M.A. Bulgakov twice, in two different works, recalls how his work on the novel began. « white guard» (1925). The hero of the “Theatrical novel” Maksudov says: “It was born at night, when I woke up after a sad dream. I dreamed hometown, snow, winter, the Civil War ... In a dream, a soundless blizzard passed in front of me, and then an old piano appeared and near it people who were no longer in the world. The story “Secret Friend” contains other details: “I pulled my barracks lamp as far as possible to the table and put on a pink paper cap over its green cap, which made the paper come to life. On it I wrote the words: "And the dead were judged according to what was written in the books, according to their deeds." Then he began to write, not yet knowing well what would come of it. I remember that I really wanted to convey how good it is when it's warm at home, the clock that strikes towers in the dining room, sleepy slumber in bed, books and frost ... ”With such a mood, Bulgakov began to create a new novel.

The novel "The White Guard", the most important book for Russian literature, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov began writing in 1922.

In 1922-1924, Bulgakov wrote articles for the newspaper "Nakanune", was constantly published in the railway newspaper "Gudok", where he met I. Babel, I. Ilf, E. Petrov, V. Kataev, Yu. Olesha. According to Bulgakov himself, the idea of ​​the novel The White Guard finally took shape in 1922. During this time there were several important events his personal life: during the first three months of that year, he received news of the fate of his brothers, whom he never saw again, and a telegram about the sudden death of his mother from typhus. During this period, the terrible impressions of the Kyiv years received an additional impetus for embodiment in creativity.

According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Bulgakov planned to create a whole trilogy, and spoke about his favorite book like this: “I consider my novel a failure, although I single it out from my other things, because. I took the idea very seriously." And what we now call the "White Guard" was conceived as the first part of the trilogy and originally bore the names "Yellow Ensign", "Midnight Cross" and "White Cross": "The action of the second part should take place on the Don, and in the third part Myshlaevsky will be in the ranks of the Red Army. Signs of this plan can be found in the text of the "White Guard". But Bulgakov did not write the trilogy, leaving it to Count A.N. Tolstoy ("Walking through the torments"). And the theme of "running", emigration, in "The White Guard" is only hinted at in the history of Thalberg's departure and in the episode of reading Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco".

The novel was created in an era of greatest material need. The writer worked at night in an unheated room, worked impulsively and enthusiastically, terribly tired: “Third life. And my third life blossomed at the desk. The pile of sheets was all swollen. I wrote with both pencil and ink. Subsequently, the author returned to his favorite novel more than once, reliving the past anew. In one of the entries relating to 1923, Bulgakov noted: “And I will finish the novel, and I dare to assure you, it will be such a novel, from which the sky will become hot ...” And in 1925 he wrote: “It will be a terrible pity, if I am mistaken and the “White Guard” is not a strong thing.” On August 31, 1923, Bulgakov informed Yu. Slezkin: “I have finished the novel, but it has not yet been rewritten, it lies in a pile, over which I think a lot. I'm fixing something." It was a draft version of the text, which is said in the "Theatrical Novel": "The novel must be corrected for a long time. You need to cross out many places, replace hundreds of words with others. Big but necessary work!” Bulgakov was not satisfied with his work, crossed out dozens of pages, created new editions and versions. But at the beginning of 1924, he was already reading excerpts from The White Guard with the writer S. Zayaitsky and with his new friends Lyamins, considering the book finished.

The first known reference to the completion of the novel is in March 1924. The novel was published in the 4th and 5th books of the Rossiya magazine in 1925. And the 6th issue with the final part of the novel was not released. According to researchers, the novel The White Guard was completed after the premiere of The Days of the Turbins (1926) and the creation of The Run (1928). The text of the last third of the novel, corrected by the author, was published in 1929 by the Parisian publishing house Concorde. Full text The novel was published in Paris: volume one (1927), volume two (1929).

Due to the fact that the White Guard was not published in the USSR, and foreign editions of the late 1920s were inaccessible in the writer's homeland, Bulgakov's first novel did not receive much press attention. The well-known critic A. Voronsky (1884-1937) at the end of 1925 called The White Guard, together with The Fatal Eggs, works of "outstanding literary quality." The answer to this statement was a sharp attack by the head of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) L. Averbakh (1903-1939) in Rapp's organ - the magazine "At the Literary Post". Later, the production of the play Days of the Turbins based on the novel The White Guard at the Moscow Art Theater in the fall of 1926 turned the attention of critics to this work, and the novel itself was forgotten.

K. Stanislavsky, worried about the passage through censorship of "Days of the Turbins", originally called, like the novel, "The White Guard", strongly advised Bulgakov to abandon the epithet "white", which seemed to many openly hostile. But the writer valued precisely this word. He agreed to “cross”, and “December”, and “blizzard” instead of “guard”, but he did not want to give up the definition of “white”, seeing in it a sign of the special moral purity of his beloved heroes, their belonging to the Russian intelligentsia as parts of the best layer in the country.

The White Guard is largely an autobiographical novel based on the writer's personal impressions of Kyiv in late 1918 - early 1919. The members of the Turbin family reflected character traits Bulgakov's relatives. Turbines - maiden name Bulgakov's grandmothers from the mother's side. The manuscripts of the novel have not survived. Kyiv friends and acquaintances of Bulgakov became the prototypes of the heroes of the novel. Lieutenant Viktor Viktorovich Myshlaevsky was written off from a childhood friend of Nikolai Nikolaevich Syngaevsky.

The prototype of Lieutenant Shervinsky was another friend of Bulgakov's youth - Yuri Leonidovich Gladyrevsky, an amateur singer (this quality also passed to the character), who served in the troops of Hetman Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), but not as an adjutant. Then he emigrated. The prototype of Elena Talberg (Turbina) was Bulgakov's sister, Varvara Afanasievna. Captain Talberg, her husband, has many features in common with the husband of Varvara Afanasievna Bulgakova, Leonid Sergeevich Karuma (1888-1968), a German by birth, a career officer who served at first Skoropadsky, and then the Bolsheviks.

The prototype of Nikolka Turbin was one of the brothers M.A. Bulgakov. The second wife of the writer, Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya-Bulgakova, wrote in her book “Memoirs”: “One of the brothers of Mikhail Afanasyevich (Nikolai) was also a doctor. It is on the personality of my younger brother, Nikolai, that I would like to dwell. The noble and cozy little man Nikolka Turbin has always been dear to my heart (especially based on the novel The White Guard. In the play Days of the Turbins, he is much more schematic). In my life, I never managed to see Nikolai Afanasyevich Bulgakov. This is the youngest representative of the profession chosen in the Bulgakov family - a doctor of medicine, bacteriologist, scientist and researcher, who died in Paris in 1966. He studied at the University of Zagreb and was left there at the department of bacteriology.

The novel was created in a difficult time for the country. Young Soviet Russia, which did not have a regular army, was drawn into the Civil War. The dreams of the hetman-traitor Mazepa, whose name is not accidentally mentioned in Bulgakov's novel, came true. The "White Guard" is based on the events related to the consequences of the Brest Treaty, according to which Ukraine was recognized as an independent state, the "Ukrainian State" was created, headed by Hetman Skoropadsky, and refugees from all over Russia rushed "abroad". Bulgakov in the novel clearly described their social status.

The philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, the writer's cousin, in his book "At the Feast of the Gods" described the death of the motherland as follows: "There was a mighty power, needed by friends, terrible by enemies, and now it is a rotting carrion, from which piece after piece falls off to the delight of a flying crow. In place of the sixth part of the world, there was a fetid, gaping hole ... ”Mikhail Afanasyevich agreed with his uncle in many respects. And it is no coincidence that this scary picture reflected in the article by M.A. Bulgakov "Hot prospects" (1919). Studzinsky speaks about the same in the play "Days of the Turbins": "We had Russia - a great power ..." So for Bulgakov, an optimist and talented satirist, despair and sorrow became the starting points in creating a book of hope. It is this definition that most accurately reflects the content of the novel "The White Guard". In the book “At the Feast of the Gods,” another thought seemed closer and more interesting to the writer: “How Russia will become self-determined largely depends on what Russia will become.” The heroes of Bulgakov are painfully looking for the answer to this question.

In The White Guard, Bulgakov sought to show the people and the intelligentsia in the flames of the Civil War in Ukraine. Main character, Aleksey Turbin, although clearly autobiographical, but, unlike the writer, is not a zemstvo doctor, only formally listed on military service, but a real military doctor who has seen and experienced a lot during the years of the World War. Much brings the author closer to his hero, and calm courage, and faith in old Russia, and most importantly - the dream of a peaceful life.

“Heroes must be loved; if this does not happen, I do not advise anyone to take up the pen - you will get the biggest trouble, just know it, ”the Theater Novel says, and this is the main law of Bulgakov’s creativity. In the novel "The White Guard" he speaks of white officers and intellectuals as ordinary people, reveals their young world of soul, charm, intelligence and strength, shows the enemies as living people.

The literary community refused to recognize the dignity of the novel. Out of almost three hundred reviews, Bulgakov counted only three positive ones, and classified the rest as "hostile and abusive." The writer received rude comments. In one of the articles, Bulgakov was called "a new-bourgeois offspring, splashing poisoned, but impotent saliva on the working class, on its communist ideals."

“Class untruth”, “a cynical attempt to idealize the White Guard”, “an attempt to reconcile the reader with the monarchist, Black Hundred officers”, “hidden counter-revolutionary” - this is not a complete list of characteristics that endowed the “White Guard” with those who believed that the main thing in literature is political position writer, his attitude to the "whites" and "reds".

