The white guard

Epilogue 'THE HOUSE OF THE TURBINS'

by VICTOR NEKRASOV

Originally published in the journal

NOVY MIR, Moscow 1967, No. VIII,

pp. 132-142

And at that moment, out go the lights. Nikolka and his guitar stop playing. 'What the hell's the matter?' says Alexei. 'They keep going out. Lena my dear, let's have some candles.' Elena enters with a candle, and from somewhere very far away comes the boom of gunfire. '. . . I get the impression it's coming from the Svyato-shino direction', says Nikolka. 'Funny, though. It can't be as near as that.'

Nikolka Turbin is seventeen and a half. And I am seventeen and a half. Admittedly he wears a corporal's stripes on his shoulder straps and tricolor chevrons on his sleeves and I am simply an apprentice in a trades-union school for Soviet railwaymen, but we are both seventeen and a half. And he is talking about Svyatoshino, our Kievan suburb of Svyatoshino, and the lights had gone out in our apartment too and we too heard the sound of distant gunfire . ..

The firing boomed on day after day, with occasional random bursts of rifle-fire. And at night they used to hit a length of railroad track as some kind of alarm. People came and went. Then when everything calmed down we were taken to the Nicholas I Park in front of the university buildings, where it was always full of soldiers. Nowadays there are none, the park is a haunt of old-age pensioners playing dominoes, but in those days the people sitting on the benches were soldiers. They were of various kinds -Germans, Petlyura's men, and then in 1920 Poles, wearing British khaki greatcoats. We would run from bench to bench asking the Germans: 'Wieviel ist die Uhr?' The soldiers would laugh, and show us their watches, give us sweets and sit us on their knees. We liked them very much. But as for 'white guardists', or, as they were called in those days, 'volunteers', there was no sign of them. There were the two huge sentries who used to stand by the steps leading up to the Tereshchenkos' big house where General Dragomirov had his headquarters and we would throw pebbles at them, but they just stood dumbly there like statues . . .

I always think of them, those unmoving sentries, whenever I pass that house on the corner of Kuznechnaya and Karavaevskaya streets, the house which was metamorphosed into the prosaic Institute of Radiology after the general and his staff had left it. . .

. . . The electric lights come on again. The candles are put out. (The electricity came on again in our house too, but in our case we would put out oil lamps, not candles. God knows where the Turbins got their candles from - they were worth their weight in gold.) Talberg has still not returned. Elena is worried. A ring at the door. Enter Myshlaevsky, frozen to death. 'Careful how you hang it up, Nikolka. Don't knock it. There's a bottle of vodka in there...'

How many times have I seen The Days of the Turbins} Three or four, maybe even five times. I have grown up, but Nikolka has stayed seventeen. Sitting with my knees hunched up on the steps of the dress circle at the Moscow Art Theater, I felt as I always did that I was the same age as him. And Alexei Turbin has always seemed 'grown-up', much older than me, although when I last saw The Turbins, before the war, I was already at least as old as Alexei.

Sakhnovsky, a director at the Moscow Art Theater, wrote somewhere that for the younger generation at the M.A.T. The Turbins became 'the second Seagull'. I'm sure it was. But that was for the actors, for the M.A.T. - for me, though at first as an apprentice then as a gradually maturing student, The Turbins was not just a play but something much more. Even when I became an actor and began to be interested in it from the purely professional angle, even then The Turbins was still not merely a piece of theater, even though a play of great talent and fascination, oddly unique in our stage literature, but it was a tangible piece of life, receding as the years passed, yet always very near to me.

Why? After all, I had never known a single 'white guardist' in my life (I met some for the first time in Prague in 1945), my family had no liking for them at all (in our apartment we had Germans and French billeted on us and - my favourites - two Red Army men who smelled of home-grown shag and foot-cloths, but never a 'White'); my parents were in any case left-wing in sympathy, having made friends abroad with Plekhanov, and with Bolsheviks like Lunacharsky and Nogin . . . there were never any Myshlaevskys or Shervinskys in our house. But there was something else about our family, something obviously 'Turbinesque'. It is even rather hard to define exactly what it was. I was the only man in our family (my mother, my grandmother and my aunt and myself - aged seven), and there were no guitars, no rivers of wine - not even a trickle - in our house, and it would seem that we had nothing in common with the Turbins, unless you count our neighbour Alibek, an Ossete, who occasionally called on us wearing his Caucasian silver cartridge-pockets (Shervinsky?) and who, when I was a little more grown up, kept asking me whether one of my schoolmates wouldn't like to buy his dagger - he was rather fond of his drink. And yet we had something in common with the Turbins. A kind of spirit? The past? Things, perhaps?

