History of the creation of the work. Genre and direction, plot and composition of the novel
The work of M. A. Bulgakov was significantly influenced by his difficult fate. Bulgakov, coming from an intelligent family, did not accept the revolutionary changes and the reaction that followed them. The ideals imposed by the authoritarian state did not inspire the writer. Bulgakov, who has a high level of intelligence and an excellent education, clearly saw the contrast between the demagoguery in the squares and the wave of terror sweeping the country. The writer dedicated the novel “The White Guard” to the tragedy of the people.
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The writer began work on the work in the winter of 1923. The novel describes the events of the Civil War of 1918. Kyiv was occupied by the troops of the Directory, who overthrew the power of Hetman P. Skoropadsky. In December 1918, officer squads tried to defend the hetman's power. Bulgakov was also enrolled in such a squad. Thus, the novel contains autobiographical features - even the number of the house in which the Bulgakovs lived during the capture of Kyiv by Petlyura is preserved - 13. This number takes on a symbolic meaning in the novel. In the work, Kyiv is simply called a city, and Andreevsky Descent, where the house is located, is called Alekseevsky. The prototypes of the characters in the novel were Bulgakov’s relatives, acquaintances and friends:
- Nikola Turbin - the writer’s younger brother Nikolai;
- Alexey Turbin - Bulgakov himself;
- Elena Turbina-Talberg is the sister of the writer Varvara;
- Talberg Sergey Ivanovich - officer L. S. Karum;
- Larion Surzhansky - N.V. Sudzilovsky, a distant relative of the Bulgakovs;
- Myshlaevsky - N.N. Syngaevsky, Bulgakov's childhood friend;
- Lieutenant Shervinsky - Yu.L. Gladyrevsky, another friend of Bulgakov;
- Colonel Felix Nay-Tours is a collective image, the prototypes of which were F.A. Keller, a white general killed by the Petliurists, Major General N.V. Shinkarenko;
- engineer Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich - Vasily Pavlovich Listovnichy;
- Futurist Mikhail Shpolyansky - critic and literary scholar V.B. Shklovsky;
Finished works on a similar topic
Course work M. A. Bulgakov, analysis of the work “The White Guard” 490 ₽ Abstract M. A. Bulgakov, analysis of the work “The White Guard” 280 ₽ Test paper M. A. Bulgakov, analysis of the work “The White Guard” 240 ₽
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Note 1
Turbina is the maiden name of the writer’s grandmother.
But The White Guard is not a completely autobiographical work. Some events are fictitious (for example, the fact that the turbines’ mother died. The Bulgakovs’ mother, the prototype of the heroine, lived with her second husband in another city).
The novel was first published in France in 1927-1929.
The work is written in the tradition of realistic literature of the 19th century. The writer uses a traditional technique in the novel - through the history of the family he shows the history of the people and the country, which gives the novel the features of an epic.
"The White Guard" begins as a family novel. Gradually, events receive philosophical understanding.
"The White Guard" is a historical novel. Bulgakov does not set himself the task of objectively describing the political situation in Ukraine in 1918-1919. He portrays events tendentiously.
In the center of the composition is the Turbin family. The events of the novel take place in the winter of 1918-1919 and cover 51 days. During this period, power changed in the city - the hetman fled with the Germans, Petliura entered the city. At the end, the Petliurists also flee under the cannonade of the Red Army.
The novel has two epigraphs. The first describes the snowstorm in “The Captain’s Daughter” by A.S. Pushkin. The second epigraph from the Apocalypse, warning that everyone will be judged according to their deeds.
At the beginning of the work, 1918 is called great and terrible. At the end of the novel, the writer notes that 1919 was even worse.
Analysis of the novel by M.A. Bulgakov "The White Guard"
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 natural, sometimes allegorical (“Revenge from the north has long 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 entire 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 a date, not a designation of the time of action - just an image.
“It was a great and terrible year after the birth of Christ, 1918, and the second since the beginning of the 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 captured 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 Petliurists, 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 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 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 Alexei, 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 also means 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’re all 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: “... you’re all 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?"
Topic, issue, main idea
In the novel “The White Guard” M. Bulgakov raises the topic of moral choice. The White Guards are forced to choose - to participate in meaningless battles for the power of the hetman who has fled from the city, or to save themselves.
Another key theme of the novel is political instability. The events of the novel take place after the revolutionary events. The Petliurists who captured the city are weak in front of the Bolsheviks, just like the White Guards. Bulgakov's novel is a tragic work about how the intelligentsia perishes.
The problem of the novel is the disastrous, hopeless situation of the intelligentsia. In their tragedy, the author reflects the drama of the entire country, because without a cultural and intellectual elite, the country is not able to develop harmoniously.
Bulgakov in The White Guard raises the following problems:
- Cowardice and dishonor;
- The problem of choosing between life and duty;
- The split of Russian society;
- Civil War.
The main meaning of the novel is the struggle: between honor and dishonor, between courage and cowardice, between good and evil, between God and the devil.
Honor and courage are the Turbin family and their friends, Colonel Malyshev, Nai-Tours. Contrasted with cowardice and dishonor are Staff Captain Studzinsky, Hetman Talberg.
Ordinary citizens are assessed by the same criteria.
Another meaning of the work is that God is close not to the churchmen who serve him officially, but to those who, even in such a merciless, bloody time, managed to preserve their humanity. In the parable of the novel - Alexei Turbin's dream - God explains that the White Guards will find themselves in their own paradise, with church floors, and the Red Army soldiers - in theirs, with red stars, since both of them, albeit in different ways, believed in the coming of good for the fatherland. Despite the fact that the White Guards and Red Army men are on different sides, their essence is the same. But the churchmen, according to this parable, will not go to heaven, since they have departed from the truth.
Note 2
The essence of Bulgakov's novel is that humanity and inhumanity will always fight for power over the world. And in this eternal struggle it is important to choose the right side.