One of the main motives of the "White Guard" is faith in life, its victorious power. That is why this book, considered forbidden for several decades, found its reader, found a second life in all the richness and brilliance of Bulgakov's living word. Viktor Nekrasov, a writer from Kiev who read The White Guard in the 1960s, quite rightly remarked: “Nothing, it turns out, has faded, nothing has become outdated. It was as if those forty years had never happened... an obvious miracle happened before our eyes, which happens very rarely in literature and far from everyone - a second birth took place. The life of the heroes of the novel continues today, but in a different direction.

"White Guard" (1923-1924) - one of the most famous novels outstanding Russian prose writer Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (1891-1940). The novel is a gripping narrative of the tragic events of 1918 in Ukraine, engulfed in the unrest of the Civil War. The book is intended for the most general audience.

Dedicated to Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya

Light snow began to fall and suddenly fell in flakes.
The wind howled; there was a blizzard. In an instant
the dark sky mingled with the snowy sea. All
disappeared.
- Well, sir, - shouted the coachman, - trouble: a snowstorm!
"Captain's daughter"

And the dead were judged according to what was written in the books
according to your business...

PART ONE

Great was the year and terrible year after the birth of Christ 1918, from the beginning of the second revolution. It was abundant in the sun in summer and snow in winter, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the shepherd's star - evening Venus and red, trembling Mars.
But the days, both in peaceful and bloody years, fly like an arrow, and the young Turbins did not notice how white, shaggy December came in a hard frost. Oh, our Christmas tree grandfather, sparkling with snow and happiness! Mom, bright queen, where are you?
A year after daughter Elena married captain Sergei Ivanovich Talberg, and in the week when the eldest son, Alexei Vasilyevich Turbin, after hard campaigns, service and troubles, returned to Ukraine in the City, in his native nest, a white coffin with his mother's body they took it down the steep Alekseevsky descent to Podol, to the small church of St. Nicholas the Good, on Vzvoz.
When mother was buried, it was May, cherry trees and acacias tightly covered the lancet windows. Father Alexander, stumbling with sadness and embarrassment, shone and sparkled at the golden lights, and the deacon, purple in face and neck, all forged gold to the very toes of his boots, creaking on the welt, gloomily rumbled the words of church farewell to the mother leaving her children.
Alexei, Elena, Talberg and Anyuta, who had grown up in Turbina's house, and Nikolka, stunned by death, with a whirlwind hanging over his right eyebrow, stood at the feet of the old brown Saint Nicholas. Nikolka's blue eyes, set on the sides of a long bird's nose, looked bewildered, slain. Occasionally he erected them on the iconostasis, on the vault of the altar sinking in the twilight, where the sad and mysterious old god ascended, blinking. Why such an insult? Injustice? Why was it necessary to take away the mother when everyone had gathered, when relief had come?
The god flying away into the black, cracked sky did not give an answer, and Nikolka himself did not yet know that everything that happens is always the way it should be, and only for the better.
They sang the burial service, went out to the echoing slabs of the porch and accompanied the mother through the whole huge city to the cemetery, where under the black marble cross the father had long been lying. And they buried my mother. Eh... eh...

For many years before his death, in house N_13 on Alekseevsky Spusk, a tiled stove in the dining room warmed and raised little Helenka, Alexei the elder, and the very tiny Nikolka. As often read by the burning tiled square "Saardam Carpenter", the clock played gavotte, and always at the end of December there was a smell of pine needles, and multi-colored paraffin burned on green branches. In response, with a bronze gavotte, with the gavotte that stands in the bedroom of the mother, and now Yelenka, they beat black walls in the dining room with a tower battle. Their father bought them a long time ago, when women wore funny, bubble sleeves at the shoulders.

The history of the creation of Bulgakov's novel "The White Guard"

The novel "White Guard" was first published (not completely) in Russia, in 1924. Completely - in Paris: volume one - 1927, volume two - 1929. The White Guard is largely an autobiographical novel based on the writer's personal impressions of Kyiv in late 1918 and early 1919.



The Turbin family is largely the Bulgakov family. Turbines is the maiden name of Bulgakov's grandmother on her mother's side. The "White Guard" was started in 1922, after the death of the writer's mother. The manuscripts of the novel have not survived. According to the typist Raaben, who retyped the novel, The White Guard was originally conceived as a trilogy. As possible titles of the novels of the proposed trilogy appeared "Midnight Cross" and "White Cross". Kyiv friends and acquaintances of Bulgakov became the prototypes of the heroes of the novel.


So, Lieutenant Viktor Viktorovich Myshlaevsky was written off from a childhood friend of Nikolai Nikolaevich Sigaevsky. Another friend of Bulgakov's youth, Yuri Leonidovich Gladyrevsky, an amateur singer, served as the prototype for Lieutenant Shervinsky. In The White Guard, Bulgakov seeks to show the people and the intelligentsia in flames civil war in Ukraine. The main character, Aleksey Turbin, although clearly autobiographical, but, unlike the writer, is not a zemstvo doctor, who was only formally registered in the military service, but a real military doctor who has seen and experienced a lot during the years of World War II. The novel contrasts two groups of officers - those who “hate the Bolsheviks with a hot and direct hatred, one that can move into a fight” and “who returned from the war to their homes with the thought, like Alexei Turbin, to rest and arrange a new non-military, but ordinary human life.


Bulgakov sociologically accurately shows the mass movements of the era. He demonstrates the centuries-old hatred of the peasants for the landlords and officers, and the newly emerged, but no less deep hatred for the "occupiers. All this fueled the uprising raised against the formation of Hetman Skoropadsky, the leader of the Ukrainian national movement Petliura. Bulgakov called one of the main features of his work in the "White Guard" the stubborn portrayal of the Russian intelligentsia as the best layer in an impudent country.


In particular, the image of an intelligentsia-noble family, by the will of historical fate thrown into the camp of the White Guard during the Civil War, in the tradition of "War and Peace". “The White Guard” is a Marxist criticism of the 1920s: “Yes, Bulgakov's talent was precisely not as deep as it was brilliant, and the talent was great ... And yet Bulgakov's works are not popular. There is nothing in them that affected the people as a whole. There is a mysterious and cruel crowd.” Bulgakov's talent was not imbued with an interest in the people, in his life, his joys and sorrows cannot be recognized from Bulgakov.

M.A. Bulgakov twice, in two different works, recalls how his work on the novel The White Guard (1925) began. The hero of the “Theatrical novel” Maksudov says: “It was born at night, when I woke up after a sad dream. I dreamed of my hometown, snow, winter, the Civil War ... In a dream, a soundless blizzard passed in front of me, and then an old piano appeared and near it people who were no longer in the world. The story “Secret Friend” contains other details: “I pulled my barracks lamp as far as possible to the table and put on a pink paper cap over its green cap, which made the paper come to life. On it I wrote the words: "And the dead were judged according to what was written in the books, according to their deeds." Then he began to write, not yet knowing well what would come of it. I remember that I really wanted to convey how good it is when it's warm at home, the clock that strikes towers in the dining room, sleepy slumber in bed, books and frost ... ”With such a mood, Bulgakov began to create a new novel.


The novel "The White Guard", the most important book for Russian literature, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov began writing in 1822.

In 1922-1924, Bulgakov wrote articles for the newspaper "Nakanune", was constantly published in the railway newspaper "Gudok", where he met I. Babel, I. Ilf, E. Petrov, V. Kataev, Yu. Olesha. According to Bulgakov himself, the idea of ​​the novel The White Guard finally took shape in 1922. At this time, several important events in his personal life took place: during the first three months of this year, he received news of the fate of his brothers, whom he never saw again, and a telegram about the sudden death of his mother from typhus. During this period, the terrible impressions of the Kyiv years received an additional impetus for embodiment in creativity.


According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Bulgakov planned to create a whole trilogy, and spoke about his favorite book like this: “I consider my novel a failure, although I single it out from my other things, because. I took the idea very seriously." And what we now call the "White Guard" was conceived as the first part of the trilogy and originally bore the names "Yellow Ensign", "Midnight Cross" and "White Cross": "The action of the second part should take place on the Don, and in the third part Myshlaevsky will be in the ranks of the Red Army. Signs of this plan can be found in the text of the "White Guard". But Bulgakov did not write the trilogy, leaving it to Count A.N. Tolstoy ("Walking through the torments"). And the theme of "running", emigration, in "The White Guard" is only hinted at in the history of Thalberg's departure and in the episode of reading Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco".


The novel was created in an era of greatest material need. The writer worked at night in an unheated room, worked impulsively and enthusiastically, terribly tired: “Third life. And my third life blossomed at the desk. The pile of sheets was all swollen. I wrote with both pencil and ink. Subsequently, the author returned to his favorite novel more than once, reliving the past anew. In one of the entries relating to 1923, Bulgakov noted: “And I will finish the novel, and I dare to assure you, it will be such a novel, from which the sky will become hot ...” And in 1925 he wrote: “It will be a terrible pity, if I am mistaken and the “White Guard” is not a strong thing.” On August 31, 1923, Bulgakov informed Yu. Slezkin: “I have finished the novel, but it has not yet been rewritten, it lies in a pile, over which I think a lot. I'm fixing something." It was a draft version of the text, which is said in the "Theatrical Novel": "The novel must be corrected for a long time. You need to cross out many places, replace hundreds of words with others. Big but necessary work!” Bulgakov was not satisfied with his work, crossed out dozens of pages, created new editions and versions. But at the beginning of 1924, he was already reading excerpts from The White Guard by the writer S. Zayaitsky and his new friends Lyamins, considering the book finished.