'. . . furniture covered in old red velvet. . . worn carpets . . . the bronze lamp and its shade; the best bookshelves in the world full of books that smelled mysteriously of old chocolate, with their Natasha Rostovs and their Captain's Daughters, gilded cups, silver, portraits, drapes . . .'

In a word, the Turbins became part of my life, firmly and forever, at first by way of the play at the Moscow Art Theater, then through the novel, The White Guard. It was written a year or two before the play, but it did not come my way until the early thirties. And it strengthened the friendship. I was delighted that Bulgakov 'resurrected' Alexei, having 'killed' him in the play -after the novel of course, but I read the novel after seeing the play. The scope of the action was widened, new characters were introduced: Colonel Malyshev, the gallant Nai-Turs, the mysterious Julia, the landlord Vasilisa and his bony, jealous wife Wanda. On the M.A.T. stage there was the comfortable, lived-in apartment, as charming as the people who inhabited it, there were the cream-colored blinds which reduced Lariosik to tears of affection, but the novel recreated the whole life of that 'fair city, happy city, mother of Russian cities', deep in snow, mysterious and disturbing in that terrible 'year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second'.

All this was specially precious to us Kievans. Before Bulgakov, Russian literature had somehow missed Kiev out - except perhaps for Kuprin, and that was somehow so very pre-war. But in The White Guard everything was close at hand - familiar streets and crossroads, St Vladimir up on his hill holding the illuminated white cross in his hand (alas, I was too young to remember the time when that cross was lit up) which could be 'seen from far, far away and often in summer, in thick black mist, amid the osier beds and tortuous meanders of the age-old river, the boatmen would see it and by its light would steer their way to the City and its wharves'.

I don't know how other people feel, but for me the exact 'topography' of a book is always extremely important. For me it is essential to know - precisely! - where Raskolnikov and the old money-lending woman lived; where the heroes of Veresaev's In a Blind Alley lived, whereabouts in Koktebel was their little white house with its tiled roof and its green shutters. I was at first disappointed (because I had grown so used to the idea), and then delighted when I learned that the Rostovs never in reality lived on Povarskaya Street in the building which now houses the Union of Writers (Natasha lived in the wing which is now the personnel office or the accounts department, or something . . .). But I have always felt it important to know where the heroes of their books lived, not the authors. They have always been (now, perhaps, to a lesser degree) more significant to me than the authors who invented them. To this day for me Rastignac is more 'alive' than Balzac, just as I still find d'Artagnan more real than Dumas pere.

What about the Turbins? Where did they live? Until this year (to be precise, until April of this year, when I read The White Guard again for the second time in thirty years), I only remembered that they lived on St Alexei's Hill. There is no such street in Kiev, but there is a St Andrew's Hill. For some reason known only to Bulgakov, he, the author, having kept the real names of all the other streets and parks in Kiev, changed the names of the two streets most intimately linked with the Turbins themselves: he changed St Andrew's to St Alexei's Hill, and he changed Malo-Podvalnaya (where Julia saves the wounded Alexei) to Malo-Provalnaya Street. Why he did this remains a mystery, but it was nevertheless not very difficult to deduce that the Turbins lived on St Andrew's Hill. I also remembered that they lived near the bottom of the hill in a two-storey house, on the second floor, whilst Vasilisa their landlord lived on the first floor. That was all I remembered.

