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All will pass. Suffering, torment, blood, hunger and pestilence. The sword will disappear, but the stars will remain, when the shadow of our deeds and bodies will not remain on earth. M. Bulgakov In 1925, the first two parts of Mikhail's novel were published in the Rossiya magazine ...
All will pass. Suffering, torment, blood, hunger and pestilence. The sword will disappear, but the stars will remain, when the shadow of our deeds and bodies will not remain on earth. M. Bulgakov In 1925, the first two parts of the novel by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov were published in the Rossiya magazine ...
The novel by M. A. Bulgakov "The White Guard" is dedicated to the events of the Civil War. “The year was great and terrible after Christmas 1918, from the beginning of the second revolution ...” - this is how the novel begins, which tells about the fate of the Turbin family. They live in Kyiv,...
The novel "White Guard" was first published (not completely) in Russia, in 1924. Completely - in Paris: volume one - 1927, volume two - 1929. The White Guard is largely an autobiographical novel based on the writer's personal impressions of Kyiv...
1. The meaning of the epigraphs to the novel. 2. The sinister atmosphere of the work. 3. Reflections of heroes about life and death. 4. The greatness of the heroes of the novel. Each historical era their own concept of greatness. M. Heidegger Roman M. A. Bulgakov "White Guard"...
"White Guard"
M.A. Bulgakov was born and raised in Kyiv. All his life he was devoted to this city. It is symbolic that the name of the future writer was given in honor of Archangel Michael, the guardian of the city of Kyiv. The action of the novel by M.A. Bulgakov's "White Guard" takes place in the same famous house No. 13 on Andreevsky Spusk (in the novel it is called Alekseevsky), where the writer himself once lived. In 1982, a memorial plaque was installed on this house, and since 1989 the Literary Memorial House-Museum named after M.A. Bulgakov.
It is no coincidence that the author chooses for the epigraph a fragment from " captain's daughter”, a novel that paints a picture of a peasant revolt. The image of a blizzard, a blizzard, symbolizes the whirlwind of revolutionary changes unfolding in the country. The novel is dedicated to the second wife of the writer Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya-Bulgakova, who also lived in Kyiv for some time and remembered those terrible years of constant change of power and bloody events.
At the very beginning of the novel, the mother of the Turbins dies, bequeathing to the children to live. “And they will have to suffer and die,” exclaims M.A. Bulgakov. However, the answer to the question of what to do in difficult times is given by the priest in the novel: “Despondency must not be allowed... Despondency is a great sin...”. The White Guard is, to a certain extent, an autobiographical work. It is known, for example, that the reason for writing the novel was sudden death mother of M.A. Bulgakov Varvara Mikhailovna from typhus. The writer was very upset by this event, it was doubly hard for him because he could not even come from Moscow to the funeral and say goodbye to his mother.
From the numerous artistic details in the novel, everyday realities of that time emerge. "Revolutionary riding" (you drive for an hour - you stand for two hours), Myshlaevsky's dirtiest cambric shirt, frostbitten legs - all this eloquently testifies to the complete household and economic confusion in people's lives. Deep experiences of socio-political conflicts were also expressed in the portraits of the heroes of the novel: before parting, Elena and Talberg even outwardly haggard, aged.
The collapse of the established way of M.A. Bulgakov also shows the example of the interior of the Turbins' house. From childhood, the order familiar to the heroes with wall clocks, old red velvet furniture, a tiled stove, books, gold watches and silver - all this turns out to be in complete chaos when Talberg decides to run to Denikin. But still M.A. Bulgakov urges never to pull off the lampshade from the lamp. He writes: “The lampshade is sacred. Never run like a rat into the unknown from danger. Read by the lampshade - let the blizzard howl - wait until they come to you. However, Thalberg, a military man, tough and energetic, is not satisfied with the humble humility with which the author of the novel calls to treat life's trials. Elena perceives Thalberg's flight as a betrayal. It is no coincidence that before leaving, he mentions that Elena has a passport for her maiden name. He seems to renounce his wife, although at the same time he tries to convince her that he will return soon. During further development plot, we learn that Sergei went to Paris and remarried. The prototype of Elena is the sister of M.A. Bulgakova Varvara Afanasievna (by her husband Karum). Thalberg is a well-known surname in the world of music: in the nineteenth century there was a pianist Sigmund Thalberg in Austria. The writer liked to use sonorous surnames in his work. famous musicians(Rubinstein in The Fatal Eggs, Berlioz and Stravinsky in The Master and Margarita).