The first known reference to the completion of the novel is in March 1924. The novel was published in the 4th and 5th books of the Rossiya magazine in 1925. And the 6th issue with the final part of the novel was not released. According to researchers, the novel The White Guard was completed after the premiere of Days of the Turbins (1926) and the creation of Run (1928). The text of the last third of the novel, corrected by the author, was published in 1929 by the Parisian publishing house Concorde. The full text of the novel was published in Paris: volume one (1927), volume two (1929).

Due to the fact that the White Guard was not published in the USSR, and foreign editions of the late 1920s were inaccessible in the writer's homeland, Bulgakov's first novel did not receive much press attention. The well-known critic A. Voronsky (1884-1937) at the end of 1925 called The White Guard, together with The Fatal Eggs, works of "outstanding literary quality." The answer to this statement was a sharp attack by the head of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) L. Averbakh (1903-1939) in Rapp's organ - the magazine "At the Literary Post". Later, the production of the play Days of the Turbins based on the novel The White Guard at the Moscow Art Theater in the autumn of 1926 turned the attention of critics to this work, and the novel itself was forgotten.


K. Stanislavsky, worried about the passage of the Days of the Turbins, originally called, like the novel, The White Guard, through censorship, strongly advised Bulgakov to abandon the epithet "white", which seemed to many openly hostile. But the writer valued precisely this word. He agreed to “cross”, and “December”, and “blizzard” instead of “guard”, but he did not want to give up the definition of “white”, seeing in it a sign of the special moral purity of his beloved heroes, their belonging to the Russian intelligentsia as parts of the best layer in the country.

The White Guard is largely an autobiographical novel based on the writer's personal impressions of Kyiv in late 1918 - early 1919. The members of the Turbin family reflected the characteristic features of Bulgakov's relatives. Turbines is the maiden name of Bulgakov's grandmother on her mother's side. The manuscripts of the novel have not survived. Kyiv friends and acquaintances of Bulgakov became the prototypes of the heroes of the novel. Lieutenant Viktor Viktorovich Myshlaevsky was written off from a childhood friend of Nikolai Nikolaevich Syngaevsky.

The prototype of Lieutenant Shervinsky was another friend of Bulgakov's youth - Yuri Leonidovich Gladyrevsky, an amateur singer (this quality also passed to the character), who served in the troops of Hetman Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), but not as an adjutant. Then he emigrated. The prototype of Elena Talberg (Turbina) was Bulgakov's sister, Varvara Afanasievna. Captain Talberg, her husband, has many features in common with the husband of Varvara Afanasievna Bulgakova, Leonid Sergeevich Karuma (1888-1968), a German by birth, a career officer who served at first Skoropadsky, and then the Bolsheviks.

The prototype of Nikolka Turbin was one of the brothers M.A. Bulgakov. The second wife of the writer, Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya-Bulgakova, wrote in her book “Memoirs”: “One of the brothers of Mikhail Afanasyevich (Nikolai) was also a doctor. It is on the personality of my younger brother, Nikolai, that I would like to dwell. The noble and cozy little man Nikolka Turbin has always been dear to my heart (especially based on the novel The White Guard. In the play Days of the Turbins, he is much more schematic.). In my life, I never managed to see Nikolai Afanasyevich Bulgakov. This is the youngest representative of the profession chosen in the Bulgakov family - a doctor of medicine, bacteriologist, scientist and researcher, who died in Paris in 1966. He studied at the University of Zagreb and was left there at the department of bacteriology.

The novel was created in a difficult time for the country. Young Soviet Russia, which did not have a regular army, was drawn into the Civil War. The dreams of the hetman-traitor Mazepa, whose name is not accidentally mentioned in Bulgakov's novel, came true. The "White Guard" is based on the events related to the consequences of the Brest Treaty, according to which Ukraine was recognized as an independent state, the "Ukrainian State" was created, headed by Hetman Skoropadsky, and refugees from all over Russia rushed "abroad". Bulgakov in the novel clearly described their social status.

The philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, the writer's cousin, in his book "At the Feast of the Gods" described the death of the motherland as follows: "There was a mighty power, needed by friends, terrible by enemies, and now it is a rotting carrion, from which piece after piece falls off to the delight of a flying crow. In place of the sixth part of the world, there was a fetid, gaping hole ... ”Mikhail Afanasyevich agreed with his uncle in many respects. And it is no coincidence that this terrible picture is reflected in the article by M.A. Bulgakov "Hot prospects" (1919). Studzinsky speaks about the same in the play "Days of the Turbins": "We had Russia - a great power ..." So for Bulgakov, an optimist and talented satirist, despair and sorrow became the starting points in creating a book of hope. It is this definition that most accurately reflects the content of the novel "The White Guard". In the book “At the Feast of the Gods,” another thought seemed closer and more interesting to the writer: “How Russia will become self-determined largely depends on what Russia will become.” The heroes of Bulgakov are painfully looking for the answer to this question.

In The White Guard, Bulgakov sought to show the people and the intelligentsia in the flames of the Civil War in Ukraine. The main character, Aleksey Turbin, although clearly autobiographical, but, unlike the writer, is not a zemstvo doctor, who was only formally registered in the military service, but a real military doctor who has seen and experienced a lot during the years of the World War. Much brings the author closer to his hero, and calm courage, and faith in old Russia, and most importantly - the dream of a peaceful life.

“Heroes must be loved; if this does not happen, I do not advise anyone to take up the pen - you will get the biggest trouble, just know it, ”the Theater Novel says, and this is the main law of Bulgakov’s creativity. In the novel "The White Guard" he speaks of white officers and intellectuals as ordinary people, reveals their young world of soul, charm, intelligence and strength, shows the enemies as living people.

The literary community refused to recognize the dignity of the novel. Out of almost three hundred reviews, Bulgakov counted only three positive ones, and classified the rest as "hostile and abusive." The writer received rude comments. In one of the articles, Bulgakov was called "a new-bourgeois offspring, splashing poisoned, but impotent saliva on the working class, on its communist ideals."

“Class untruth”, “a cynical attempt to idealize the White Guard”, “an attempt to reconcile the reader with the monarchist, Black Hundred officers”, “hidden counter-revolutionary” - this is not a complete list of characteristics that were given to the White Guard by those who believed that the main thing in literature is the political position of the writer, his attitude towards the "whites" and "reds".

One of the main motives of the "White Guard" is faith in life, its victorious power. That is why this book, considered forbidden for several decades, found its reader, found a second life in all the richness and brilliance of Bulgakov's living word. Viktor Nekrasov, a writer from Kiev who read The White Guard in the 1960s, quite rightly remarked: “Nothing, it turns out, has faded, nothing has become outdated. It was as if those forty years had never happened... an obvious miracle happened before our eyes, which happens very rarely in literature and far from everyone - a second birth took place. The life of the heroes of the novel continues today, but in a different direction.

http://www.litra.ru/composition/get/coid/00023601184864125638/wo

http://www.licey.net/lit/guard/history

Illustrations:

"White Guard", Chapter 1 - summary

The intelligent Turbin family living in Kyiv - two brothers and a sister - find themselves in the middle of the cycle of revolution in 1918. Alexei Turbin, a young doctor, is twenty-eight years old, he has already fought in the First World War. Nikolka is seventeen and a half. Sister Elena is twenty-four, a year and a half ago she married staff captain Sergei Talberg.

This year, the Turbins buried a mother who, dying, said to the children: “Live!” But the year is ending, already December, and the terrible blizzard of revolutionary turmoil does not cease to avenge. How to live in such a time? Apparently you have to suffer and die!

White Guard. 1 series. Film based on the novel by M. Bulgakov (2012)

The priest who buried his mother, father Alexander, prophesies to Alexei Turbin that it will be even more difficult further. But he convinces me not to despair.

"White Guard", Chapter 2 - summary

The power of the hetman planted by the Germans in Kyiv Skoropadsky staggers. Socialist troops march towards the city from the White Church Petliura. He is just as much of a thief as Bolsheviks, differs from them only in Ukrainian nationalism.

On a December evening, the Turbins gather in the living room, hearing cannon shots through the windows, already close to Kyiv.

A friend of the family, a young, courageous lieutenant Viktor Myshlaevsky, unexpectedly rings the doorbell. He is terribly cold, cannot reach the house, asks permission to spend the night. With swearing, he tells how he stood in the vicinity of the city on defense from the Petliurists. 40 officers were thrown in the evening into an open field, without even giving boots, and almost without cartridges. From a terrible frost, they began to burrow into the snow - and two froze to death, and two more would have to amputate their legs due to frostbite. The careless drunkard, Colonel Shchetkin, did not deliver the shift in the morning. She was brought only to dinner by the brave Colonel Nai-Tours.

Exhausted Myshlaevsky falls asleep. Elena's husband returns home, a dry and prudent opportunist Captain Talberg, born in Balts. He quickly explains to his wife: Hetman Skoropadsky is abandoned by the German troops, on which all his power rested. At one in the morning, General von Bussow's train leaves for Germany. Thalberg, thanks to his staff acquaintances, the Germans agree to take with them. He should be preparing to leave immediately, but “I can’t take you, Elena, on wanderings and the unknown.”

Elena is crying softly, but doesn't mind. Talberg promises that he will make his way from Germany through Romania to the Crimea and the Don, in order to come to Kyiv with Denikin's troops. He busily packs his suitcase, hastily says goodbye to Elena's brothers, and leaves at one in the morning with the German train.

"White Guard", Chapter 3 - Summary

Turbines occupy the 2nd floor of a two-story house No. 13 on Alekseevsky Spusk, and on the first floor lives the owner of the house, engineer Vasily Lisovich, whose acquaintances call Vasilisa for cowardice and womanly vanity.