St Andrew's Hill is one of the most typically 'Kievan' streets in the city. Very steep, paved with cobblestones (where else will you find them nowadays?), twisting in the shape of a big letter 'S', it runs down from the Old City to the lower part - Podol. At the top is the church of St Andrew - built by Rastrelli in the eighteenth Century - and at the bottom is Kontraktovaya Square (so-called after the fair - the 'Kontrakty' - that used to be held there in the spring; I can still remember the macerated apples, the freshly-baked wafer biscuits, the crowds of people). The whole street is lined with small, cosy houses, and only two or three large apartment houses. One of these I know well from my childhood. We called it 'Richard the Lionheart's Castle': a seven-storey neo-Gothic house built in yellow Kiev brick, with a sharp-pointed turret on one corner. It is visible from many distant parts of the city. If you pass under the rather oppressively low porte-cochere, you find yourself in a small stone-flagged courtyard which we, as children, found quite breathtaking. It was a place straight out of the Middle Ages. Vaulted Gothic arches, buttressed walls, stone staircases recessed into the thickness of the walls, suspended cast-iron walkways, huge balconies, crenellated parapets . . . All that was missing were the sentries, their halberds piled in a corner, and playing dice somewhere on an upturned cask. But that was not all. If you climb up the stone-built embrasured staircase you come out on to a hilltop, a glorious hilltop overgrown with wild acacia, a hilltop where there is such a view over Podol, the Dnieper and the countryside beyond the Dnieper that when you take people up there for the first time it is difficult to drag them away again. And below, clustered around the bottom of that steep hill are dozens of little houses, little backyards with sheds, with dovecots and strings of washing hung out to dry. I really don't know what's wrong with all the artists in Kiev: if I were them I would spend all my time up on that hill . . .

So that is what St Andrew's Hill is like. And it has not changed: there is not one new house in the whole street, it still has its big cobblestones, its wild acacia bushes and occasional gnarled American maples bending right out over the street; it was exactly like that ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and it was like that in the winter of 1918 when 'the City lived a strange unnatural life which is unlikely to be repeated in the twentieth century'.

Whereabouts on St Andrew's Hill did the Turbins live? I don't quite know why, but I convinced myself, and then I also started to convince my friends when I used to take them up on to that hilltop, that the Turbins lived in the little house next door to Richard the Lionheart's Castle. It had a verandah, a charming gateway in a high fence, a little garden and one of those twisted maples in front of the door. Of course they must have lived there! And that, as far as I was concerned, was where they had lived.

It turned out, however, that I was quite, quite wrong.

Now begins the most interesting part. What I have written so far has been, as it were, the prologue: I now come to the story proper.

It was 1965.

I need hardly describe the delight which we all experienced when Bulgakov's Theatrical Novel first appeared in print that year,¹ and a year later The Master and Margarita? Twenty-five

1. Published in English translation in 1967 under the title Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel (London: Hodder and Stoughton; New York: Simon and Schuster).

2. Published in English in 1967 (London: Collins/Harvill; New York: Harper and P.ow).

years after the author's death came our first introduction to those hitherto unknown works of Bulgakov. And we were amazed and delighted, though this is not the place to enlarge on it. But I at least was even more amazed and delighted to find The White Guard again. Nothing in it had faded, nothing had aged, as if those forty years had never been. I found it difficult to tear myself away from the novel and I had to force myself to do so, in order to prolong the pleasure. Something like a miracle had happened before our eyes, something which happens very rarely in literature and which by no means every author can pull off - a book had been born again.

With the dramatised version of the story, The Days of the Turbins, this had not happened. No one found the post-war revival of the production at the Stanislavsky Theater particularly thrilling. Perhaps because after such actors as Khmelyov, Dobronravov and Kudryavtsev (to think that not one of them is still alive), after the original Lariosik played by Yanshin when he was young and thin, after Tarasova and Yelanskaya, it would have been extremely hard to mount a revival that said anything new. Perhaps, too, because not all works of art can be copied and it is none too easy to create something original. I await the new M.A.T. production with alarm (with hope, too, but with rather more alarm than hope). Shall I go and see it? I don't know. I'm afraid . . . afraid of so much: youthful memories, comparisons, parallels . . . Yes, I'm afraid for the Turbins, afraid for the play.

But the republished novel has completely disarmed me. It is as fresh and alive as when I first read it - not a wrinkle, not a gray hair. It has survived and conquered.

But I am getting carried away. To return to our topography: where did the Turbins live?

It transpires that the author made no secret of it. The exact address is given, literally on the second page of the novel: No. 13 St Alexei's Hill (for 'St Alexei's' read 'St Andrew's').

'For many years before her [their mother's] death, in the house at No. 13 St Alexei's Hill, little Elena, Alexei the eldest and baby Nikolka had grown up in the warmth of the tiled stove that burned in the dining-room.' Clear and precise. How was it that I didn't remember it? Somehow I just didn't.

So, to No. 13 St Andrew's Hill.

