The White Guard: Introduction by Orlando Figes

Bulgakov's brilliant novel, first published in 1925, portrays his beloved city of Kiev as it is torn apart during a few crucial weeks in 1918, seen through the eyes of a family fleeing the Russian revolution.

With cinematic vividness, Bulgakov puts us on the streets of a gracious, historic city as it is successively besieged by invading Germans, Ukrainian nationalists, the Red Guard of the Bolsheviks, and the White Guard loyal to the recently executed tsar. The Turbin siblings, once wealthy and secure in Russia, have fled to Kiev to escape the ongoing civil war, but find themselves surrounded by chaos and danger. As Bulgakov depicts their devotion to a doomed cause and the surreal horrors they face, he provides a view of history that is both grandly panoramic and movingly intimate.  

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1891–1940) was born and educated in Kiev, Ukraine, where he graduated as a doctor in 1916. He abandoned medicine to write some of the greatest Russian literature of this century. He died impoverished and blind in 1940 shortly after completing his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita.

ORLANDO FIGES is the author of many acclaimed books on Russian history, including A People’s Tragedy, Natasha’s Dance, The Whisperers, The Crimean War, Revolutionary Russia, and The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Before his retirement he was a professor of history at London University.