That night, Lisovich, having curtained the windows in the room with a sheet and a blanket, hides an envelope with money in a hiding place inside the wall. He does not notice that a white sheet on a green-painted window has attracted the attention of a passer-by. He climbed a tree and, through a gap above the upper edge of the curtain, saw everything that Vasilisa was doing.

Having calculated the rest of the Ukrainian money saved for current expenses, Lisovich goes to bed. He sees in a dream how thieves open his hiding place, but soon wakes up with curses: upstairs they play the guitar loudly and sing ...

Two more friends came to the Turbins: staff adjutant Leonid Shervinsky and artilleryman Fyodor Stepanov (gymnasium nickname - Karas). They brought wine and vodka. The whole company, together with the awakened Myshlaevsky, sits down at the table. Karas is campaigning for everyone who wants to defend Kyiv from Petlyura, to enter the mortar division being formed, where an excellent commander is Colonel Malyshev. Shervinsky, obviously in love with Elena, is glad to hear about Thalberg's departure and begins to sing a passionate epithalame.

White Guard. 2 series. Film based on the novel by M. Bulgakov (2012)

Everyone is drinking for the Allies in the Entente to help Kyiv fight off Petliura. Aleksey Turbin scolds the hetman: he oppressed the Russian language, until the last days he did not allow the army to be formed from Russian officers - and at the decisive moment he found himself without an army. If from April the hetman had begun to create officer corps, we would now have driven the Bolsheviks out of Moscow! Alexey says that he will go to the division to Malyshev.

Shervinsky transmits rumors from the headquarters that Emperor Nicholas is not killed, but escaped from the hands of the communists. Everyone at the table understands: this is unlikely, but still they sing in delight “God save the Tsar!”

Myshlaevsky and Alexei get very drunk. Seeing this, Elena puts everyone to bed. She sits sadly on her bed alone in her room, thinking about her husband's departure and suddenly realizing clearly that in a year and a half of marriage she never had respect for this cold careerist. Aleksey Turbin thinks about Talberg with disgust.

"White Guard", Chapter 4 - summary

The entire last (1918) year, a stream of wealthy people fleeing from Bolshevik Russia is pouring into Kyiv. It intensifies after the election of a hetman, when, with German help, it is possible to establish some order. Most visitors are an idle, depraved public. For her, countless cafes, theaters, clubs, cabarets are opened in the city, where there are a lot of drugged prostitutes.

A lot of officers are also coming to Kyiv - with etched eyes after the collapse of the Russian army and the soldiers' arbitrariness in 1917. Lousy, unshaven, badly dressed officers do not find support from Skoropadsky. Only a few manage to enter the hetman's convoy, flaunting fantastic epaulettes. The rest are wandering around idle.

So the 4 cadet schools that were in Kyiv before the revolution remain closed. Many of their pupils fail to complete the course. Among these is the ardent Nikolka Turbin.

The city is calm thanks to the Germans. But there is a feeling that peace is fragile. News is coming from the countryside that the revolutionary robberies of the peasants cannot be appeased in any way.

"White Guard", Chapter 5 - Summary

Signs of imminent trouble are multiplying in Kyiv. In May there is a terrible explosion of armories in the suburbs on Lysa Gora. On July 30, Field Marshal Eichhorn, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army in Ukraine, is killed by a bomb in the street in broad daylight on the street. And then the troublemaker Simon Petlyura is released from the hetman's prison - a mysterious man who immediately goes to lead the peasants rioting in the villages.

A village riot is very dangerous because many men have recently returned from the war - with weapons, and having learned to shoot there. And by the end of the year, the Germans are defeated in the First World War. They themselves begin revolution overthrow the emperor Wilhelm. That is why they are now in a hurry to withdraw their troops from Ukraine.

White Guard. 3 series. Film based on the novel by M. Bulgakov (2012)

... Aleksey Turbin is sleeping, and he dreams that he met Captain Zhilin on the eve of Paradise and with him his entire squadron of Belgrade hussars, who died in 1916 in the Vilna direction. For some reason, their commander also jumped here - the still living Colonel Nai-Tours in the armor of a crusader. Zhilin tells Alexei that the Apostle Peter let his entire detachment go to Paradise, although they took several cheerful women with them along the way. And Zhilin saw mansions in paradise, painted with red stars. Peter said that the Red Army soldiers would soon go there, who would be killed many under Perekop. Zhilin was surprised that the atheist Bolsheviks would be allowed into Paradise, but the Almighty himself explained to him: “Well, they don’t believe in me, what can you do. One believes, the other does not believe, but you all have the same actions: now each other's throat. All of you with me, Zhilin, are the same - killed in the battlefield.

Alexey Turbin also wanted to throw himself into the gates of heaven - but woke up ...

"White Guard", Chapter 6 - summary

Enrollment in the mortar division takes place in the former Parisian Chic store Madame Anjou, in the city center. In the morning after a drunken night, Karas, already in the division, leads Alexei Turbin and Myshlaevsky here. Elena baptizes them at home before leaving.

The division commander, Colonel Malyshev, is a young man of about 30, with lively and intelligent eyes. He is very happy about the arrival of Myshlaevsky, an artilleryman who fought on the German front. At first, Malyshev is wary of Dr. Turbin, but is very happy to learn that he is not a socialist, like most intellectuals, but an ardent hater of Kerensky.

Myshlaevsky and Turbina are recorded in the division. In an hour they should appear on the parade ground of the Alexander Gymnasium, where soldiers are being trained. Turbin runs home at this hour, and on the way back to the gymnasium he suddenly sees a crowd of people carrying coffins with the bodies of several ensigns. The Petliurists surrounded and slaughtered an officer detachment that night in the village of Popelyukha, gouged out their eyes, cut epaulettes on their shoulders ...

Turbin himself studied at the Alexander Gymnasium, and now fate after the front again threw him here. There are no gymnasium students now, the building is empty, and on the parade ground young volunteers, students and cadets, run around with terrible, blunt-faced mortars, learning how to handle them. Classes are led by the senior officer of the division Studzinsky, Myshlaevsky and Karas. The turbine is assigned to train two fighters in paramedical work.

Colonel Malyshev arrives. Studzinsky and Myshlaevsky quietly report to him their impressions of the recruits: “They will fight. But complete inexperience. For one hundred and twenty junkers, there are eighty students who do not know how to hold a rifle in their hands. Malyshev, with a frown, informs the officers that the headquarters will not give the division either horses or shells, so they will have to quit training with mortars and teach them how to shoot from a rifle. The colonel orders that most of the recruits be dismissed for the night, leaving only 60 of the best junkers in the gymnasium as a guard for weapons.

In the lobby of the gymnasium, officers remove the drape from the portrait of its founder, Emperor Alexander I, which has been hanging closed since the first days of the revolution. The sovereign points to the portrait with his hand at the Borodino regiments. Looking at the picture, Alexei Turbin recalls the happy pre-revolutionary days. “Emperor Alexander, save the dying house with the Borodino regiments! Revive, bring them off the canvas! They would have beaten Petlyura."

Malyshev orders the division to assemble again on the parade ground tomorrow morning, but he allows Turbin to arrive only at two o'clock in the afternoon. The remaining guard of the junkers under the command of Studzinsky and Myshlaevsky drowns stoves in the gymnasium all night. Domestic notes"and" Library for reading "for 1863 ...

"White Guard", Chapter 7 - summary

In the hetman's palace this night - indecent fuss. Skoropadsky, rushing about in front of the mirrors, changes into the uniform of a German major. The doctor who entered tightly bandaged his head, and the hetman was taken away in a car from the side entrance under the guise of German Major Schratt, who allegedly accidentally wounded himself in the head while unloading a revolver. No one in the city yet knows about Skoropadsky's flight, but the military informs Colonel Malyshev about this.

In the morning, Malyshev announces to the fighters of his division who gathered at the gymnasium: “During the night, sharp and sudden changes took place in the state situation in Ukraine. Therefore, the mortar division is disbanded! Here in the arsenal, take all the weapons that everyone wants, and go home! For those who want to continue the fight, I would advise you to make your way to Denikin on the Don.

Among the stunned, not understanding young men, a muffled murmur passes. Captain Studzinsky even makes an attempt to arrest Malyshev. However, he calms his excitement with a loud shout and continues: “Do you want to defend the hetman? But today, at about four o'clock in the morning, shamefully leaving us all to the mercy of fate, he fled like the last rascal and a coward, along with the commander of the army, General Belorukov! Petliura has more than a hundred thousand army on the outskirts of the city. In unequal battles with her today, handfuls of officers and cadets will die, standing in the field and abandoned by two scoundrels who should have been hanged. And I dismiss you in order to save you from certain death!”

Many junkers are weeping in despair. The division disperses, spoiling, as much as possible, thrown mortars and guns. Myshlaevsky and Karas, not seeing Alexei Turbin in the gymnasium and not knowing that Malyshev ordered him to come only at two o'clock in the afternoon, think that he has already been notified of the dissolution of the division.

Part 2

"White Guard", Chapter 8 - summary

At dawn, December 14, 1918, in the village of Popelyukhe near Kiev, where ensigns had recently been slaughtered, Petliura's colonel Kozyr-Leshko raises his cavalry detachment, a sabelyuk of 400. With singing Ukrainian song he leaves for a new position, on the other side of the city. This is how the cunning plan of Colonel Toropets, the commander of the oblog city of Kyiv, is being carried out. Toropets thinks of distracting the city's defenders with artillery cannonade from the north, and making the main attack in the center and south.

Meanwhile, the pampered Colonel Shchetkin, who leads the detachments of these defenders in the snowy fields, secretly abandons his fighters and leaves for a rich Kyiv apartment, to a full blonde, where he drinks coffee and goes to bed ...

