrays the disarray of a civil war in which there is no good or evil, only loyalty to one’s friends, family, and convictions.\ First appearing in partial form in a Soviet-era literary journal, the story was turned into a play under the title The Days of the Turbins—a long-running hit that Stalin himself attended twenty times—yet was not published widely until decades after Bulgakov’s death.