Book description
Drawing closely on Bulgakov's personal experiences of the horrors of
civil war as a young doctor,
The
White Guard
takes place in Kiev, 1918, a time of turmoil and suffocating
uncertainty as the Bolsheviks, Socialists and Germans fight for control
of the city. It tells the story of the Turbins, a once-wealthy Russian
family, as they are forced to come to terms with revolution and a new
regime. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev
where he graduated as a doctor in 1916. He rapidly abandoned medicine to
write some of the greatest Russian literature of this century. After a
lifetime at odds with the stultifying Soviet regime, he died
impoverished and blind in 1940, shortly after completing his
masterpiece, The Master and Margarita
. None of his major fiction was published during his lifetime.