The really funny thing is that it turns out I even have a photograph of that house, although when I took it I had no idea of its significance or of its place in Russian literature. I had simply taken a liking to that little corner of Kiev (I used to be keen on photography and was particularly fond of certain parts of Kiev), and the vantage point from which I had taken the photograph, by climbing up to the top of one of Kiev's many hills, was extremely well chosen. St Andrew's Church, Richard the Lionheart's Castle, the hill, the gardens, the Dnieper in the background, and down below - the steep curve of St Andrew's Hill with the Turbins' house slap in the middle. Incidentally from the hill that I have just mentioned, the courtyard behind No. 13 can be clearly seen. It is most attractive, with its dovecot and its little balcony - I must have pointed it out hundreds of times to my friends when proudly showing them the charm and beauty of Kiev.

And of course I have been to that house. Twice, in fact - the first time for a few minutes in passing, mainly to check whether or not this really was the right house, and the second time for longer.

In the novel the house is described with great precision. 'No. 13 was a curious building. On the street the Turbins' apartment was on the second floor, but so steep was the hill behind the house that their back door opened directly on to the sloping yard, where the house was brushed and overhung by the branches of the trees growing in the little garden that clung to the hillside. The backyards filled up with snow and the hill turned white until it became one gigantic sugar-loaf. The house acquired a covering like a White general's winter fur cap; on the lower floor (on the street side it was the first floor, whilst at the back, under the Turbins' verandah, it was the basement) the disagreeable Vasily Lisovich -an engineer, a coward and a bourgeois - lit his flickering little yellow lamps, whilst upstairs the Turbins' windows shone brightly and cheerfully.'

Nothing has changed since those days: the house, the yard, the sheds, the verandah and the stairs under the verandah leading down to the back door of 'Vasilisa's' apartment - Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich. On the street side it is the first floor, whilst in the backyard it is the basement. Only the garden has disappeared - the backyard is now entirely taken up with sheds.

As I have said, my first visit was a short one. I was with my mother and a friend, we had come by car, and we had little time to spare. Having entered by the backyard, I timidly rang the bell on the left-hand one of the two doors giving on to the verandah and asked the fair-haired middle-aged lady who opened it whether some people called Turbin had once lived here. Or rather Bulgakov.

The lady stared at me in some astonishment and said, yes, they did live here once, very long ago, but why should I be interested in them? I said that Bulgakov was a famous Russian writer and that everything connected with him . . .

Her face showed even greater astonishment.

'What? Mishka Bulgakov - a famous writer? That incompetent venereologist - a famous Russian writer?'

With that I became dumb with embarrassment, and it was only later that I realised that the lady was not astonished at the incompetent venereologist becoming a writer (she knew that), but that he had become famous . . .

But this only came out during my second visit. This time only two of us went and we had all the time we needed.

When we rang, a young girl's voice rang outfrom the depths of the apartment:

'Mama, it's two men . . .'

Mama - the same middle-aged blond woman - appeared, and after a momentary pause of recognition and appraisal (for some reason she failed to recognise me at first), she said kindly:

'Please come in. Here, into the drawing-room. It was their drawing-room. And that was the dining-room. We have had to divide it with a partition, as you can see . . .'

Judging from the plaster mouldings on the ceiling, the former dining-room had once been very big and obviously comfortable;

now it served as both hall and kitchen. A handsome gas stove stood against the right-hand partition wall.

We went into the drawing-room, and the lady of the house excused herself for going on with her work - she was ironing net curtains, admittedly not very energetically, on a long ironing board - and invited us to sit down.

The drawing-room was obviously furnished in a most un-Turbinlike, or rather un-Bulgakovlike fashion. The three windows, giving on to the street and looking over to the hill on the far side where the grass was just beginning to sprout, were curtained to sill height, and there were flowers on the window ledge - a riot of mauve in little vases. All the rest - as it is everywhere in Kiev nowadays - was 'contemporary' furniture of the early 'fifties made at the Lvov factory together with some pieces of what is known locally as 'Bozhenko' furniture. (A hero of the civil war and companion-in-arms of the legendary partisan leader Shchors, Bozhenko, alas, is nowadays associated in the minds of most Kievans only with the mediocre furniture turned out by the factory that was named after him.) On the wall was some vaguely Japanese design on black lacquer (were they herons?), and by the doorway a gleaming piano in imitation walnut.

We sat down. The blond lady asked us what it was that we wanted to know, and we replied that we were interested in everything about this apartment which had been connected with the life of Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov.

