M.A. Bulgakov twice, in two different works of his, 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 my dream, a silent 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 “To a Secret Friend” contains other details: “I pulled my barracks lamp as far as possible to the table and put a pink paper cap on top of 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 very 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 chiming like a tower in the dining room, sleepy slumber in bed, books and frost...” With this mood, Bulgakov began to create a new novel.
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov began writing the novel “The White Guard,” the most important book for Russian literature, in 1822.
In 1922–1924, Bulgakov wrote articles for the newspaper “Nakanune”, constantly published in the newspaper of railway workers “Gudok”, where he met I. Babel, I. Ilf, E. Petrov, V. Kataev, Yu. Olesha. According to Bulgakov himself, the concept of the novel “The White Guard” finally took shape in 1922. During this time, several important events in his personal life occurred: 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 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 distinguish it 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 initially 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 end up 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 a trilogy, leaving it to Count A.N. Tolstoy (“Walking through Torment”). And the theme of “flight”, emigration, in “The White Guard” is only outlined in the story 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 impetuously and enthusiastically, and was terribly tired: “The third life. And my third life blossomed at the desk. The pile of sheets kept swelling. I wrote with both pencil and ink.” Subsequently, the author returned to his favorite novel more than once, reliving the past. In one of the entries dating back to 1923, Bulgakov noted: “And I will finish the novel, and, I dare to assure you, it will be the kind of novel that will make the sky feel hot...” And in 1925 he wrote: “It will be a terrible pity, if I’m mistaken and the “White Guard” is not a strong thing.” On August 31, 1923, Bulgakov informed Yu. Slezkine: “I finished the novel, but it has not yet been rewritten, it lies in a heap, over which I think a lot. I’m fixing something.” This was a draft version of the text, which is mentioned in the “Theatrical Novel”: “The novel takes a long time to edit. It is necessary to cross out many places, replace hundreds of words with others. A lot of work, but necessary!” Bulgakov was not satisfied with his work, crossed out dozens of pages, created new editions and variants. But at the beginning of 1924, I already read excerpts from “The White Guard” from the writer S. Zayaitsky and from my new friends the Lyamins, considering the book finished.
The first known mention of the completion of the novel dates back to March 1924. The novel was published in the 4th and 5th books of the Rossiya magazine in 1925. But the 6th issue with the final part of the novel was not published. According to researchers, the novel "The White Guard" was written 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 completed publication in the USSR, and foreign publications of the late 20s were not readily available in the writer’s homeland, Bulgakov’s first novel did not receive much attention from the press. The famous critic A. Voronsky (1884–1937) at the end of 1925 called The White Guard, together with Fatal Eggs, works of “outstanding literary quality.” The response to this statement was a sharp attack by the head of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) L. Averbakh (1903–1939) in the Rapp 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 censorship of “The Days of the Turbins,” originally called, like the novel, “The White Guard,” strongly advised Bulgakov to abandon the epithet “white,” which seemed openly hostile to many. But the writer treasured this very word. He agreed with the “cross”, and with “December”, and with “buran” 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 stratum in the country.
"The White Guard" is a largely autobiographical novel based on the writer's personal impressions of Kyiv at the end of 1918 - beginning of 1919. The members of the Turbin family reflected the characteristic features of Bulgakov’s relatives. Turbiny is the maiden name of Bulgakov’s grandmother on his mother’s side. No manuscripts of the novel have survived. The prototypes of the novel's heroes were Bulgakov's Kyiv friends and acquaintances. Lieutenant Viktor Viktorovich Myshlaevsky was copied from his childhood friend Nikolai Nikolaevich Syngaevsky.
The prototype for Lieutenant Shervinsky was another friend of Bulgakov’s youth, Yuri Leonidovich Gladyrevsky, an amateur singer (this quality passed on 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 Afanasyevna. Captain Talberg, her husband, has many similarities with Varvara Afanasyevna Bulgakova’s husband, Leonid Sergeevich Karuma (1888–1968), a German by birth, a career officer who served first Skoropadsky and then the Bolsheviks.
