Mikhail Bulgakov
1891–1940
Biography
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) was a Russian and Soviet novelist and playwright who had trained as a doctor. He was born in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, and he practised medicine for a time before he gave himself to writing, the theatre and, later, screenplays.
Much of his work is set against the Civil War, the revolution and the early Soviet years. Several of his writings were banned, and his plays were staged and then withdrawn, so his career was difficult and his reputation was small while he lived. Stalin is said to have seen his play The Days of the Turbins many times, but that did not secure his other work. After his death his reputation grew, and The Master and Margarita, first published in 1966–67, is now counted among the great novels of the twentieth century.
The White Guard (Белая гвардия) is on this site under its Russian title and is his first novel. It is set in Kyiv in the closing months of 1918, when the city passed between armies, and it follows the Turbin family and their friends. The streets of the city and the family home reflect Bulgakov's own youth there, and he later reworked the material for the stage as The Days of the Turbins.
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Books
Белая гвардия
by автор Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков
In the winter of 1918, as armies fight over Kyiv, the Turbin family and their friends sit in their apartment, waiting for the city to fall. Bulgakov's first novel is a warm, bitter portrait of a vanishing class. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as written…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.