The impatient Petliurist Colonel Bolbotun decides to speed up Toropets' plan - and without preparation rushes into the city with his cavalry. To his surprise, he encounters no resistance all the way to the Nikolaev Military School. Only there it is fired from the only machine gun they have, 30 cadets and four officers.

Bolbotun's reconnaissance with the centurion Galanba at the head rushes along the empty Millionnaya Street. Here Galanba slashes with a saber on the head of Yakov Feldman, who accidentally came out of the entrance to meet them, a well-known Jew in the city, a supplier of armored parts to Hetman Skoropadsky.

"White Guard", Chapter 9 - summary

An armored car approaches a handful of cadets near the school to help. After three shots from his gun, the movement of Bolbotun's regiment completely stops.

Not one armored car, but four had to approach the junkers - and then the Petliurists would have to flee. But recently, Mikhail Shpolyansky, a revolutionary warrant officer, personally awarded by Kerensky, was appointed commander of the second vehicle in the hetman's armored regiment, black, with velvet sideburns, similar to Eugene Onegin.

This reveler and lyricist, who came from Petrograd, wasted money in Kiev, founded here the poetic order "Magnetic Triolet" under his chairmanship, kept two mistresses, played a piece of iron and orated in clubs. Recently, Shpolyansky treated the head of the Magnetic Triolet in the evening in a cafe, and after dinner, the novice, but already sick with syphilis, poet Rusakov wept drunk on his beaver cuffs. Shpolyansky went from the cafe to his mistress Yulia on Malaya Provalnaya Street, and Rusakov, having come home, looked at the red rash on his chest with tears and prayed on his knees for the forgiveness of the Lord, who punished him with a serious illness for writing godless verses.

The next day, Shpolyansky, to everyone's surprise, entered the armored division of Skoropadsky, where instead of beavers and a top hat he began to walk in a military sheepskin coat, all smeared with machine oil. Four hetman armored cars had great success in the battles with the Petliurists near the city. But three days before the fateful December 14, Shpolyansky, slowly gathering the gunners and drivers of the cars, began to convince them: it is stupid to defend the reactionary hetman. Soon both him and Petliura will be replaced by the third, the only correct historical force - the Bolsheviks.

On the eve of December 14, Shpolyansky, along with other drivers, poured sugar into the engines of armored cars. When the battle began with the cavalry that entered Kyiv, only one of the four cars started up. He was brought to the aid of the junkers by the heroic ensign Strashkevich. He delayed the enemy, but could not drive him out of Kyiv.

"White Guard", Chapter 10 - Summary

Hussar Colonel Nai-Tours is a heroic front-line soldier who speaks with a burr and turns his whole body, looking sideways, because after being wounded his neck is reduced. In the first days of December, he recruits up to 150 junkers to the second department of the city defense squad, but he demands dads and boots for all of them. Clean General Makushin in the supply department replies that he does not have so many uniforms. Nye then calls several of his junkers with loaded rifles: “Write a plea, your pge. Live. We have no time, it's time for us to go out. Nepgiyatel under the very best. If you don’t write, you stupid stagik, I’ll ring you in the head with a Colt, you’ll kick your legs. The general writes on paper with a jumping hand: "Issue."

All morning on December 14th, Nye's detachment sits in the barracks without receiving orders. Only in the afternoon does he receive an order to go to the guard of the Polytechnic Highway. Here, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Nye sees the approaching Petliura regiment of Kozyr-Leshko.

By order of Nye, his battalion fires several volleys at the enemy. But, seeing that the enemy appeared from the side, he orders his fighters to retreat. The junker sent to reconnaissance in the city, returning, reports that the Petliura cavalry is already on all sides. Nai loudly shouts to his chains: "Save yourself, whoever can!"

... And the first department of the squad - 28 cadets, among whom is Nikolka Turbin, languishes idle in the barracks until dinner. Only at three in the afternoon the phone suddenly rings: “Go outside along the route!” There is no commander - and Nikolka has to lead everyone, as a senior.

... Alexei Turbin sleeps late that day. Waking up, he hurriedly gets ready for the division at the gymnasium, knowing nothing about city events. On the street, he is surprised by the close sounds of machine-gun fire. Having reached the gymnasium in a cab, he sees that the division is not there. "Gone without me!" - Alexey thinks in despair, but notices with surprise: the mortars have remained in their original places, and they are without locks.

Guessing that a disaster has happened, Turbin runs to Madame Anjou's shop. There, disguised as a student, Colonel Malyshev burns lists of division fighters in the oven. “Don't you know anything yet? Malyshev shouts to Alexei. “Take off your shoulder straps and run, hide!” He talks about the flight of the hetman and that the division has been disbanded. Waving his fists, he curses the staff generals.

"Run! Only not to the street, but through the back door!” - Malyshev exclaims and hides in the back door. Stunned, Turbin rips off his shoulder straps and rushes to the same place where the colonel disappeared.

"White Guard", Chapter 11 - Summary

Nikolka leads 28 of his junkers through the whole of Kyiv. At the last crossroads, the detachment lies down with rifles in the snow, they prepare a machine gun: the shooting is heard very close.

Suddenly, other junkers fly out to the crossroads. "Run with us! Save yourself who can!” they shout to the Nikolkins.

Colonel Nai-Tours is shown the last of the runners with a colt in his hand. "Yunkegga! Listen to my command! he shouts. - Get off your shoulder straps, kokagdy, bgosai oguzhie! Along the Fonagny Pegeulk - only along the Fonagny! - by two to Gazezzhuya, to Podol! The fight is over! Headquarters - stegs! .. "

The junkers scatter, and Nye rushes to the machine gun. Nikolka, who did not run with everyone else, also jumps up to him. Nye chases him away: "Get out, you stupid mother!", but Nikolka: "I don't want to, Mr. Colonel."

Horsemen jump out at the crossroads. Nye fires a machine-gun burst at them. Several riders fall, the rest immediately disappear. However, the Petliurists, who had lain down further along the street, opened hurricane fire in two at the machine gun. Nye falls, bleeding, and dies, having only time to say: “Unteg-tseg, God bless you ... Little-pgovalnaya ...” Nikolka, grabbing the Colonel’s Colt, miraculously crawls under heavy shelling around the corner, into Lantern Lane.

Jumping up, he rushes into the first courtyard. Here it is with a cry of “Hold it! Keep Junkerey!" - tries to grab the janitor. But Nikolka hits him in the teeth with the hilt of a Colt, and the janitor runs away with a bloody beard.

Nikolka climbs over two high walls on the run, bleeding his toes and breaking off his nails. Running out of breath on Razezzhaya Street, he tears his documents on the go. He rushes to Podol, as ordered by Nai-Turs. Having met a cadet with a rifle along the way, he pushes him into the entrance: “Hide. I am a junker. Catastrophe. Petliura took the city!”

Through Podil, Nikolka happily gets home. Elena is crying there: Alexei has not returned!

By nightfall, the exhausted Nikolka falls into an uneasy sleep. But a noise wakes him up. Sitting on the bed, he vaguely sees before him a strange, unfamiliar man in a jacket, riding breeches and boots with jockey cuffs. In his hand is a cage with a canary. The stranger says in a tragic voice: “She was with her lover on the very sofa on which I read poetry to her. And after the bills for seventy-five thousand I signed without hesitation, like a gentleman ... And, imagine, a coincidence: I arrived here at the same time as your brother.

Hearing about his brother, Nikolka rushes into the dining room like lightning. There, in someone else's coat and trousers, a bluish-pale Alexei lies on the sofa, near which Elena rushes about.

Alexey was wounded by a bullet in the arm. Nikolka rushes after the doctor. He treats the wound and explains: the bullet did not affect either the bone or the large vessels, but shreds of wool from the overcoat got into the wound, so inflammation begins. And you can’t take Alexei to the hospital - the Petliurists will find him there ...

Part 3

Chapter 12

The stranger who appeared at the Turbins is Sergei Talberg's nephew Larion Surzhansky (Lariosik), a strange and careless man, but kind and sympathetic. His wife cheated on him in his native Zhytomyr, and, mentally suffering in his city, he decided to go to visit the Turbins, whom he had never seen before. Lariosik's mother, warning of his arrival, gave a 63-word telegram to Kyiv, but it did not reach war time.

On the same day, awkwardly turning in the kitchen, Lariosik smashes the Turbins' expensive service. He comically but sincerely apologizes, and then he takes out eight thousand hidden there from behind the lining of the jacket and gives it to Elena - for his maintenance.

Lariosik traveled from Zhytomyr to Kyiv in 11 days. The train was stopped by the Petliurists, and Lariosik, mistaken by them for an officer, only miraculously escaped execution. In his eccentricity, he tells the Turbins about this as about an ordinary minor incident. Despite Lariosik's oddities, everyone in the family likes him.

The maid Anyuta tells how, right on the street, she saw the corpses of two officers killed by the Petliurists. Nikolka wonders if Karas and Myshlaevsky are alive. And why did Nai-Tours mention Malo-Provalnaya Street before his death? With the help of Lariosik, Nikolka hides the Nai-Turs Colts and his own Browning by hanging them in a box behind a window that opens onto a narrow, snowdrifted clearing on the blank wall of a neighboring house.

Alexei's temperature rises above forty the next day. He begins to rave and from time to time repeats female nameJulia. In his daydreams, he sees Colonel Malyshev in front of him, burning documents, and remembers how he himself ran out through the back door from Madame Anjou's store...

Chapter 13

Having run out of the store then, Alexey hears the shooting very close. Through the yards, he gets out into the street, and, going around one turn, he sees Petliurists on foot with rifles right in front of him.

