Arms against a Sea of Troubles: Text and Context of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard

Abstract

This article focuses on the representation of historical events in literary texts by pointing at the tension between their factual and fictional elements. The fable and the setting of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard and his novel-based play The Days of the Turbins serve as examples. Almost one hundred years after its first (incomplete) publication, Bulgakov’s novel remains an object of heated debates and is a pivot point for a broad range of current historical, ideological, and cultural clashes between Ukraine and Russia. Against this background, the sophisticated form of Bulgakov’s narratives and the author’s cult status encourage the reader to consider his works both as historical testimonies and poetic prophecies. More importantly, the historical contextualization of The White Guard and The Days of the Turbins goes far beyond their narrated time and the events of the year 1918: it also includes the ideology of smenovekhovstvo, the dramatic changes in Soviet politics of korenizatsiya, and the self-identification of the intelligentsiya in the late Soviet era.