GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLVI

Alpha And Omega.

Posting #43.

“The night – important, military – draws

the Imperial Monogram with a bayonet.”

M. Bulgakov. White Guard.

In the 7^th chapter of White Guard, Bulgakov writes:

“The night – important, military – draws the Imperial Monogram with a bayonet.”

In such a way Bulgakov compares the Russian Civil War lost by the White forces, to the 1854 Crimean War lost by Imperial Russia. It was this war in which Count Lev Tolstoy participated as an artillery lieutenant, leading to his famous series of war stories titled Tales of Sebastopol. The reader must be reminded that during the Russian war with Napoleon, Lev Tolstoy had not been born yet.

And so, in his writing of the four volumes of War and Peace, Tolstoy had to rely on the tales of the eyewitnesses, whereas in the writing of the Tales of Sebastopol he was himself an eyewitness-participant.

In Bulgakov’s novel White Guard about the Russian Civil War, these two Tolstoy creations are brought together.

One part of White Guard is written like an autobiography, as Bulgakov had spent part of the Civil War in Kiev. The other part touches upon his military service in the capacity of surgeon-doctor with the White forces retreating into Northern Caucasus. It was here in the Caucasus that Bulgakov must have heard earfuls of stories about the betrayal of the White troops by their German allies. Bulgakov must have been wildly interested in these eyewitness stories, absorbing them like a sponge.

Describing in his amazingly interesting Notes on the Cuffs the time he’d spent in Northern Caucasus, Bulgakov writes that he had not left Russia because of an ailment.

Having decided to become a writer, Bulgakov moves to Moscow after the collapse of the White Movement. Moscow was where the action was after in 1918 the Bolsheviks returned the status of the capital to it.

In order to get his manuscripts to the publishers, Bulgakov needed them typed by a typist. Even though under the Bolsheviks Russia was becoming a literate nation practically overnight, literate typists could only be found among former upper-class women who, having stayed in Russia after the Revolution, were earning money to live on from typing.

[Several years ago I was lucky to switch to the TCM TV Channel when a special program was on showing apparently Russian footage with an American commentator introducing it and commenting on it. This newsreel must have been brought to America at a more benign time of American attitude toward Russia. The announcer was reading from an American-written text, striking not only in its generally positive tone, but also in its unconcealed admiration for Russia’s rapid progress in fulfilling Lenin’s promise to make Russia a country of 100% literacy. Awesome!]

On a recommendation of acquaintances, who must have been all arriving in Moscow, many surely from Kiev, providing Bulgakov with addresses of typists, Bulgakov picked one of such typists, and it is very likely that she was depicted in the character of Yulia Reise. The reader remembers of course the woman-stranger who saved the life of the hero of Bulgakov’s novel White Guard A. Turbin. The woman must have been a daughter or a wife of a tsarist army senior officer.

Considering that fiction in any good work of literature is somehow based on factual material, it is highly likely that Bulgakov knew a woman like this. After all, not all military officers were leaving for the West. Some of them stayed in Russia.

If Bulgakov indeed managed to get acquainted with a woman like this, that is, like Yulia Alexandrovna Reise, then she may also have told him about her own family and friends so that Bulgakov would get a feeling of how it was. Reading White Guard people are feeling the events, feeling the pain, feeling both the betrayal and the fury. Bulgakov’s genius as a writer is in this. Even without being an eyewitness, he is using the tools of the trade to his own advantage.

Reading my chapter Alpha and Omega, the reader will understand what I mean. M. A. Bulgakov is unique already in his first novel White Guard. The personages he depicts in this work already contain many terrific puzzles.

To be continued…

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