Exhausted people in the whirlwind of revolutionary events do not know what to believe in and where to go. With pain in the soul, the Kiev officer society meets the news of the death royal family and, despite caution, sings the forbidden royal hymn. Out of desperation, the officers drink half to death.
A terrifying story about the Kyiv life of the period civil war interspersed with memories of a past life that now look like an unaffordable luxury (for example, trips to the theater).
In 1918, Kyiv became a haven for those who, fearing reprisals, left Moscow: bankers and homeowners, artists and painters, aristocrats and gendarmes. Describing cultural life Kyiv, M.A. Bulgakov mentions famous theater"Purple Negro", cafe "Maxim" and the decadent club "Dust" (in fact it was called "Trash" and was located in the basement of the Continental Hotel on Nikolaevskaya Street; many celebrities visited it: A. Averchenko, O. Mandelstam, K. Paustovsky, I. Ehrenburg and M. Bulgakov himself). “The city swelled, expanded, climbed like dough from a pot,” writes M.A. Bulgakov. The motive of flight, indicated in the novel, will become a through motive for a number of the writer's works. In the "White Guard", as it becomes clear from the name, for M.A. Bulgakov, first of all, the fate of the Russian officers during the years of the revolution and the civil war, which for the most part lived with the concept of officer honor, is important.
The author of the novel shows how people go berserk in the crucible of fierce trials. Having learned about the atrocities of the Petliurists, Alexei Turbin offends the newspaper boy in vain and immediately feels shame and absurdity from his act. However, most often the heroes of the novel remain true to their life values. It is no coincidence that Elena, when she finds out that Alexei is hopeless and must die, lights a lamp in front of old icon and prays. After this, the disease recedes. Describes M.A. with admiration. Bulgakov Noble act Yulia Alexandrovna Reis, who, risking herself, saves the wounded Turbine.
The city can be considered a separate hero of the novel. In his native Kyiv, the writer himself best years. The urban landscape in the novel amazes with fabulous beauty (“All the energy of the city, accumulated during the sunny and stormy summer, poured out in the light), overgrown with hyperbole (“And there were as many gardens in the City as in no other city in the world”), M, A. Bulgakov makes extensive use of ancient Kyiv toponymy (Podil, Kreshchatik), often mentions the sights of the city dear to every heart of a Kiev citizen (Golden Gate, St. Sophia Cathedral, St. Michael's Monastery). The best place in the world he calls Vladimir Hill with a monument to Vladimir. Separate fragments of the urban landscape are so poetic that they resemble poems in prose: “A sleepy slumber passed over the City, a cloudy white bird swept by, bypassing the cross of Vladimir, fell behind the Dnieper into the thick of the night and swam along the iron arc.” And then this poetic picture is interrupted by a description of an armored train locomotive, angrily hooting, with a blunt snout. In this contrast of war and peace, the cross of Vladimir, a symbol of Orthodoxy, is a through image. At the end of the work, the illuminated cross visually turns into a threatening sword. And the writer encourages us to pay attention to the stars. Thus, the author moves from a concrete historical perception of events to a generalized philosophical one.
An important role in the novel is played by the motif of sleep. Dreams are seen in the work by Alexei, Elena, Vasilisa, the sentry at the armored train and Petka Shcheglov. Dreams help expand art space novel, to characterize the era more deeply, and most importantly, they raise the theme of hope for the future, that after a bloody civil war, the heroes will begin a new life.
"White Guard" Bulgakov M.A.
M. Bulgakov's novel The White Guard was written in 1923-1925. At that time, the writer considered this book to be the main one in his destiny, he said that from this novel "the sky will become hot." Years later, he called him "failed". Perhaps the writer meant that that epic in the spirit of L.N. Tolstoy, which he wanted to create, did not work out.
Bulgakov witnessed the revolutionary events in Ukraine. He expressed his view of the experience in the stories The Red Crown (1922), The Extraordinary Adventures of the Doctor (1922), The Chinese Story (1923), The Raid (1923). Bulgakov's first novel with the bold title "The White Guard" was, perhaps, the only work at that time in which the writer was interested in human experiences in a raging world, when the foundation of the world order is collapsing.
