The White Guard (41 page)

   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.'