From the account that followed, interrupted first by the appearance of the silent husband looking for something in a cupboard, then by the incursion of two grandsons who were immediately chased out again ('Run along, this is nothing to do with you'), we learned that the Bulgakov family was a large one: the father - a professor of theology who had apparently died some time before the revolution; the mother-very houseproud and orderly; and seven children - three brothers, of whom Mikhail was the eldest, and four sisters. They had lived in this apartment for more than twenty years and had left in 1920. After that none of them had ever come back, including Mikhail. The family was patriarchal, run on

firm lines. Then with the death of their father everything had changed. The mother, as far as we could gather, had moved elsewhere: 'Up at the top of the street, opposite St Andrew's church, there lived a doctor, a very decent man, he died not long ago as a very old man in Alma-Ata', and after that untidiness and confusion had reigned in the house.

'They were very noisy and cheerful. And the place was always full of people. Singing, drinking, always talking at once and trying to shout each other down . . . The gayest of all was Misha's second sister. The older sister was quieter and more serious, she was married to an officer. His surname was something like Kraube - he was German by origin.' (Ah, we thought: Talberg . . .) 'They were expelled after the revolution and neither of them are alive now. But the second sister - Varya - was a delightful creature: she sang well, played the guitar . . . and whenever the noise got unbearable she would climb up on a chair and write "Quiet!" on the stove.'

'On this stove?' We turned round at once and looked at the corner, involuntarily recalling the erstwhile scribbles and inscriptions on it, especially the last one written by Nikolka:

'I hereby forbid the scribbling of nonsense on this stove. Any comrade found guilty of doing so will be shot and deprived of civil rights.

signed: Abraham Goldblatt,

Ladies, Gentlemen's and Women's Tailor. Commissar, Podol District Committee. 30th January 1918.'

'No,' said the lady, 'on the stove in the dining-room. I'll show you on your way out.'

For the rest of the time she told us about Misha himself. Somehow the story began with his teeth. He had very strong teeth. ('Yes, yes,' added the husband who had sat down on a chair in the corner, 'he had very strong teeth.') Misha was tall, fair, with bright blue eyes. He was always tossing back his hair. Like this - with his head. And he walked very fast. No, they had not been friends, he had been considerably older, at least twelve years older than her.

She had been friends with the youngest sister, Lyolya. But she remembered Misha very well. And his character - sarcastic, ironic, caustic. Not an easy person to get on with, on the whole. One day he had even insulted her father, for no reason at all.

'Misha's consulting-room was in there.' The blonde lady pointed to the wall in front of her. 'That's where he saw his syphilitic patients. You know, of course, that after he qualified he went on to specialise in venereology. Yes, and for some reason the faucets in his consulting-room were always running. And his basin was always overflowing. And seeping through the floor, so that the water dripped on to our heads . . .'

My companion and I exchanged glances.

'You lived on the first floor, then?'

'Yes. And his water was always dripping on to our heads. One day the ceiling almost caved in, so my father, a very decent, well-educated man - and he was the landlord, after all: they rented the apartment from us . . .' (we exchanged looks again) '. . . went upstairs and said: "Look here Misha, you must see to those faucets of yours, we're being flooded out downstairs . . ." And Misha was so rude to him in reply, so rude . . .'

But we never heard exactly what it was that Misha had said, because at that moment the conversation was interrupted by the blond lady's daughter, combing her mass of golden hair as she came in from the passage.

'Why all these details, mother?'

Her mother looked rather embarrassed, although she said at once that she saw nothing wrong in all these details, they were simply an illustration of one side of Misha's character, and for the third time my friend and I glanced at each other.

'So you lived on the first floor? And your back door was at basement level?'

'Yes, that's why the water dripped through on to us.'

It was obvious: the first floor, the landlord . . . Absolutely clear. We were talking to none other than the daughter of the owner of the Turbins' house, Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich, alias Vasilisa.

The detailed, and in the case of Mikhail Bulgakov none too

sympathetic analysis which our hostess gave us raised the question in our minds: had she read The White Guard? She had obviously seen the play based on it, The Days of the Turbins, when the Moscow Art Theater had taken it on tour to Kiev immediately before the war (her son saw it, at any rate: it had been impossible to get tickets, but as soon as he had said that he was the grandson of the man who had owned the house where the Bulgakovs had lived, they had given him a ticket at once). In short, we assumed that she knew the play, but the whole point was that Vasilisa, her father, is not in the play: he is not even mentioned. But he is in the novel. Vasilisa might have read it, but he was unlikely to have wanted his children to read it . . .