The prototype of Nikolka Turbin was one of the brothers M.A. Bulgakov. The writer’s second wife, Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya-Bulgakova, wrote in her book “Memoirs”: “One of Mikhail Afanasyevich’s brothers (Nikolai) was also a doctor. It’s the personality of my younger brother, Nikolai, that I want to dwell on. The noble and cozy little man Nikolka Turbin has always been dear to my heart (especially in the novel “The White Guard”. In the play “Days of the Turbins” he is much more sketchy.). In my life I never managed to see Nikolai Afanasyevich Bulgakov. This is the youngest representative of the profession favored by the Bulgakov family - doctor of medicine, bacteriologist, scientist and researcher, who died in Paris in 1966. He studied at the University of Zagreb and was assigned to the department of bacteriology there.”
The novel was created at a difficult time for the country. Young Soviet Russia, which did not have a regular army, found itself embroiled in the Civil War. The dreams of the traitor hetman Mazepa, whose name was not accidentally mentioned in Bulgakov’s novel, came true. The “White Guard” is based on events related to the consequences of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, according to which Ukraine was recognized as an independent state, the “Ukrainian State” was created led by Hetman Skoropadsky, and refugees from all over Russia rushed “abroad.” Bulgakov clearly described their social status in the novel.
The philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, the writer’s cousin, in his book “At the Feast of the Gods” described the death of his homeland as follows: “There was a mighty power, needed by friends, terrible by enemies, and now it is rotting carrion, from which piece by piece falls off to the delight of the crows that have flown in. In place of a sixth of the world there was a stinking, 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 this in his play “Days of the Turbins”: “Russia was a great power...” So for Bulgakov, an optimist and talented satirist, despair and grief 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,” the writer found another thought closer and more interesting: “What Russia will become depends largely on how the intelligentsia determines itself.” Bulgakov's heroes are painfully searching for the answer to this question.
“You have to love your heroes; if this does not happen, I do not advise anyone to take up the pen - you will get into the biggest troubles, so you know,” says the “Theatrical Novel”, and this is the main law of Bulgakov’s work. In the novel "The White Guard" he talks about white officers and intelligentsia as ordinary people, reveals their young world of soul, charm, intelligence and strength, and shows their enemies as living people.
The literary community refused to recognize the novel's merits. Out of almost three hundred reviews, Bulgakov counted only three positive ones, and classified the rest as “hostile and abusive.” The writer received rude reviews. In one of the articles, Bulgakov was called “a new bourgeois scum, splashing poisoned but powerless 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 monarchical, Black Hundred officers”, “hidden counter-revolutionism” - 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 and its victorious power. Therefore, this book, considered banned for several decades, found its reader, found a second life in all the richness and splendor of Bulgakov’s living word. Kiev writer Viktor Nekrasov, who read The White Guard in the 60s, quite rightly noted: “Nothing, it turns out, has faded, nothing has become outdated. It was as if these forty years had never happened... before our eyes an obvious miracle happened, something that happens very rarely in literature and not to everyone - a rebirth took place.” The life of the novel's heroes continues today, but in a different direction.
Analysis of the work
“The White Guard” is a work that signified that a new writer had come to literature, with his own style and his own manner of writing. This is Bulgakov's first novel. The work is largely autobiographical. The novel reflects that terrible era in the life of Russia, when the Civil War was devastating across the country. Horrifying pictures appear before the reader's eyes: son goes against father, brother against brother. This reveals the illogical, cruel rules of war that are contrary to human nature. And into this environment, filled with the most brutal images of bloodshed, the Turbin family finds itself. This quiet, calm, pretty family, far from any political vicissitudes, turns out to be not only a witness to large-scale upheavals in the country, but also an involuntary participant in them; it unexpectedly found itself in the very epicenter of a huge storm. This is a kind of test of strength, a lesson in courage, wisdom, and perseverance. And no matter how hard this lesson is, you cannot escape it. He must bring his entire past life to a common denominator in order to begin a new life. And Turbines overcome this with dignity. They make their choice, stay with their people.
The characters in the novel are very diverse. This is the cunning owner of the house Vasilisa, the brave and courageous Colonel Nai-Tours, who sacrificed his life to save the young cadets, the frivolous Larion, the brave Julia Reise, Alexey Turbin, Nikolai Turbin, who remained faithful only to their life rules, the principles of humanity and love for people , the principles of human brotherhood, valor, honor. The Turbin family remains as if on the periphery of the Civil War. They do not take part in bloody skirmishes, and if Turbin kills one of his pursuers, it is only to save his own life.