One of the most important motives of M. Bulgakov's creativity is the value of home, family, simple human affections. The heroes of the "White Guard" are losing the warmth of the hearth, although they are desperately trying to keep it. In a prayer to the Mother of God, Elena says: “You send too much grief at once, intercessor mother. So in one year you end your family. For what?.. My mother took it from us, I don't have a husband and never will, I understand that. Now I understand very clearly. And now you're taking away the elder. For what?.. How will we be together with Nikol?.. Look at what is happening around, you look... Protective mother, won’t you take pity?.. Maybe we are bad people, but why punish like that -then?"
The novel begins with the words: "Great was the year and terrible year after the Nativity of Christ 1918, from the beginning of the second revolution." Thus, as it were, two systems of time reference, chronology, two systems of values are offered: traditional and new, revolutionary.
Remember how at the beginning of the 20th century A.I. Kuprin portrayed the Russian army in the story "Duel" - decayed, rotten. In 1918, on the battlefields of the Civil War were the same people who made up the pre-revolutionary army, in general Russian society. But on the pages of Bulgakov's novel, we do not see Kuprin's heroes, but rather Chekhov's. The intellectuals, even before the revolution, longing for the bygone world, who understood that something had to be changed, found themselves at the epicenter of the Civil War. They, like the author, are not politicized, they live their own lives. And now we find ourselves in a world in which there is no place for neutral people. Turbines and their friends desperately defend what is dear to them, sing "God Save the Tsar", tear off the fabric hiding the portrait of Alexander I. Like Chekhov's uncle Vanya, they do not adapt. But, like him, they are doomed. Only Chekhov's intellectuals were doomed to vegetate, and Bulgakov's intellectuals to defeat.
Bulgakov likes a cozy Turbine apartment, but life for a writer is not valuable in itself. Life in the "White Guard" is a symbol of the strength of being. Bulgakov leaves no illusions to the reader about the future of the Turbin family. The inscriptions from the tiled stove are washed off, cups are beating, slowly, but irreversibly, the inviolability of everyday life and, consequently, being is crumbling. The Turbins' house behind the cream curtains is their fortress, a refuge from a blizzard, a snowstorm raging outside, but it is still impossible to protect oneself from it.
Bulgakov's novel includes the symbol of a blizzard as a sign of the times. For the author of The White Guard, a blizzard is not a symbol of the transformation of the world, not the sweeping away of everything obsolete, but of an evil inclination, violence. “Well, I think it will stop, that life will begin, which is written in chocolate books, but not only does it not begin, but around it it becomes more and more terrible. In the north, a blizzard howls and howls, but here underfoot it rumbles muffledly, the disturbed womb of the earth grumbles. Blizzard force destroys the life of the Turbin family, the life of the City. Bulgakov's white snow does not become a symbol of purification.
“The provocative novelty of Bulgakov’s novel was that five years after the end of the Civil War, when the pain and heat of mutual hatred had not subsided yet, he dared to show the officers of the White Guard not in the poster guise of an “enemy”, but as ordinary, good and bad, suffering and deluded, intelligent and limited people, showed them from the inside, and the best in this environment - with obvious sympathy. What does Bulgakov like about these stepchildren of history, who lost their battle? And in Alexei, and in Malyshev, and in Nai-Tours, and in Nikolka, he most of all appreciates courageous directness, fidelity to honor, ”notes literary critic V.Ya. Lakshin. The concept of honor is the starting point that determines Bulgakov's attitude towards his heroes and which can be taken as a basis in a conversation about the system of images.
But for all the sympathy of the author of The White Guard for his heroes, his task is not to decide who is right and who is wrong. Even Petlyura and his henchmen, in his opinion, are not responsible for the horrors that are taking place. This is a product of the elements of rebellion, doomed to a quick disappearance from the historical arena. Kozyr, who was a bad school teacher, would never have become an executioner and would not have known about himself that his vocation was war, if this war had not started. A lot of the actions of the heroes are brought to life by the Civil War. "War is mother dear" for Kozyr, Bolbotun and other Petliurists who take pleasure in killing defenseless people. The horror of war is that it creates a situation of permissiveness, shakes the foundations human life.
Therefore, for Bulgakov, it does not matter which side his heroes are on. In Alexei Turbin’s dream, the Lord says to Zhilin: “One believes, the other does not believe, but you all have the same actions: now each other’s throats, and as for the barracks, Zhilin, then you need to understand this, you are all with me, Zhilin, identical - killed in the battlefield. This, Zhilin, must be understood, and not everyone will understand this. And it seems that this view is very close to the writer.
