- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (May 28 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 030012242X
- ISBN-13: 978-0300122428
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14.9 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 499 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #333,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
The White Guard is less famous than Mikhail Bulgakov's comic hit, The Master and Margarita, but it is a lovely book, though completely different in tone. It is set in Kiev during the Russian revolution and tells a story about the war's effect on a middle-class family (not workers). The story was not politically correct and thereby contributed to Bulgakov's lifelong troubles with the Soviet authorities. It was, however, well-loved, and the novel was turned into a successful play at the time of its publication in 1967.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Review
"Mikhail Bulgakov''s White Guard is a classic modern novel by one of the greatest Russian avant-garde writers that vividly recreates the chaos of Revolutionary Kiev in 1918. Marian Schwartz''s English translation brilliantly reproduces the author''s aural and visual montage of a family caught in the deadly whirlpool of multiple warring adversaries."—Charlotte Douglas, New York University
"Bulgakov''s novel evokes the suffering of the conflict and the still greater horrors that lay ahead."—Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal
Finalist for the 2010 Lewis Galantiere Award sponsored by the American Translators Association
(Lewis Galantiere Award American Translators Association )
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of very few great books to emerge from the Soviet Union,
By
This review is from: White Guard (Paperback)
Bulgakov presented an absorbing and fully realized novel. It not only brings the Turbins, a bourgeois family in Kiev, to life, but shows what it is like for decent, intelligent, idealistic people to live through a civil war on the losing side. (In the stage of the civil war covered in the novel, the Bolsheviks hardly figure at all; Bulgakov left before the Red Army triumphed.) Not as romantic as _Dr. Zhivago_, _White Guard_ focuses more on the collapse of the old order without the replacement of any new one. It is not as daring and free-wheeling as _The Master and the Margarita_, but shows that M&M was no fluke. This was a very great writer whose work (like Pasternak's) was massively interfered with by the commisars of literature in the USSR--and by Stalin himself (who personally banned Bulgakov's play about another set of those on the losing side of the revolution, "Flight."
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Visionary literatural debut of former doctor Bulgakov,
By algugel (Richmond Hill, NY USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: White Guard (Paperback)
"White guard"is a requiem to the whole generation of russian intellectuals,noblemen and simply honest people,which were almost completely whipped out in a terrible years of Civil War,and at the same time that novel is a hymn of true humanity,"White Guard"like its great predecessors-"War and Peace","Dead Souls"and "Crime and Punishment" follows most important tradition of Great Russian Literature - Humanistic.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A 1:30 AM "I can still read for fifteen more minutes" book,
By Brian Aldershof (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
This review is from: White Guard (Paperback)
I am also astounded that only three people reviewed this book. The novel centers on the Turbin family living in Kiev, Ukraine during the Civil War (1918 - 1921) that followed World War I and the Russian Revolution. After the Russian empire fell apart in 1917, the Ukraine declared an independent state in early 1918 led by a parliamentary leader called a Hetman. The Hetman Skoropadsky in The White Guard is the second such leader. Skoropadsky assumed power with German support and intervention. Having just lost World War I and being not all that interested in the Ukraine anyway, the Germans could not support Skoropadsky enough to quell the inevitable power struggle. In the Ukraine, there arose armies of Tsarists (led by Deniken, mentioned briefly in the book), Bolsheviks (who, of course, ultimately win but are not major players in the book), and Socialist nationalists led by Simon Petlyura. The Turbins enlist in a local guard unit supporting the Hetman against Petlyura's much larger army. It soon becomes clear that their loyalty to the Hetman is misplaced, but the Turbins' loyalty to each other, their city, their friends and neighbors, and their commanding officers is heart-warming. Besides "heart-warming" there are also running gun battles, sabre decapitations, machine gun ambushes, and enough action to please all but the most hard core testosterone addicts. Petlyura is regarded by many Ukrainians as a great general (no opinion from me), but many readers will enjoy despising Petlyura for the pogroms he instituted that killed 100,000 Ukrainian Jews. Petlyura is called a "dirty Yid" at a point in the book that might give insight into Bulgakov's view on these pogroms. This book is both a taut thriller and a beautiful story of loyalty and love. Brian says "Check it out" (Sorry, Joe Bob).
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