The novel tells the story of a bloody page in Russian history, but its depiction is complicated by the fact that it is a war of one’s own against one’s own. And therefore, the writer faces a doubly difficult task: to judge, to give a sober assessment, to be impartial, but at the same time to ardently empathize, to be sick himself. Historical prose about the Civil War, like any other, is characterized by ponderousness and heavy rethinking. what you are writing about. Bulgakov copes with his task brilliantly: his style is light, his thought glides correctly, accurately, snatching events from the very thick of it. V. Sakharov wrote about this in the preface to Bulgakov’s book. Sakharov speaks of “the amazing spiritual unity of the author with his characters. “You have to love your heroes; If this doesn’t happen, I don’t advise anyone to take up the pen - you’ll get into big trouble, you know that.”
The writer talks about the fate of Russia, about the fate of millions of its foolish children. Bulgakov is having a hard time going through this period; he himself, like Alexey Turbin, was mobilized as a doctor, first into the troops of Petliura, from where he escaped, and then ended up with the White Guards. He saw everything with his own eyes, felt the fury and uncontrollability of the Russian storm. However, he remained faithful to the principles of justice and love for people. In his novel, he goes far beyond the boundaries of problems associated with the war itself. He thinks about lasting values. He ends his work with the words: “Everything will pass. Suffering, torment, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will disappear, but the stars will remain, when the shadow of our bodies and deeds will not remain on the earth. There is not a single person who does not know this. So why don't we want to turn our gaze to them? Why?" The author talks about how insignificant a person is with his petty problems and experiences in comparison with the eternal and harmonious flow of world life. This is a question about the meaning of life. You must live your life in such a way as to remain human, not to commit evil, not to envy, not to lie, not to kill. These Christian commandments are the guarantee of true life.
The epigraphs to the novel are no less interesting. There is a deep meaning here. These epigraphs draw threads from the novel “The White Guard” to the entire work of Bulgakov, to the problem of creative heritage. “It began to snow lightly and suddenly began to fall in flakes. The wind howled; there was a snowstorm. In an instant, the dark sky mixed with the snowy sea. Everything has disappeared. “Well, master,” the coachman shouted, “trouble: a snowstorm!” This epigraph is taken from “The Captain’s Daughter” by A. S. Pushkin. A blizzard, a storm, is a symbol of civil war, where everything is mixed up in a mad whirlwind, the road is not visible, it is not known where to go. The feeling of loneliness, fear, the unknown of the future and fear of it are the characteristic moods of the era. The reference to Pushkin’s work also provides a reminder of Pugachev’s rebellion. As many researchers aptly noted, the Pugachevs appeared again in the 20th century, but their rebellion was much more terrible and larger-scale.
By mentioning Pushkin, Bulgakov hints at his connection with the poet’s creative heritage. He writes in his novel: “The walls will fall, the falcon will fly away from the white mitten, the fire in the bronze lamp will go out, and “The Captain’s Daughter” will be burned in the oven.” The writer expresses great concern about the fate of Russian cultural heritage. Like many intellectuals, he did not accept the ideas of the October Revolution. The slogan “Throw Pushkin off the ship of modernity” scared him away. He understood that it is much easier to destroy centuries-old traditions and the works of the “golden age” than to build anew. Moreover, it is almost impossible to build a new state, a new bright life on suffering, war, and bloody terror. What will remain after a revolution that sweeps away everything from its path? - Emptiness.
The second epigraph is no less interesting: “And the dead were judged according to what was written in the books, according to their deeds.” These are words from a book known as the Apocalypse. These are the Revelations of John the Theologian. The “apocalyptic” theme takes on a core meaning. People who lost their way were caught in the whirlwind of revolution and civil war. And they were very easily won over to their side by smart and insightful politicians, instilling the idea of a bright future. And justifying themselves with this slogan, people went to murder. But is it possible to build a future on death and destruction?
In conclusion, we can say about the meaning of the title of the novel. The White Guard is not just the “white” soldiers and officers themselves, that is, the “white army,” but also all the people who find themselves in the cycle of revolutionary events, people trying to find shelter in the City.
M. Bulgakov’s novel “The White Guard” was written in 1923-1925. At that time, the writer considered this book to be the main one in his destiny, he said that this novel “will make the sky hot.” Years later he called him "a failure." Perhaps the writer meant that that epic in the spirit of L.N. Tolstoy, which he wanted to create, did not work out.