V. Lakshin noted: “Artistic vision, creative mindset always encompasses a broader spiritual reality than can be verified by evidence in a simple class interest. There is biased, rightful class truth. But there is a universal, classless morality and humanism, melted down by the experience of mankind. M. Bulgakov stood on the positions of such universal humanism.
M.A. Bulgakov twice, in two different works, recalls how his work on the novel The White Guard (1925) began. In Theatrical Novel, Maksudov says: “It was born at night, when I woke up after a sad dream. I dreamed of my hometown, snow, winter, civil war... In my dream, a soundless blizzard passed in front of me, and then an old piano appeared and near it people who are no longer in the world.
And in the story “The Secret Friend” there are other details: “I pulled my barracks lamp to the table as far as possible and put on a pink paper cap over its green cap, which made the paper come to life. On it I wrote the words: "And the dead were judged according to what was written in the books, according to their deeds." Then he began to write, not yet knowing well what would come of it. I remember that I really wanted to convey how good it is when it is warm at home, the clock that beats with towering battle in the dining room, sleepy slumber in bed, books and frost ... "
With such a mood, the first pages of the novel were written. But his idea was nurtured for more than one year.
In both epigraphs to the "White Guard": from "The Captain's Daughter" ("The evening howled, a snowstorm began") and from the Apocalypse ("... the dead were judged ...") - there are no riddles for the reader. They are directly related to the plot. And the blizzard really rages on the pages - sometimes the most natural, sometimes allegorical (“It has long been the beginning of revenge from the north, and sweeping, and sweeping”). And the trial of those "who are no longer in the world", and in essence - over the Russian intelligentsia, goes on throughout the novel. The author himself speaks on it from the first lines. Serves as a witness. Far from being impartial, but honest and objective, not missing the virtues of the “defendants”, nor the weaknesses, shortcomings and mistakes.
The novel opens with a majestic image of 1918. Not a date, not a designation of the time of action - just an image.
“The year was great and terrible after the birth of Christ 1918, from the beginning of the second revolution. It was abundant in summer with the sun, and in winter with snow, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the shepherd's star - evening Venus and red, trembling Mars.
House and City are the two main inanimate characters of the book. However, not completely inanimate. The Turbin House on Alekseevsky Spusk, depicted with all the features of a family idyll crossed out by war, lives, breathes, suffers like a living being. It’s as if you feel the heat from the tiles of the stove when it’s cold outside, you hear the tower clock in the dining room, the strum of a guitar and the familiar sweet voices of Nikolka, Elena, Alexei, their noisy, cheerful guests ...
And the City - immensely beautiful on its hills even in winter, snow-covered and flooded with electricity in the evenings. The Eternal City, tormented by shelling, street fighting, disgraced by crowds of soldiers, temporary workers who seized its squares and streets.
It was impossible to write a novel without a broad conscious view, what was called a worldview, and Bulgakov showed that he had it. The author avoids in his book, at least in the part that has been completed, a direct confrontation between Reds and Whites. On the pages of the novel, whites are at war with the Petliurists. But the writer is occupied with a broader humanistic thought - or, rather, a thought-feeling: the horror of fratricidal war. With sadness and regret, he observes the desperate struggle of several warring elements and does not sympathize with any of them to the end. Bulgakov defended eternal values in the novel: home, homeland, family. And he remained a realist in his narration - he did not spare either the Petliurists, or the Germans, or the Whites, and he did not say a word of untruth about the Reds, placing them, as it were, behind the curtain of the picture.
The provoking novelty of Bulgakov's novel was that five years after the end of the civil war, when the pain and heat of mutual hatred had not subsided yet, he dared to show the officers of the White Guard not in the poster guise of the "enemy", but as ordinary - good and bad, suffering and erring, smart and limited - people, showed them from the inside, and the best in this environment - with obvious sympathy. In Alexei, in Myshlaevsky, in Nai-Turs and in Pikolka, the author most of all appreciates courageous directness, fidelity to honor. For them, honor is a kind of faith, the core of personal behavior.
The officer's honor demanded the protection of the white banner, unreasoning loyalty to the oath, the fatherland and the tsar, and Alexei Turbin painfully endures the collapse of the creed, from under which the main support was pulled out with the abdication of Nicholas II. But honor is also loyalty to other people, camaraderie, duty to the younger and the weak. Colonel Malyshev is a man of honor, because he sends the junkers home, realizing the senselessness of resistance: courage and contempt for phrases are needed for such a decision. Nai-Tours is a man of honor, even a knight of it, because he fights to the end, and when he sees that the case is lost, he rips off the cadet, almost a boy, thrown into a bloody mess, shoulder straps and covers his retreat with a machine gun. A man of honor and Nikolka, because he rushes through the streets of the city, looking for relatives of Nai-Turs to inform them of his death, and then, at the risk of himself, almost steals the body of the deceased commander, removing him from the mountain of frozen corpses in the basement of the anatomical theater .