“Stop! they shout. - Yes, that's an officer! Keep an officer!” Turbin rushes to run, groping for a revolver in his pocket. He turns into Malo-Provalnaya Street. Shots are heard from behind, and Aleksey feels as if someone has pulled him by the left armpit with wooden tongs.

He takes a revolver out of his pocket, shoots six times at the Petliurists - "the seventh bullet for himself, otherwise they will torment, they will cut out epaulettes on their shoulders." Ahead is a blind alley. Turbin is waiting for certain death, but a young female figure emerges from the wall of the fence, shouting with outstretched arms: “Officer! Here! Here…"

She is at the gate. He rushes to her. The stranger closes the gate behind him on the latch and runs, leading him along a whole labyrinth of narrow passages, where there are several more gates. They run into the entrance, and there - into the apartment opened by the lady.

Exhausted from loss of blood, Alexei falls unconscious to the floor in the hallway. The woman brings him to life by splashing water, and then bandages him.

He kisses her hand. "Well, you are brave! she says admiringly. “One Petliurist fell from your shots.” Alexei introduces himself to the lady, and she gives her name: Yulia Alexandrovna Reiss.

Turbin sees pianos and ficuses in the apartment. A photo of a man with epaulettes hangs on the wall, but Yulia is at home alone. She helps Alexei to the sofa.

He lies down. He has a fever at night. Julia is sitting next to him. Alexei suddenly throws his hand around her neck, pulls her to him and kisses her on the lips. Julia lays down next to him and strokes his head until he falls asleep.

Early in the morning she takes him out into the street, sits down with him in a cab and brings him home to the Turbins.

Chapter 14

The next evening Viktor Myshlaevsky and Karas appear. They come to the Turbins in disguise, without an officer's uniform, learning the bad news: in addition to the wound, Alexei also has typhus: the temperature already reaches forty.

Shervinsky also comes. Hot Myshlaevsky swears last words the hetman, his commander-in-chief and the entire "staff horde".

The guests stay overnight. Late in the evening everyone sits down to play vint - Myshlaevsky paired with Lariosik. Learning that Lariosik sometimes writes poetry, Victor laughs at him, saying that he himself recognizes only “War and Peace” from all literature: “It was not written by some dumbass, but by an artillery officer».

Lariosik doesn't play cards well. Myshlaevsky yells at him for wrong moves. In the midst of a skirmish, suddenly the doorbell rings. Everyone freezes, assuming a Petliura night search? Myshlaevsky cautiously goes to open it. However, it turns out that this is the postman who brought the same 63-word telegram written by Lariosika's mother. Elena reads it: “A terrible misfortune befell my son, period Operetta actor Lipsky…”

There is a sudden and wild knock on the door. Everyone turns to stone again. But on the threshold - not those who came with a search, but a disheveled Vasilisa, who, as soon as he entered, falls into the hands of Myshlaevsky.

Chapter 15

That evening, Vasilisa and his wife Wanda hid money again: they pinned it with buttons to the underside of the table top (as many Kievans did then). But it was not for nothing that a passer-by watched from a tree through the window a few days ago how Vasilisa used his wall hiding place ...

Near midnight tonight, a call comes to his and Wanda's apartment. “Open up. Don’t go away, otherwise we’ll shoot through the door ... ”, a voice is heard from the other side. Vasilisa opens the door with trembling hands.

Three enter. One has a wolf-like face with small, deeply sunken eyes. The second is gigantic, young, with bare, stubble-free cheeks and womanish habits. The third - with a collapsed nose, eaten away from the side by a purulent scab. They poke Vasilisa's "mandate": "It is ordered to search the house of a resident Vasily Lisovich, along Alekseevsky Spusk, house number 13. For resistance, it is punishable by rosstril." The mandate was allegedly issued by some kind of "kuren" of the Petliurov army, but the seal is very illegible.

The wolf and the mangled take out a Colt and a Browning and aim at Vasilisa. That one's head is spinning. Those who came immediately begin to tap the walls - and by the sound they find a cache. “Oh, you bitch tail. Sealed pennies into the wall? You need to be killed!" They take money and valuables from the cache.

The giant beams with joy when he sees chevrolet boots with patent leather toes under Vasilisina's bed and begins to change into them, throwing off his own rags. “I accumulated things, ate my face, pink, like a pig, and you bachish what good people walk? Wolf hisses angrily at Vasilisa. “His feet are frozen, he rotted in the trenches for you, and you played the gramophone.”

The mutilated man takes off his pants and, remaining in only tattered underpants, puts on Vasilisa's trousers hanging on a chair. The wolf changes his dirty tunic for Vasilisa's jacket, takes a watch from the table and demands that Vasilisa write a receipt that he gave everything he took from him voluntarily. Lisovich, almost crying, writes on paper under the dictation of the Wolf: “Things ... handed over intact during the search. And I have no complaints." - “And to whom did you hand it over?” - "Write: Nemolyak, Kirpaty and Otaman Hurricane received from the integrity."

All three leave, warning in the end: “If you drip on us, then our lads will beat you. Do not leave the apartment until the morning, you will be strictly required for it ... "

Wanda, after they leave, falls on the chest and sobs. "God. Vasya... Why, it wasn't a search. They were bandits! – “I understood it myself!” Having trampled on the spot, Vasilisa rushes to the apartment of the Turbins ...

From there, everyone descends to him. Myshlaevsky advises not to complain anywhere: no one will be caught anyway. And Nikolka, having learned that the bandits were armed with a Colt and Browning, rushes to the box that he and Lariosik hung outside his window. That one is empty! Both revolvers are stolen!

The Lisovichi beg for one of the officers to spend the rest of the night with them. Karas agrees to this. The stingy Wanda, involuntarily becoming generous, treats him at home with pickled mushrooms, veal and cognac. Satisfied, Karas lays down on the couch, and Vasilisa sits next to him in an armchair and wails sadly: “Everything that was acquired by hard work, in one evening went into the pockets of some scoundrels ... I do not deny the revolution, I am a former cadet. But here in Russia the revolution has degenerated into Pugachevism. The main thing has disappeared - respect for property. And now I have an ominous certainty that only the autocracy can save us! Worst dictatorship!

Chapter 16

In Kiev's Hagia Sophia - a lot of people, not overcrowded. A prayer service is served here in honor of the occupation of the city by Petliura. The crowd marvels: “But the Petliurists are socialists. Why are the priests here? “Yes, give the priests a blue one, so they will serve the devil’s mass.”

In severe frost, the people's river flows in procession from the temple to the main square. Supporters of Petliura in the crowd, a small majority gathered only out of curiosity. The women scream: “Oh, I want to bang Petliura. It seems that Vin is an indescribable handsome man. But he is nowhere to be seen.

Petliur's troops parade through the streets to the square under yellow-black banners. The cavalry regiments of Bolbotun and Kozyr-Leshko are riding, the Sich Riflemen are marching (who fought in the First World War against Russia for Austria-Hungary). Cheers are heard from the sidewalks. Hearing the exclamation: “Trim them! Officers! I am their bachiv in uniform!” - several Petliurists grab two people indicated in the crowd and drag them into an alley. From there, a blast is heard. The bodies of the dead are thrown right on the sidewalk.

Having climbed into a niche on the wall of a house, Nikolka is watching the parade.

A small rally gathers near the frozen fountain. The speaker is raised to the fountain. Shouting: "Glory to the people!" and in the first words, rejoicing at the capture of the city, he suddenly calls the listeners “ comrades"and calls them:" Let's take an oath that we will not destroy weapons, docks red the ensign will not fly over the whole world of working people. Hai live Soviets of workers, peasants and Cossack deputies ... "

Nearby, in a thick beaver collar, the eyes and black Onegin sideburns of the ensign Shpolyansky flicker. One of the crowd screams heart-rendingly, rushing to the speaker: “Trim yoga! Tse provocation. Bolshevik! Moskal! But a man standing next to Shpolyansky grabs the screamer by the belt, and another yells: “Brothers, the clock has been cut!” The crowd rushes to beat, like a thief, someone who wanted to arrest a Bolshevik.

The speaker disappears at this time. Soon in the alley you can see how Shpolyansky treats him with a cigarette from a golden cigarette case.

The crowd drives the beaten “thief” in front of him, who sobs plaintively: “You are not right! I'm famous Ukrainian poet. My surname is Gorbolaz. I wrote an anthology Ukrainian poetry!" In response, they hit him on the neck.

Myshlaevsky and Karas are looking at this scene from the sidewalk. “Well done Bolsheviks,” Myshlaevsky says to Karas. - Did you see how cleverly the orator was fused? For what I love - for courage, their mother by the leg.

Chapter 17

After a long search, Nikolka learns that the Nai-Tours family lives on Malo-Provalnaya, 21. Today, right from the procession, he runs there.

The door is opened by a gloomy lady in pince-nez, looking suspiciously. But after learning that Nikolka has information about Naya, he lets him into the room.

There are two more women, an old one and a young one. Both look like Nai. Nikolka understands: mother and sister.

“Well, tell me, well ...” - the eldest stubbornly achieves. Seeing Nikolka's silence, she shouts to the young one: "Irina, Felix is ​​killed!" - and falls back. Nikolka also begins to sob.

He tells his mother and sister how heroically Nai died - and volunteers to go to look for his body in the dead. Naya's sister, Irina, says she will go with him...

The morgue has a disgusting, terrible smell, so heavy that it seems sticky; it seems that you can even see it. Nikolka and Irina put the bill to the watchman. He reports them to the professor and receives permission to search for the body among the many brought in the last days.

Nikolka persuades Irina not to enter the room, where they lie in piles, like firewood, naked human bodies, male and female. Nikolka notices Nye's corpse from above. Together with the watchman they take him upstairs.

