The White Guard Quotes

“Everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the Earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Tutto passa. Passano le sofferenze e i dolori, passano il sangue, la fame, la pestilenza. La spada sparirà, le stelle invece resteranno, e ci saranno, le stelle, anche quando dalla terra saranno scomparse le ombre persino dei nostri corpi e delle nostre opere. Non c'è uomo che non lo sappia. Ma perché allora non vogliamo rivolgere lo sguardo alle stelle? Perché?”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Toate sunt trecătoare. Chinuri, suferințe, vărsări de sânge, molimă, foamete. Totul va pieri, dar stelele de pe cer vor dăinui și atunci când jos, pe pământ, nu va mai rămâne nici măcar umbra noastră sau a înfăptuirilor noastre. Nu se află nimeni pe fața pământului care să n-o știe. Și atunci de ce nu vrem să ne îndreptăm privirea spre stele? De ce?”
― Mihail Bulgakov, Garda Alba

“Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter and snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds' star, eventide Venus; and Mars- quivering, red. But in days of blood and of peace the years fly like an arrow and the thick frost of a hoary white December, season of Christmas trees, Santa Claus, joy and glittering snow, overtook the young Turbins unawares. For the reigning head of the family, their adored mother, was no longer with them.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Целых лет 20 человек занимается каким-нибудь делом, например, читает римское право, а на 21 — вдруг оказывается, что римское право не при чем, что он даже не понимает его и не любит, а на самом деле он тонкий садовод и горит любовью к цветам. Происходит это, надо полагать, от несовершенства нашего социального строя, при котором люди сплошь и рядом попадают на свое место только к концу жизни.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Soon the room had that desolate look that comes from the chaos of packing up to go away and, worse, from removing the shade from the lamp. Never, never take the shade off a lamp. A lampshade is something sacred. Scuttle away like a rat from danger and into the unknown. Read or doze beside your lampshade; let the storm howl outside and wait until they come for you.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“All of this happened very quickly, but not suddenly, and not before the appearance of certain omens.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“and then in the twenty-first year it suddenly transpires that Roman law is a complete waste of time, that he not only doesn't understand it and dislikes it too, but that he is really a born gardener and has an unquenchable love of flowers. This is presumably the result of some imperfection in our social system, which seems to ensure that people frequently only find their proper metier towards the end of their lives.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“The sentries marched back and forth, guarding their tower, for without knowing it, man had made towers, alarm-bells and weapons for one purpose only - to guard the peace of his hearth and home. For this he goes to war, which if the truth be known, is the only cause for which anyone ought to fight.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“They worked in a hurry, for as every decent man who has taken part in a revolution knows very well - no matter who is in power - searches take place from 2.30 a.m. to 6.15 a.m. in winter and from midnight to 4 a.m. in summer.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“A man only has to be chased with firearms for him to turn into a cunning wolf: in place of his weak, and in really desperate situations useless intellect, the wisdom of animal instinct will suddenly take over.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“The right place to live is behind cream-coloured blinds.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Give the fathers twenty-five roubles, and they'll say a mass for the devil himself.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Behind the Blue Division, the frost-bitten horses of Kozyr-Leshko's cavalry regiment crossed the bridge at a wolfish lope followed by a rumbling, bouncing field-kitchen . . . then it all disappeared as if it had never been. All that remained was the stiffening corpse of a Jew on the approach to the bridge, some trampled hay and horse-dung.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“The snow would just melt, the green Ukrainian grass would grow again and weave its carpet over the earth . . . The gorgeous sunrises would come again . . . The air would shimmer with heat above the fields and no more traces of blood would remain. Blood is cheap on those red fields and no one would redeem it.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“The night flowed on. During its second half the whole arc of the sky, the curtain that God had drawn across the world, was covered with stars.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“The coal-black gloom of the darkest night had descended on the terraces of the most beautiful spot on earth, St Vladimir's Hill, whose brick-paved paths and avenues were hidden beneath a thick layer of virgin snow.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Pagherà qualcuno per il sangue?
No. Nessuno.
Semplicemente la neve si scioglierà, spunterà la verde erba ucraina, coprirà la terra... germineranno le biade rigogliose... tremolerà l'aria torrida sui campi e del sangue non resterà traccia. Costa poco il sangue sui campi vermigli, e nessuno lo riscatterà.
Nessuno.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Mezzanotte... ascolta... mezzanotte... ascolta. L'ora è scoccata come un monito, e le alabarde di non si sa chi hanno mandato un suono argentino e gradevole. Le sentinelle sono andate attorno e hanno vigilato, poiché l'uomo, pur non sapendolo nemmeno lui, ha creato le torri, gli allarmi e le armi per un unico scopo, quello di salvaguardare la tranquillità e il focolare degli uomini. Per questo egli combatte, e, tutto sommato, non bisogna in nessun caso combattere per qualcos'altro.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Oh, soltanto colui che è stato vinto sa che significhi questa parola! Essa assomiglia a una sera in una casa in cui si sia guastata la luce elettrica, assomiglia a una stanza sulle cui tappezzerie si diffonde una muffa verde piena di vita insana. Assomiglia a dei bambini rachitici indemoniati, all'olio marcio, a una bestemmia oscena pronunciata da voci femminili nell'oscurità. Insomma, assomiglia alla morte.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Elmúlik minden. Szenvedés, kín, ínség és tengerek. A kard eltűnik, de a csillagok megmaradnak, ha testünknek és tetteinknek nyoma sem lesz már a földön. Nincs ember, aki ezt ne tudná. Miért vonakodunk hát felnézni rájuk? Miért?”
― Bulgakov Mikhail Afanas'evich, Белая гвардия