Bulgakov witnessed the revolutionary events in Ukraine. He outlined his view of his experience in the stories “The Red Crown” (1922), “The Extraordinary Adventures of the Doctor” (1922), “Chinese History” (1923), “The Raid” (1923). Bulgakov’s first novel with the bold title “The White Guard” became, perhaps, the only work at that time in which the writer was interested in the experiences of a person in a raging world, when the foundation of the world order is collapsing.
One of the most important motives of M. Bulgakov’s work is the value of home, family, and simple human affections. The heroes of The White Guard are losing the warmth of their home, although they are desperately trying to preserve it. In her prayer to the Mother of God, Elena says: “You are sending too much grief at once, intercessor mother. So in one year you end your family. For what?.. My mother took it from us, I don’t have a husband and never will, I understand that. Now I understand very clearly. And now you’re taking away the older one too. For what?.. How will we be together with Nikol?.. Look what is happening around, look... Intercessor Mother, won’t you have mercy?.. Maybe we are bad people, but why punish like that? -That?"
The novel begins with the words: “The year after the Nativity of Christ 1918 was a great and terrible year, the second from the beginning of the revolution.” Thus, as it were, two systems of counting time, chronology, two systems of values are proposed: traditional and new, revolutionary.
Remember how at the beginning of the 20th century A.I. Kuprin depicted the Russian army in the story “The Duel” - decayed, rotten. In 1918, the same people who made up the pre-revolutionary army, and Russian society in general, found themselves on the battlefields of the Civil War. But on the pages of Bulgakov’s novel we see not Kuprin’s heroes, but rather Chekhov’s ones. Intellectuals, who even before the revolution were yearning for a bygone world and understood that something needed to be changed, found themselves in the epicenter of the Civil War. They, like the author, are not politicized, they live their own lives. And now we find ourselves in a world in which there is no place for neutral people. The Turbins and their friends desperately defend what is dear to them, singing “God Save the Tsar,” tearing off the fabric hiding the portrait of Alexander I. Like Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, they do not adapt. But, like him, they are doomed. Only Chekhov's intellectuals were doomed to vegetation, and Bulgakov's intellectuals were doomed to defeat.
Bulgakov likes the cozy Turbino apartment, but everyday life is not valuable for a writer in itself. Life in “The White Guard” is a symbol of the strength of existence. Bulgakov leaves the reader no illusions about the future of the Turbin family. Inscriptions from the tiled stove are washed away, cups are broken, and the inviolability of everyday life and, therefore, existence is slowly but irreversibly destroyed. The Turbins' house behind the cream curtains is their fortress, a refuge from the blizzard and blizzard raging outside, but it is still impossible to protect themselves from it.
Bulgakov's novel includes the symbol of a blizzard as a sign of the times. For the author of The White Guard, the blizzard is a symbol not of the transformation of the world, not of the sweeping away of everything that has become obsolete, but of an evil principle, violence. “Well, I think it will stop, the life that is written about in chocolate books will begin, but not only does it not begin, but all around it becomes more and more terrible. In the north the blizzard howls and howls, but here underfoot the disturbed womb of the earth muffles and grumbles dully.” The blizzard force destroys the life of the Turbin family, the life of the City. White snow in Bulgakov does not become a symbol of purification.
“The provocative novelty of Bulgakov’s novel was that five years after the end of the Civil War, when the pain and heat of mutual hatred had not yet subsided, he dared to show the officers of the White Guard not in the poster guise of the “enemy,” but as ordinary, good and bad, suffering and misguided, intelligent and limited people, showed them from the inside, and the best in this environment - with obvious sympathy. What does Bulgakov like about these stepsons of history who lost their battle? And in Alexey, and in Malyshev, and in Nai-Turs, and in Nikolka, he most of all values courageous straightforwardness and loyalty to honor,” notes literary critic V.Ya. Lakshin. The concept of honor is the starting point that determines Bulgakov’s attitude towards his heroes and which can be taken as a basis in a conversation about the system of images.