'There's no getting away from it,' the lady of the house smiled sadly as she folded the net curtains, 'we and the Bulgakovs were rather like the Montagues and the Capulets ... So on the whole we didn't . . .'

It further transpired that she had something of a grudge against Bulgakov not only as a tenant but as a writer as well. It so happened that in the late twenties or early thirties, when the government requisitioned all privately-held gold coinage, one of their neighbours who lived just across the street remembered that in some novel or other Misha had written about a certain house-owner who had hoarded some money; so, if this turned out to be true . . . There was no such hoard; but all the same, the story had led to some unpleasant consequences for her father. Why did Misha need to make his identity so plain?

Both of us involuntarily looked out of the window: where was the tree, the acacia, from which the Petlyurovite bandit had spied on Vasilisa's efforts to conceal his belongings in a hiding place in the wall? But we were unable to find it, then or later. After all, forty years had passed. On the other hand, we did find the gap between the two houses, Nos. 13 and 11, where Nikolka had hidden the biscuit tin containing the pistols, officers' epaulettes and the portrait of the Tsarevich Alexei. And even the planks of the fence were broken, just as if the thieves had crawled through that very gap only today or yesterday.

Today? Yesterday? The day before yesterday? Suddenly everything was confused, mixed-up, displaced . . .

In this same room where we were now sitting, with its three windows on to the street, with the same view on to the hillside which had not changed at all since then (except for the disappearance of the acacia which had cast its shade over the sitting-room), in this same sitting room there had lived a tall blue-eyed man, ironic and caustic, who used to walk rapidly up and down, tossing back his hair, who had then gone away to Moscow and had never come back here again ... In this same sitting room, which in those days had pinkish wallpaper, with its cream-colored blinds, many years ago on a freezing December night three officers, one cadet, and a silly young man who had had been abandoned by his wife were playing whist, while a man lay in the next room delirious with typhus, and while at the same time, downstairs on the first floor, a gang of Petlyura's men were robbing the landlord, after which the wretched man had run upstairs and fainted, and they had thrown cold water over him . . .

This same apartment, this same room had once smelled of pine branches at Christmas time, paraffin-wax candles had burned with a faint crackle, hortensias and langorous roses had stood in the pillar-shaped vase on the starched white tablecloth, the clock with the bronze shepherds had played its gavotte, while the black clock on the dining-room wall had echoed its chimes; the music of Faust lay open on the grand piano, the people drank wine and vodka, and sang an epithalamion to the god Hymen and another tune which reduced the landlord, with his Taras Bulba moustaches, and his wife, to terror: 'What the hell's going on? At three o'clock in the morning! This time I really am going to lodge a complaint!'

And now all that is gone. The library, the falcon on the white sleeve of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, Louis XIV in his heavenly bower on the banks of a silken lake, the bronze lamp under its green shade - they are all gone; and the cold, carefully washed Dutch tiles stare sadly at the hissing blue flames and saucepans on the gas stove. And the people who lived on the first floor have moved upstairs and Vasilisa is presumably dead (in our embarrassment we somehow forgot to enquire about him), and Vasilisa's golden-haired grand-daughter lives in Nikolka's room (twenty-six square metres, as our hostess informed us).

And what about Nikolka?

Yes, Misha had two brothers. Nikolai and Vanya. Nikolai was the older of the two, the second son after Misha, quiet and serious, the most serious-minded of them all. He died in the January of this year in Paris where he was a professor. It is quite something for a Russian emigre to be a professor in Paris. He was very clever, and was regarded as the cleverest of them when they had lived here. And Vanya? Vanya was also in Paris, but he was not a professor . . . He had played in a balalaika band, or something of that sort. He was the youngest of them all and was probably still alive . . . two of the sisters were still living, both of them in Moscow. One was seriously ill, and they still occasionally corresponded with the other sister, Nadya. When she had been in Moscow she had been to see her. Not long ago her picture had been in a newspaper, taken against the background of Misha's library. His library was still intact. But Misha was dead . . .

At this point our hostess stopped ironing and gave us a searching and mistrustful look:

'He's become famous, you say?'

'Yes, he has . . .'

She shook her head.

'Who would have thought it? You see, he was so unlucky ... It's true, Nadya did write to me not long ago that something of his was being published and lots of people were reading it . . . But it was all so long ago . . .'