Where there is honor, there is courage, where dishonor is cowardice. The reader will remember Thalberg, with his "patented smile", stuffing his travel suitcase. He is a stranger in the Turbine family. People tend to err, sometimes tragically err, to doubt, to seek, to come to a new faith. But a man of honor makes this way out of inner conviction, usually with pain, with anguish, parting with what he worshiped. For a person deprived of the concept of honor, such changes are easy: he, like Thalberg, simply changes the bow on the lapel of his coat, adapting to changed circumstances.
The author of The White Guard was also worried about another issue, the bond of the old "peaceful life", in addition to autocracy, was also Orthodoxy, faith in God and the afterlife - some sincere, some weathered and remaining only as fidelity to rituals. In Bulgakov's first novel, there is no break with traditional awareness, but there is no sense of loyalty to it either.
Elena's lively, fervent prayer for the salvation of her brother, addressed to the Mother of God, performs a miracle: Alexei recovers. Before Elena's inner gaze, there appears the one whom the author will later call Yeshua Ha-Nozri - "completely resurrected, and gracious, and barefoot." A light transparent vision anticipates with its visibility the late novel: “the glassy light of the heavenly dome, some unprecedented red-yellow sand blocks, olive trees ...” - a landscape of ancient Judea.
Much brings the author closer to his main character - doctor Alexei Turbin, to whom he gave a particle of his biography: both calm courage and faith in old Russia, faith to the last, until the course of events exhausts it to the end, but most of all - the dream of a peaceful life.
The semantic climax of the novel lies in the prophetic dream of Alexei Turbin. “I have neither profit nor loss from your faith,” God simply argues in a peasant way, “appearing” to Wahmister Zhilin. - One believes, the other does not believe, but the actions ... you all have the same: now each other by the throat ... "Both whites, and reds, and those that fell at Perekop are equally subject to the highest mercy:" .. .all of you are the same for me - killed in the battlefield.
The author of the novel did not pretend to be a religious person: both hell and heaven for him are most likely "so ... a human dream." But Elena says in her home prayer that "we are all guilty of blood." And the writer was tormented by the question of who would pay for the blood shed in vain.
The suffering and anguish of the fratricidal war, the awareness of the justice of what he called "the clumsy peasant anger", and at the same time the pain from trampling on old human values led Bulgakov to create his own unusual ethics - essentially non-religious, but preserving the features of the Christian moral tradition. The motive of eternity, which arose in the first lines of the novel, in one of the epigraphs, in the form of a great and terrible year, rises in the finale. The biblical words about the Last Judgment sound especially expressive: “And each one was judged according to his deeds, and whoever was not written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”
“... The cross turned into a threatening sharp sword. But he's not terrible. All will pass. Suffering, torment, blood, hunger and pestilence. The sword will disappear, but the stars will remain, when the shadow of our bodies and deeds will not remain on earth. There is not a single person who does not know this. So why don't we want to turn our eyes to them? Why?"
The writing
The novel by M. Bulgakov "The White Guard" was written in 1923-1925. At that time, the writer considered this book to be the main one in his destiny, he said that from this novel "the sky will become hot." Years later, he called him "failed". Perhaps the writer meant that that epic in the spirit of L.N. Tolstoy, which he wanted to create, did not work out.
Bulgakov witnessed the revolutionary events in Ukraine. He expressed his view of the experience in the stories The Red Crown (1922), The Extraordinary Adventures of the Doctor (1922), The Chinese Story (1923), The Raid (1923). Bulgakov's first novel with the bold title "The White Guard" was, perhaps, the only work at that time in which the writer was interested in human experiences in a raging world, when the foundation of the world order is collapsing.
One of the most important motives of M. Bulgakov's creativity is the value of home, family, simple human affections. The heroes of the "White Guard" are losing the warmth of the hearth, although they are desperately trying to keep it. In a prayer to the Mother of God, Elena says: “You send too much grief at once, intercessor mother. So in one year you end your family. For what?.. My mother took it from us, I don't have a husband and never will, I understand that. Now I understand very clearly. And now you're taking away the elder. For what?.. How will we be together with Nikol?.. Look at what is happening around, you look... Protective mother, won’t you take pity?.. Maybe we are bad people, but why punish like that -then?"