But despite all the sympathy of the author of “The White Guard” for his heroes, his task is not to decide who is right and who is wrong. Even Petliura and his henchmen, in his opinion, are not the culprits of the horrors taking place. This is a product of the elements of rebellion, doomed to quickly disappear from the historical arena. Kozyr, who was a bad school teacher, would never have become an executioner and would not have known about himself that his calling was war, if this war had not begun. Many of the heroes’ actions were brought to life by the Civil War. “War is a native mother” for Kozyr, Bolbotun and other Petliurists, who take pleasure in killing defenseless people. The horror of war is that it creates a situation of permissiveness and undermines the foundations of human life.
Therefore, for Bulgakov it does not matter whose side his heroes are on. In Alexey Turbin’s dream, the Lord says to Zhilin: “One believes, the other doesn’t believe, but you all have the same actions: now each other is at each other’s throats, and as for the barracks, Zhilin, then you have to understand this, I have you all, Zhilin, identical - killed on the battlefield. This, Zhilin, must be understood, and not everyone will understand it.” And it seems that this view is very close to the writer.
V. Lakshin noted: “Artistic vision, the mindset of the creative mind always embraces a broader spiritual reality than can be verified by evidence of simple class interest. There is a biased class truth that has its own right. But there is a universal, classless morality and humanism, smelted by the experience of mankind.” M. Bulgakov stood in the position of such universal humanism.
M.A. Bulgakov twice, in two different works, recalls how his work on the novel “The White Guard” (1925) began. In “Theatrical Novel” Maksudov says: “It arose at night when I woke up after a sad dream. I dreamed of my hometown, snow, winter, civil war... In my dream, a silent blizzard passed in front of me, and then an old piano appeared and near it people who were no longer in the world.”
And in the story “To a Secret Friend” there are other details: “I pulled my barracks lamp as far as possible to the table and put a pink paper cap on top of 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 very 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 chiming like a tower in the dining room, sleepy slumber in bed, books and frost...”
It was with this mood that the first pages of the novel were written. But his plan was hatched for more than one year.
In both epigraphs to “The White Guard”: from “The Captain’s Daughter” (“The evening howled, a blizzard began”) and from the Apocalypse (“... the dead were judged ...”) - there are no riddles for the reader. They are directly related to the plot. And the blizzard really rages on the pages - sometimes the most natural, sometimes allegorical (“The beginning of revenge from the north has long since begun, and it sweeps and sweeps”). And the trial of those “who are no longer in the world,” and essentially the Russian intelligentsia, continues throughout the novel. The author himself speaks on it from the first lines. Acts as a witness. Far from impartial, but honest and objective, not missing either the virtues of the “defendants” or the weaknesses, shortcomings and mistakes.
The novel opens with a majestic image of 1918. Not by date, not by designation of the time of action - precisely by image.
“It was a great and terrible year after the birth of Christ, 1918, and since the beginning of the second revolution. It was full of sun in summer and snow in winter, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the shepherd star - evening Venus and red, trembling Mars.
House and City are the two main inanimate characters of the book. However, not completely inanimate. The Turbins' house on Alekseevsky Spusk, depicted with all the features of a family idyll, criss-crossed by war, lives, breathes, suffers like a living being. It’s as if you feel the warmth from the tiles of the stove when it’s frosty outside, you hear the tower clock striking in the dining room, the strumming of a guitar and the familiar sweet voices of Nikolka, Elena, Alexey, their noisy, cheerful guests...
And the City is immensely beautiful on its hills even in winter, snow-covered and flooded with electricity in the evenings. The Eternal City, tormented by shelling, street fighting, disgraced by crowds of soldiers and temporary workers who seized its squares and streets.
It was impossible to write a novel without a broad, conscious view, what was called a worldview, and Bulgakov showed that he had it. The author avoids in his book, at least in the part that was completed, a direct confrontation between the Reds and Whites. On the pages of the novel, the Whites are fighting the Petliurists. But the writer is occupied by a broader humanistic thought - or, rather, a thought-feeling: the horror of a fratricidal war. With sadness and regret, he observes the desperate struggle of several warring elements and does not sympathize with any of them to the end. Bulgakov defended eternal values in the novel: home, homeland, family. And he remained a realist in his narration - he did not spare either the Petliurites, or the Germans, or the Whites, and he did not say a word of lies about the Reds, placing them as if behind the curtain of the picture.
