The White Guard

"I was saying before how I find reading novels an aid to the imagination of a time and place. The White Guard does that for Kyiv in 1918. I started as a historian of the Revolution and civil war, and this is one of the first novels that I read with my historian’s hat on. I just love the way it recreates this world of Kyiv where there’s chaos, essentially. There are various contenders for power: the Germans have set up a puppet government, Petlyura and his nationalists are trying to topple it; the Bolsheviks are attacking Kyiv from the east. In the middle of all of this turmoil, there’s a family, the Turbins, who have fled south, as so many did after the October Revolution. They’re trying to eke out an existence in Kyiv, to make sense of what’s happening and where they should put their efforts—whether they should join the White Guards who are assembling in the South, in the Don and Kuban, at that time. It’s a novel that perfectly evokes a short period of time, only a few weeks, in 1918. What I love about it is it does in a novel what you would want to do in a history book but can’t because you have to write history. It’s released from all the anchors of history writing, footnotes and archives and all the rest of it. In brilliant prose, it manages to conjure up that atmosphere better than anything you could do as a historian. He uses symbols wonderfully as a way of compressing the meaning and resonance of his writing. In A People’s Tragedy , I quote the final paragraph of the book where he describes this menacing railway engine, which is clearly a metaphor for the Red Army which is about to march in. It is brilliant. So that’s the reason I chose it. I’ve read it again since the war in Ukraine began because I put it down as one of my suggested reads for a piece I did for the Observer . It’s not a very politically correct choice now because although Bulgakov was born in Kyiv, he doesn’t actually have much truck with the Ukrainian nationalists and is pretty rude about them. He is one of those Ukrainian writers—like Gogol—who wrote in Russian and always saw Russia as a home for himself as a Ukrainian and Russian as the literary language, the big civilization. I don’t know because I’m not a Bulgakov expert, but a lot of it is from direct impressions and experience. He saw what was happening in the chaos of 1918. It’s a visceral book and very visual. It’s got little details that just take you there immediately. I don’t know what it would be like for someone who doesn’t know the history but to me, it feels like you’re watching something happen before your eyes."