The novel begins with the words: "Great was the year and terrible year after the Nativity of Christ 1918, from the beginning of the second revolution." Thus, as it were, two systems of time reference, chronology, two systems of values are offered: traditional and new, revolutionary.
Remember how at the beginning of the 20th century A.I. Kuprin portrayed the Russian army in the story "Duel" - decayed, rotten. In 1918, on the battlefields of the Civil War were the same people who made up the pre-revolutionary army, in general, Russian society. But on the pages of Bulgakov's novel, we do not see Kuprin's heroes, but rather Chekhov's. The intellectuals, even before the revolution, longing for the bygone world, who understood that something had to be changed, found themselves at the epicenter of the Civil War. They, like the author, are not politicized, they live their own lives. And now we find ourselves in a world in which there is no place for neutral people. Turbines and their friends desperately defend what is dear to them, sing "God Save the Tsar", tear off the fabric hiding the portrait of Alexander I. Like Chekhov's uncle Vanya, they do not adapt. But, like him, they are doomed. Only Chekhov's intellectuals were doomed to vegetate, and Bulgakov's intellectuals to defeat.
Bulgakov likes a cozy Turbine apartment, but life for a writer is not valuable in itself. Life in the "White Guard" is a symbol of the strength of being. Bulgakov leaves no illusions to the reader about the future of the Turbin family. The inscriptions from the tiled stove are washed off, cups are beating, slowly, but irreversibly, the inviolability of everyday life and, consequently, being is crumbling. The Turbins' house behind cream curtains is their fortress, a refuge from a blizzard, a snowstorm raging outside, but it is still impossible to protect oneself from it.
Bulgakov's novel includes the symbol of a blizzard as a sign of the times. For the author of The White Guard, the blizzard is not a symbol of the transformation of the world, not the sweeping away of everything that has become obsolete, but of an evil inclination, violence. “Well, I think it will stop, that life will begin, which is written in chocolate books, but not only does it not begin, but around it it becomes more and more terrible. In the north, a blizzard howls and howls, but here underfoot it rumbles muffledly, the disturbed womb of the earth grumbles. Blizzard force destroys the life of the Turbin family, the life of the City. Bulgakov's white snow does not become a symbol of purification.
“The provocative novelty of Bulgakov’s novel was that five years after the end of the Civil War, when the pain and heat of mutual hatred had not yet subsided, he dared to show the officers of the White Guard not in the poster guise of an “enemy”, but as ordinary, good and bad, suffering and deluded, intelligent and limited people, showed them from the inside, and the best in this environment - with obvious sympathy. What does Bulgakov like about these stepchildren of history, who lost their battle? And in Alexei, and in Malyshev, and in Nai-Tours, and in Nikolka, he most of all appreciates courageous directness, fidelity to honor, ”the literary critic V.Ya. Lakshin. The concept of honor is the starting point that determines Bulgakov's attitude to his heroes and which can be taken as a basis for talking about the system of images.
But for all the sympathy of the author of The White Guard for his heroes, his task is not to decide who is right and who is wrong. Even Petlyura and his henchmen, in his opinion, are not responsible for the horrors that are taking place. This is a product of the elements of rebellion, doomed to a quick disappearance from the historical arena. Trump, who was a bad school teacher, would never have become an executioner and would not have known about himself that his vocation was war, if this war had not begun. A lot of the actions of the heroes are brought to life by the Civil War. "War is mother dear" for Kozyr, Bolbotun and other Petliurists who take pleasure in killing defenseless people. The horror of war is that it creates a situation of permissiveness, shakes the foundations of human life.
Therefore, for Bulgakov, it does not matter which side his heroes are on. In Alexei Turbin’s dream, the Lord says to Zhilin: “One believes, the other does not believe, but you all have the same actions: now each other’s throats, and as for the barracks, Zhilin, then you need to understand this, you are all with me, Zhilin, identical - killed in the battlefield. This, Zhilin, must be understood, and not everyone will understand this. And it seems that this view is very close to the writer.
V. Lakshin noted: “Artistic vision, creative mindset always encompasses a broader spiritual reality than can be verified by evidence in a simple class interest. There is biased, rightful class truth. But there is a universal, classless morality and humanism, melted down by the experience of mankind. M. Bulgakov stood on the positions of such universal humanism.