The provocative novelty of Bulgakov’s novel lay in the fact that five years after the end of the civil war, when the pain and heat of mutual hatred had not yet subsided, he dared to show the officers of the White Guard not in the poster guise of an “enemy”, but as ordinary people - good and bad, suffering and misguided, intelligent and limited - people, showed them from the inside, and the best in this environment - with obvious sympathy. In Alexey, in Myshlaevsky, in Nai-Turs and in Pikolka, the author most of all values courageous straightforwardness and loyalty to honor. For them, honor is a kind of faith, the core of personal behavior.
Officer's honor demanded the protection of the white banner, unreasoning loyalty to the oath, the fatherland and the tsar, and Alexey Turbin painfully experiences the collapse of the symbol of faith, from under which the main support was pulled out with the abdication of Nicholas II. But honor is also loyalty to other people, comradeship, and duty to the younger and weaker. Colonel Malyshev is a man of honor because he dismisses the cadets to their homes, having realized the pointlessness of resistance: courage and contempt for the phrase are needed for such a decision. Nai-Turs is a man of honor, even a knight of it, because he fights to the end, and when he sees that the matter is lost, he tears off the cadet's shoulder straps, almost a boy thrown into a bloody mess, and covers his retreat with a machine gun. Nikolka is also a man of honor, because he rushes through the bullet-riddled streets of the city, looking for Nai-Tours’s loved ones to inform them about his death, and then, risking himself, he almost steals the body of the deceased commander, removing him from the mountain of frozen corpses in the basement of the anatomical theater .
Where there is honor, there is courage, where there is dishonor, there is cowardice. The reader will remember Thalberg, with his “patented smile,” stuffing his travel suitcase. He is a stranger in the Turbino family. People tend to be mistaken, sometimes tragically mistaken, to doubt, to search, to come to a new faith. But a man of honor makes this journey out of inner conviction, usually with anguish, with anguish, parting with what he worshiped. For a person devoid of the concept of honor, such changes are easy: he, like Thalberg, simply changes the bow on the lapel of his coat, adapting to changed circumstances.
The author of “The White Guard” was also concerned about another question: the bond of the old “peaceful life”, in addition to autocracy, was Orthodoxy, faith in God and the afterlife - some sincere, some weathered and remaining only as loyalty to rituals. In Bulgakov's first novel there is no break with traditional awareness, but there is no sense of loyalty to it.
Elena's lively, fervent prayer for the salvation of her brother, addressed to the Mother of God, performs a miracle: Alexey recovers. Before Elena’s inner gaze appears the one whom the author will later call Yeshua Ha-Nozri, “completely resurrected, and blessed, and barefoot.” The light, transparent vision anticipates the late novel in its visibility: “the glass light of the heavenly dome, some unprecedented red-yellow sand blocks, olive trees...” - the landscape of ancient Judea.
Much brings the author together with his main character - the doctor Alexei Turbin, to whom he gave a piece of his biography: calm courage, and faith in old Russia, faith to the last, until the course of events destroys it completely, but most of all - the dream of a peaceful life .
The semantic culmination of the novel lies in the prophetic dream of Alexei Turbin. “I have neither profit nor loss from your faith,” God, who “appeared” to Sergeant Zhilin, simply argues in a peasant manner. “One believes, the other doesn’t believe, but your actions... you all have the same: now you’re at each other’s throats...” And the whites, the reds, and those who fell at Perekop are equally subject to the highest mercy: “.. “All of you are the same to me - killed on the battlefield.”
The author of the novel did not pretend to be a religious person: both hell and heaven for him were most likely “so... a human dream.” But Elena says in her home prayer that “we are all guilty of blood.” And the writer was tormented by the question of who would pay for the blood shed in vain.
The suffering and torment of a fratricidal war, the consciousness of the justice of what he called “the clumsy peasant’s anger,” and at the same time the pain from the violation of old human values led Bulgakov to the creation of his unusual ethics - essentially non-religious, but preserving the features of the Christian moral tradition. The motif of eternity, which arose in the first lines of the novel, in one of the epigraphs, in the image of a great and terrible year, rises in the finale. The biblical words about the Last Judgment sound especially expressive: “And everyone was judged according to his deeds, and whoever was not written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”
“...The cross turned into a threatening sharp sword. But he's not scary. All will pass. Suffering, torment, blood, famine and pestilence. The sword will disappear, but the stars will remain, when the shadow of our bodies and deeds will not remain on the earth. There is not a single person who does not know this. So why don't we want to turn our gaze to them? Why?"