“Go on living . . . and be kind to one another . .”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“– Молебен будет.

– Крестный ход.

– Молебствие о даровании победы и одоления революционному оружию народной украинской армии.

– Помилуйте, какие же победы и одоление? Победили уже.

– Еще побеждать будут!

– Поход буде.

– Куды поход?

– На Москву.

– На какую Москву?

– На самую обыкновенную.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Да-с, смерть не замедлила. Она пошла по осенним, а потом зимним украинским дорогам вместе с сухим веющим снегом. Стала постукивать в перелесках пулеметами. Самое ее не было видно, но явственно видный предшествовал ей некий корявый мужичонков гнев. Он бежал по метели и холоду, в дырявых лаптишках, с сеном в непокрытой свалявшейся голове и выл. В руках он нес великую дубину, без которой не обходится никакое начинание на Руси.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Honor is to a Russian but a useless burden...”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Out in the black and deserted street a gray, ragged, wolf-like creature slid noiselessly down from the branches of an acacia, where he had been sitting for half an hour, suffering badly from the cold but avidly watching Lisovich at work through a tell-tale gap above the upper edge of the towel.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“In the Russian Revolution, for example, we could expect to see mainly the reaction of the patriarchal feudal society to the challenges of modernization. However, the victory of the countryside and the peasant masses over the westernized city turned out to be a Pyrrhic one, since it threw the already backward country into the backwoods of civilization. Petlyura-style nationalism differs from European nationalism in that the latter aimed to strengthen the national state in the name of modernization and progress, while the Petlyura (and later Soviet) variety fulfilled directly opposite functions and had no constructive, civilizing content, being instead a particularly destructive phenomenon — the expression of a nation's frustration at having failed to come together. This failure, in Bulgakov's opinion, was also due to the fact that this nation did not exist (he saw nothing in it but comical rustic bandura players and petty bourgeois who suddenly "remembered" their Ukrainian-ness and began to speak in broken Ukrainian); or else because the nation was not ready for statehood (which offered nothing except bloody pogroms); or else because its aspirations to statehood were historically and politically unjustified. Ultimately, Kiev was for Bulgakov a Russian city. Historically, it was in fact the "mother of Russian cities," the cradle of Russian state-hood, and the capital of ancient Kievan Rus. Bulgakov's refusal to recognize the rights of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian aspirations in Kiev was even demographically justified: in 1917, more than half the population of Kiev was Russian, followed by Jews (about twenty per-cent), and only then Ukrainians (a little more than sixteen percent), with a significant Polish minority (almost a tenth of the population). But who remembers today that even Prague, for instance, was at that time a German-speaking city? In the newly proclaimed Ukrainian state, many eastern and southern cities (among them such first-rate cultural and industrial centers as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Iuzovka, Ekaterinoslav, and Lugansk) had never been Ukrainian at all. One should also consider that western Ukraine (the primary base of present-day Ukrainian nationalism) was once part of Poland. All of this made the aspirations toward Ukrainian "independence" highly questionable. Ukraine began where the city ended, and Bulgakov considered the city the basis of culture and civilization. Ukraine in Bulgakov's world is "the steppe" — culturally barren, not creating anything, and capable only of barbarian destruction. The Ukrainian national elites understood this perfectly when, as early as the 1920s, they demanded that Stalin ban The Days of the Turbins because, ostensibly, "the Whites movement is praised" in it. But in fact it was because the attempt to create a Ukrainian "state" was depicted by Bulgakov as a bloody operetta.”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, The White Guard

“The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, The White Guard