On the same night, Nai's body is washed in the chapel, dressed in a jacket, a crown is placed on his forehead, and a St. George ribbon on his chest. The old mother, with a shaking head, thanks Nikolka, and he cries again and leaves the chapel into the snow...

Chapter 18

On the morning of December 22, Alexey Turbin lies dying. The gray-haired doctor-professor tells Elena that there is almost no hope, and leaves, leaving, just in case, his assistant, Brodovich, with the patient.

Elena, with a distorted face, goes into her room, kneels before the icon of the Mother of God and begins to pray passionately. "Holy Virgin. Ask your son to send a miracle. Why are you ending our family in one year? Mother took from us, I don’t have a husband and never will, I already clearly understand this. And now you're taking away Alexei. How will we be alone with Nicol at a time like this?”

Her speech comes in a continuous stream, her eyes become insane. And it seems to her that next to the ruined tomb, Christ appeared, resurrected, blessed and barefoot. And Nikolka opens the door to the room: “Elena, go to Alexei soon!”

Consciousness returns to Alexei. He understands that he has just passed - and did not destroy him - the most dangerous crisis of the disease. Brodovitch, agitated and shocked, injects him with a syringe with a trembling hand.

Chapter 19

A month and a half passes. On February 2, 1919, Aleksey Turbin, who had lost weight, stood at the window and again listened to the sounds of cannons in the vicinity of the city. But now it is not Petlyura who goes to expel the hetman, but the Bolsheviks go to Petlyura. “Here comes the horror in the city with the Bolsheviks!” Alexey thinks.

He has already resumed medical practice at home, and now a patient is calling to see him. This is a thin young poet Rusakov, sick with syphilis.

Rusakov tells Turbin that he used to be a God-fighter and a sinner, and now he prays to the Almighty day and night. Alexei tells the poet that he is not allowed to cocaine, alcohol, or women. “I have already retired from temptations and bad people, - Rusakov answers. - The evil genius of my life, the vile Mikhail Shpolyansky, who inclines wives to debauchery, and young men to vice, left for the city of the devil - Bolshevik Moscow, in order to lead hordes of Aggels to Kiev, as they once went to Sodom and Gomorrah. Satan - Trotsky will come for him. The poet predicts that the people of Kiev will soon face even more terrible trials.

When Rusakov leaves, Aleksey, despite the danger from the Bolsheviks, whose carts are already rumbling through the streets of the city, goes to Yulia Reiss to thank her for saving her and give her the bracelet of his deceased mother.

At home with Julia, he, unable to stand it, hugs and kisses her. Noticing again in the apartment a photo of a man with black sideburns, Alex asks Yulia who it is. “This is my cousin, Shpolyansky. He has now left for Moscow, ”Yulia answers, looking down. She is ashamed to admit that in fact Shpolyansky was her lover.

Turbin asks Yulia for permission to come again. She allows. Leaving Yulia on Malo-Provalnaya, Aleksey unexpectedly meets Nikolka: he was on the same street, but in a different house - at the sister of Nai-Turs, Irina ...

Elena Turbina receives a letter from Warsaw in the evening. Olya's friend, who left there, informs: "your ex-husband Talberg is not going from here to Denikin, but to Paris, with Lidochka Hertz, whom he is going to marry. Enter Alexei. Elena hands him a letter and cries on his chest...

Chapter 20

Great and terrible was the year 1918, but 1919 was even more terrible.

In the first days of February, the Haidamaks of Petliura flee Kyiv from the advancing Bolsheviks. No more Petliura. But will anyone pay for the blood he shed? No. Nobody. The snow will simply melt, the green Ukrainian grass will rise and hide everything under it...

At night, in a Kyiv apartment, the syphilitic poet Rusakov reads Apocalypse, reverently freezing over the words: “... and there will be no more death; there will be no more mourning, no outcry, no sickness, for the former is past…”

And the house of the Turbins is asleep. On the first floor, Vasilisa dreams that there was no revolution and that he grew a rich crop of vegetables in the garden, but round piglets ran up, tore up all the beds with their snouts, and then began to jump on him, baring sharp fangs.

Elena dreams that the frivolous Shervinsky, who is looking after her more and more insistently, joyfully sings in an operatic voice: “We will live, we will live !!” - “And death will come, we will die ...” - Nikolka, who entered with a guitar, answered him, his neck was covered in blood, and on his forehead there was a yellow halo with icons. Realizing that Nikolka will die, Elena wakes up screaming and sobbing for a long time...

And in the wing, smiling joyfully, he sees a happy dream about a large diamond ball on a green meadow, a little unintelligent boy Petka ...

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More than one generation of domestic and foreign readers is sincerely interested in the work of the outstanding Kyiv writer Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov. His works have become classics. Slavic culture which the whole world knows and loves. Among the immortal works of Bulgakov, a special place is occupied by the novel "The White Guard", which at one time became a writer of a talented young journalist. This novel is largely autobiographical, written on the basis of "live" material: facts from the life of relatives and friends during the civil war in Ukraine.

Readers and researchers have not yet agreed on the definition of the White Guard genre: biographical prose, historical and even detective-adventure novel - these are the characteristics that can be found in relation to this work. The character of the novel by Mikhail Afanasyevich is laid down in its title: "The White Guard". Based on the historical realities of the title, the novel should be perceived as deeply tragic and sentimental. Why? This is what we will try to explain.

The historical events described in the novel date back to the end of 1918: the struggle in Ukraine between the socialist Ukrainian Directory and the conservative regime of Hetman Skoropadsky. The main characters of the novel are drawn into these events, and as the White Guards defend Kyiv from the troops of the Directory. Under the sign of the bearers of the White idea, we perceive the characters of the novel. Those officers and volunteers who actually defended Kyiv in November-December 1918 were deeply convinced of their "White Guard essence". As it turned out later, they were not White Guards. The Volunteer White Guard Army of General Anton Denikin did not recognize the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and de jure remained at war with the Germans. The Whites did not recognize the puppet government of Hetman Skoropadsky, who ruled under the cover of German bayonets. When the struggle between the Directory and Skoropadsky began in Ukraine, the hetman had to seek help among the intelligentsia and officers of Ukraine, who mostly support the White Guards. In order to win over these categories of the population, the government's Skoropadsky was announced in the newspapers by the alleged order of Denikin on the entry of troops fighting the Directory into the Volunteer Army. In accordance with this order, the units defending Kyiv became White Guards. This order turned out to be an outright lie of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Skoropadsky's government, Igor Kistyakovsky, who thus lured new fighters into the ranks of the hetman's defenders. Anton Denikin sent several telegrams to Kyiv denying the existence of such an order, in which he refused to recognize the defenders of Skoropadsky as White Guards. These telegrams were hidden, and the Kyiv officers and volunteers sincerely considered themselves part of the Volunteer Army. Only after the Ukrainian Directory took Kyiv, and its defenders were captured by Ukrainian units, Denikin's telegrams were made public. It turned out that the captured officers and volunteers were neither White Guards nor Hetmans. In fact, they defended Kyiv for no one knows why and no one knows from whom. Kyiv prisoners for all the warring parties turned out to be outlaws: the whites refused them, the Ukrainians did not need them, for the reds they remained enemies. More than two thousand people, mostly officers and intellectuals, who were captured by the Directory, were sent along with the evacuated Germans to Germany. From there, with the assistance of the Entente, they fell into all sorts of White Guard armies: the North-Western Yudenich near Petrograd, the West Bermondt-Avalov in East Prussia, the North General Miller on the Kola Peninsula, and even the Siberian armies of Kolchak. The vast majority of the prisoners of the Directory came from Ukraine. With their blood, because of the hetman's reckless adventure, they had to stain the battlefields near Tsarskoye Selo and Shenkursk, Omsk and Riga. Only a few returned to Ukraine. Thus, the name "White Guard" is tragic and mournful, and from a historical point of view, also ironic.

The second half of the title of the novel - "Guard" - also has its own explanation. Volunteer units, formed in Kyiv against the troops of the Directory, initially arose in accordance with the law of Skoropadsky on the National Guard. Thus, the Kyiv formations were officially considered the National Guard of Ukraine. In addition, some relatives and friends of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov served in the Russian guard until 1918. So, the brother of the first wife of the writer Yevgeny Lappa died during the July offensive of 1917, being an ensign of the Guards of the Lithuanian Regiment. Yuri Leonidovich Gladyrevsky, whose main features were embodied in the literary image of Leonid Yuryevich Shervinsky, served in the Life Guards in the 3rd Rifle Regiment.

Other variants of the title of the novel "White Guard" also have their own historical explanation: "White Koest", "Midnight Cross", "Scarlet Mach". The fact is that during the described historical events in Kyiv, the Northern Volunteer Army of General Keller was formed. Count Keller, at the invitation of Skoropadsky, led the defense of Kyiv for some time, and after he was occupied by Ukrainian troops, he was shot. The main milestones in the life of Fyodor Arturovich Keller, as well as his external physical defects associated with injuries, were very accurately described by Bulgakov in the form of Colonel Nai-Tours. By order of Keller, the white cross, which was made of fabric and sewn on the left sleeve of the tunic, became the identification mark of the Northern Army. Subsequently, the North-Western and Western armies, which considered themselves the successors of the Northern Army, left a white cross as the identification mark of their servicemen. Most likely, it was he who served as the reason for the emergence of variants of names with a "cross". The name "Scarlet Mach" may well be associated with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the civil war.