The children, a boy and a girl, burst in once more and were chased out again. The husband idly looked for something in the cupboard and sat down again, although he was really supposed to go out. The daughter who was still combing out her hair, tried to break into the conversation - why hadn't her mother told us anything about Lancia? But here, for all her garrulity, her mother suddenly balked - there was nothing interesting in that story. The daughter assured us that it was very interesting, at least to her it was. But her mother showed a strange obstinacy. All we learned was that Lancia had been the owner of the Hotel d'Europe on what was formerly Imperial Square (this piece of information was the second and final sentence spoken by the husband), that he had a country villa in Buch opposite the Bulgakovs' villa, and that he had a conservatory . . . That's all, she said, nothing interesting, as you can see. We realised that there was something interesting behind it, but for some private reason she did not want to tell us about what had obviously been some complication in the triangular relationship between the Bulgakovs, Lancia and Vasilisa, and we did not press her.

On the whole my friend and I proved to be incompetent reporters. We forgot to take a camera with us, we had sat there, I in the armchair and he on the divan, as if we had been strapped down, we never went into the other rooms, and we failed to ask about the fate of Vasilisa . . . And yet perhaps that is as it should be. After all, we were not reporters, and what we did find out was interesting enough. And I can photograph the house any time I like - it will be there for a long time yet.

That was all.

We said goodbye and left, promising to come back again. But I doubt if we ought to.

At present I am curious about one thing only: will the inhabitants of that little hillside house read about the events which took place in it almost fifty years ago?³

As we climbed back up St Andrew's Hill, thrilled yet saddened, we tried to draw some kind of conclusions. Conclusions about what? Well, about everything. The past, the present, things that never were. At Yalta in the summer of 1966 we read Yermolinsky's memoirs of Bulgakov, which have just been published in the magazine Teatr: they are very sad, not to say tragic. We had just been exploring the haunts of Bulgakov's youth, we still had to visit

3. Events ? What events ? The White Guard is fiction. But what fiction, when I can quite seriously and spontaneously write a sentence like the one printed above. And I have decided not to alter it, but just to add this footnote.

the erstwhile First Gimnaziya⁴ (the building is now part of Kiev University), on whose main staircase Alexei died (on the Moscow Art Theater stage), we would go to the delicatessen store on Teatralnaya Street which was once Madame Anjou's shop, Le Chic Parisien, with its bell that rang every time the door was opened, then we planned to try for the nth time to find the house on Malo-Provalnaya Street. Just around the corner of 'the most fantastic street in the world' - a moss-grown wall, a gate, a brick path, another gate, still another, a garden of snow-covered lilac bushes, a lantern in front of an old-fashioned porch, the gentle light of a tallow candle in a candlestick, a portrait with gold epaulettes, Julia . . . Julia Alexandrovna Reiss . . . No sign of her. And the house was not there either. I had reconnoitred the whole of Malo-Podvalnaya Street. There had once been, at the far end of a courtyard, a wooden house that roughly corresponded to Bulgakov's description complete with verandah with colored glass panes, but it had long since vanished. In its place there was a new multi-storey stone building, looking hideously out of place in that crooked little street, while alongside it a six hundred feet high television mast thrust itself skywards . . .

As we walked away up St Andrew's Hill we wondered why neither Bulgakov nor any of his brothers and sisters had ever felt drawn to come back here. His brothers, of course, could hardly have done so: Nikolka was dead, buried in some Parisian cemetery, whilst Vanya . . . Could it be that I had seen him, even met him? I was once in Paris, in a Russian restaurant not far from the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It was called 'Le vodka'. They had served real vodka there, which is not so common in normal French restaurants, some elderly people at the next table who had had a little to drink had sung old Russian songs, and on a little stage in the corner six balalaika players in blue silk Russian shirts had played three encores of 'Ochi chyorniye' ... I had talked to them; all except one were Russian. They didn't tell me their surnames,

4. In pre-revolutionary Russia a state secondary school, originally modelled on the Prussian Gymnasium and roughly equivalent to an English grammar school.

But all of them wanted to know how they could return to Russia. Perhaps one of them was Vanya Bulgakov, the man who for me and for all of us was - Nikolka Turbin? If he was playing 'Ochi chyorniye' on the balalaika now, might he not have played an army marching song to the guitar as a cadet in 1918?

How I long for a sequel to The White Guard! A childish curiosity makes me want desperately to know what happened afterwards, what fate befell the Turbins and their friends after 1918. Exile? For Nikolka the answer is clearly yes. As for Myshlaevsky - I don't know. And what about Shervinsky and Elena? And Alexei? Did he write The Days of the Turbins and The White Guard? And die in 1940, so long before the triumphal recognition of his writing which came twenty-five years later?