The chronological framework of the novel "The White Guard" by Mikhail Afanasyevich does not correspond much to real historical events. So, if in the novel only about three days pass from the day the battles near Kiev began to the time the Ukrainian troops entered, then in fact the events of the struggle between Skoropadsky and the Directory developed for a whole month. The beginning of the shelling of Kiev by Ukrainian units falls on the evening of November 21, the funeral of the killed officers, described in the novel, took place on November 27, and the final fall of the city took place on December 14, 1918. Thus, historical novel"White Guard" is difficult to name, because the writer did not follow the real chronology of events. So, among the dead officers listed in the novel, there is not a single correct surname. Many facts of the novel are the author's fiction.

Of course, when writing the novel "The White Guard" Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov used available sources and his excellent memory. However, one should not exaggerate the influence of these sources on the writer's intention. Many of the facts gleaned from the newspapers of Kyiv at the end of 1918, the writer retold solely from memory, which led only to an emotional reproduction of information that did not contain the accuracy and correctness of the presentation of events. Bulgakov did not use the memoirs of Roman Gul "The Kiev Epic", published in Berlin in 1921, although many Bulgakov scholars are inclined to assert this. Information about the events at the front near Krasny Traktir and Zhuliany given in the novel is historically accurate to the smallest detail (except for the names, of course). Gul did not cite this information in his memoirs, since he participated in other events near the Red Tavern. Bulgakov could have received them only from an old Kyiv acquaintance, Pyotr Aleksandrovich Brzhezitsky, a former staff captain-artilleryman, who, according to very many biographical data and character, almost completely corresponds to the literary image of Myshlaevsky. And in general, we have serious doubts that Bulgakov had the opportunity to get acquainted with the emigrant White Guard publications. The same can be said about other memoirs dedicated to the events in Kyiv in 1918, published in exile. Most of them were written on the basis of the same newspaper facts and urban rumors to which Bulgakov himself had direct access in his time. At the same time, it is quite obvious that Mikhail Afanasyevich transferred to the novel some plots from the memoirs of V. Shklovsky "Revolution and the Front", first published in Petrograd in 1921, and then published under the title "Sentimental Journey" in Moscow in 1923-1924 . Only in these memoirs Bulgakov could take the plot with sugaring Hetman's armored cars. In fact, there was no such thing in the history of the defense of Kyiv, and the plot itself is an invention of Shklovsky, why the latter can be the only source of such information.

On the pages of the novel, the name of the city in which the events of the novel unfold is never mentioned. Only by toponymy and events in the described city can the reader determine that we are talking about Kyiv. All street names in the novel were changed, but remained very close in sound to their real-life counterparts. That is why without much difficulty it is possible to determine many places of the events described. The only exception, perhaps, is Nikolka Turbin's escape route, which in reality is impossible to do. Buildings known throughout Kyiv were also transferred without changes to the novel. This is the Pedagogical Museum, and the Alexander Gymnasium, and a monument to Prince Vladimir. We can say that Mikhail Afanasyevich, without any writer's remarks, depicted his hometown of that time.

The house of the Turbins described in the novel fully corresponds to the house of the Bulgakovs, which is still preserved in Kyiv. At the same time, the undoubted autobiographical nature of the novel does not correspond to many events in the Bulgakov family itself. So, the mother of Mikhail Afanasyevich, Varvara Mikhailovna, died only in 1922, while the mother of the Turbins dies in the spring of 1918. In 1918, among the relatives of Mikhail Afanasyevich, the sisters Lelya and Varvara lived in Kiev with their husband Leonid Karum, brothers Nikolai, Ivan, cousin Kostya "Japanese", and finally, Tatyana Lappa - the writer's first wife. In the novel "The White Guard" far from all family members are displayed. We can trace biographical parallels in the images of Alexei Turbin and the writer himself, Nikolai Turbin and Nikolai Bulgakov, Elena Turbina and Varvara Bulgakova, her husband Leonid Karum and Sergei Talberg. Missing are Lelya, Ivan and Kostya Bulgakov, as well as the first wife of the writer. Confused by the fact that Alexei Turbin, very similar to Mikhail Afanasyevich, is unmarried. Sergey Talberg is not quite positively displayed in the novel. We can only attribute this to the disagreements and quarrels that were inevitable in such a large family as the Bulgakovs.

The environment and friends of the Bulgakov house of that time are also far from fully displayed in the novel. At various times, Nikolai and Yuri Gladyrevskiy, Nikolai and Viktor Syngaevskiy with their five sisters, Boris (who shot himself in 1915) and Pyotr Bogdanov, Alexander and Platon Gdeshinsky visited Andreevsky Spusk. The Bulgakovs visited the Kossobudzsky family, where there were brother Yuri, sister Nina and her fiancé Peter Brzhezitsky. Among the youth, only a few were military men: Piotr Brzezitski was a staff captain of artillery, Yuri Gladyrevski was a lieutenant, and Piotr Bogdanov was an ensign. It is this trio that, in its main features and facts of military biographies, completely converges with the trio of literary characters of the White Guard: Myshlaevsky, Shervinsky, Stepanov-Karas. One of the Syngaevsky sisters was bred in the novel by Irina Nai-Tours. One more female role in the novel, Irina Reis from Kiev, depicted in the novel by Yulia Reiss, beloved of Alexei Turbin, received. Some biographical facts for the images of Myshlaevsky, Shervinsky, Karas are taken from other members of the Bulgakov family company. However, these facts, such as, for example, the comparison of Myshlaevsky and Nikolai Syngaevsky, are so small that they do not give us the right to call the images of the main characters of the novel collective. The situation is much simpler with Lariosik - Illarion Surzhansky, whose image is almost completely created on the basis of manifestations of character and biographical facts of Karum's nephew Nikolai Sudzilovsky, who lived at that time in the Bulgakov family. About each of the characters in the novel and its real historical prototype we will talk separately.

The unfinished nature of the novel "The White Guard" has long been known. The writer's intentions in this regard extended to the size of a trilogy, embracing the entire civil war in its chronological framework. It is also known that Mikhail Afanasyevich planned to send Myshlaevsky to serve with the Reds, while Stepanov was supposed to serve with the Whites. Why didn't Mikhail Afanasyevich finish his novel? According to chronology, the version of the "White Guard" known to us is brought by the writer to the beginning of February 1919 - the retreat of the troops of the Directory from Kyiv. It was during this period that Bulgakov's "commune", as Karum called it, broke up: Pyotr Bogdanov left with the Petliurists, and Brzhezitsky left with the Germans for Germany. Subsequently, other members of the company dispersed for various reasons. Already in the autumn of 1919, they ended up in completely different regions: Bogdanov fought as part of the North-Western White Guard Army near Petrograd, where he died in battle with the Reds, Brzhezitsky, after long ordeals, ended up in Krasnoyarsk, where he taught at the Kolchak artillery school, and then moved on to red, Karum, Gladyrevsky, Nikolai Bulgakov and Mikhail Afanasyevich himself fought the Bolsheviks in the Volunteer Army of General Denikin. Mikhail Bulgakov could not know what the prototypes of the main characters of the novel were doing at that time. Only Karum and Brzhezitsky, who had lived in Kyiv since 1921, could tell Mikhail Afanasyevich about their misadventures during the civil war. Although, we have doubts that they could even tell anyone the details of their service with the whites. Others either emigrated, like Nikolai Bulgakov and Yuri Gladryrevskiy, or perished, like Pyotr Bogdanov. The writer knew in general terms about the fate that befell his friends and acquaintances, but, of course, he had nowhere to know the details. It is precisely because of the lack of information about his heroes that Mikhail Afanasyevich, as it seems to us, stopped working on the novel, although the plot turned out to be very interesting.

Our book is not intended to analyze the text of the novel, look for cultural parallels, or build any hypotheses. With the help of archival research: work on the service records of Brzhezitsky, Gladyrevsky, Karum, the Sudzilovsky case, the cases of the repressed Brzhezitsky and Karum, military school cases in which Nikolai Bulgakov and Pyotr Bogdanov appear, a large number of sources on the history of the civil war and White Guard military units , who took part in it, a number of other documents and materials with great accuracy, we managed to restore the biographies of almost all the persons who in one way or another became prototypes for creating literary images"White Guard". It is about them, as well as about Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov during the civil war and after it, that we will tell in this book. We also tried to restore the historical background of the events of the "White Guard" themselves, and those facts that were supposed to serve as the basis for creating a continuation of the novel. As researchers of the civil war, we tried to create a historical ending to Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov's novel The White Guard. By and large, the novel was used by us as a foundation from which we can build on when describing the difficult path of an ordinary Kyiv family and its friends during the years of the civil war. The heroes of our book are first of all considered as participants in important historical events, and only then as prototypes of the novel by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov.

The book contains a lot of supporting material to the history of the events described in the novel "The White Guard", as well as the city of Kyiv, in which these events unfolded.

For help in creating this book, I would like to express my gratitude to the Russian State Military Historical Archive, State archive public and political organizations of Ukraine, the State Archive of the Supreme Authorities of Ukraine, the State Archive of Film and Photo Documents of Ukraine, the Museum of One Street, as well as the employee of the Museum of the Museum of One Street Vladislav Osmak, the director of the Museum Dmitry Shlensky, employee Memorial Museum M.A. Bulgakov Tatyana Rogozovskaya, military historians Nikolai Litvin (Lvov), Vladimir Nazarchuk (Kiev), Anatoly Vasilyev (Moscow), Andrey Kruchinin (Moscow), Alexander Deryabin (Moscow), Sergey Volkov (Moscow), Kiev culturologist Miron Petrovsky, Kievologist Mikhail Kalnitsky .

I would especially like to thank Alexander Vyacheslavovich Slobodyan, Director General of the Obolon Brewery Joint-Stock Company, without whose help it would be very problematic to publish many of our studies.