How I regret now not having known Bulgakov. How keenly I long to know the how, the where and the why in the genesis of his novel.

In 1923 his mother died of typhus. The White Guard was begun in 1923. And it opens with the funeral of the Turbins' mother: 'For the reigning head of the family, their adored mother, was no longer with them.'

I am just re-reading The Master and Margarita, and I now understand very clearly the real-life origin of the flood caused by Margarita in Latunsky's apartment.

And Maxudov in The Theatrical Novel is not writing Black Snow but The White Guard:'... It's evening, the lamp is burning; it has a fringed shade. Music lies open on the grand piano. Someone is playing Faust. Suddenly Faust stops and a guitar starts playing. Who is playing it? Here he comes, with the guitar in his hands . . .'⁵

Nikolka . . . Nikolka again . . . Greetings, Nikolka, old friend of my youth . . .

There I've said it: The friend of my youth, it appears, was no more and no less than a White officer-cadet. But I cannot reject

5. M. Bulgakov Black Snow. A Theatrical Novel. (Hodder and Stough-ton; London 1965), p. 63.

him or deny him, nor his elder brother. Norhis sister, nor his brother's friends ...

For I fell in love with those people and I love them to this day. I love them for their honesty, their nobility and their bravery, and ultimately for the tragedy of their position. I love them, just as the hundreds of thousands of people loved them who saw the play at the Moscow Art Theater.⁶ And among them was Stalin. According to the M.A.T. records he saw The Days of the Turbins no less than fifteen times! And he could hardly be called the keenest of theatergoers . . .

The Turbins' apartment was destroyed by fire at Minsk in 1941. And although it rose from the ashes again thirteen years later, this time not in one but in three versions (the play was revived in Moscow, in Tbilisi and in Novosibirsk), for me there was only one genuine one, the set (hateful word for something so real!) designed by the artist Ulyanov. It is gone forever. Just as the actors in the original cast, Khmelyov, Dobronravov, Kudryavtsev, are gone for ever, the ones who first made us fall in love with the real-life (or maybe they were fictional, well perhaps half- or quarter-fictional -God, I've made the same mistake again!) heroes of Bulgakov's play.

We have known them so long - forty years in fact (incidentally we are now as far away in time - even three years longer - from the last M.A.T. production of the play as was that performance from the events it describes). Why has our friendship with them not only not waned over so many years (for they have acquired new friends too) but actually grown stronger? Why did I love them even more when I saw the revived production?

At first I could not give a precise answer to that question. Now I can.

I loved the Turbins even more just because it was they who first introduced me to Bulgakov.

Forty years ago, there's no point in concealing it, I was much less interested in Bulgakov (as a writer, and still less as a person)

6. Not less than a million, in my estimation. In the fifteen years from 1926 to 1941 the play ran for 987 performances, with an audience of at least i.ooo people each time.

than in his heroes. But now, when we have come to know so many more of his heroes, even including some who are devils and witches, I turn back in my mind to 1928, I am again sitting on the steps of the dress circle in the Moscow Art Theater and I give thanks to Alexei, to Elena and Nikolka, even to the Hetman Skoropadsky for having been the first to say to me: 'Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov, playwright . . .'

I have never seen his play Moliere, but I have read his Life of Monsieur de Moliere. Bulgakov had no patrons, he had no Prince Conti, no Duke of Orleans, just as Moliere had no Artistic Directors to contend with, but both of them were equally aware what a steep path the true artist had to climb.

Bulgakov achieved fame (with all its problems) both early in his career and late. But here I must stop; for that is a subject for a separate piece of research, for which I am not equipped.

My subject has been topography. I am proud (and surprised that no one did it before me) of having discovered 'The house of the Turbins', and when you come to Kiev I invite you to walk down the steep slope of St Andrew's Hill to No. 13, to glance into the backyard (be sure to notice the steps on the left, under the verandah, for it was just there that a shiver ran down poor Vasilisa's belly when he caught sight of Yavdokha, the beautiful milkmaid), and then to go uphill, cross the 'mediaeval' courtyard of Richard the Lionheart's Castle and to go up on to the hilltop, sit down on the edge of it, light a cigarette if you like, and admire the City which, even though he never came back to it, Bulgakov loved so much.