The Bulgakov Museum, Kyiv

The Bulgakov museum, on Andriivskyi Descent, in the beautiful heart of old Kyiv, is situated in the apartment where Mikhail Bulgakov was brought up and lived as a young man. His famous literary works were written later, after he left this house. This was his family home, and he practiced medicine here. But the apartment is also significant because it was the model for the family home of the fictional Turbin family, the main characters of Bulgakov’s first novel, The White Guard. Bulgakov lived in Kyiv during part of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, and witnessed firsthand the tumultuous events as the various competing armies, White, Red, Ukrainian nationalist, German, came and went. The museum depicts the lives of two families that lived there, the Bulgakovs themselves and the fictional Turbins.

The Bulgakov Museum, Kyiv

Following the February Revolution, a Central Council of Ukraine had taken power in Kyiv, and declared Ukraine’s autonomy within Russia, which was later recognised by Russia’s Provisional Government. However, following the October Revolution, the Central Council denounced the Bolsheviks and declared an independent Ukrainian People’s Republic. The Central Council was in turn driven out by the Germans in April 2018, and was replaced by the pro-German Ukrainian State under Pavlo Skoropadskyi, a former general in the Imperial Russian Army, who styled himself Hetman, the title of the heads of the Zaporizhian Cossack host that had held sway in much of Ukraine between the 16th and 18th centuries. Following the German surrender in November 2018, Skoropadskyi’s rule swiftly collapsed as Ukrainian forces under Symon Petliura, the head of the Central Council’s military, approached the city. Skoropadskyi withdrew with the Germans.

The White Guard opens in late 1918, as the well-to-do Turbins, supporters of the Hetmanate, participate in the defence of the city against Petliura’s army. The novel depicts the chaos of the civil war, the euphoria of many Ukrainians as Petliura, who appears as a figure of almost legendary proportions, enters Kyiv, as well as the terror of those who, like the Turbins, had opposed Petliura. In one particularly heart-rending scene, an entirely innocent Jewish man is murdered by Petliura’s troops. As so often, the Jewish population were targeted for special cruelty.

The White Guard is in a fine tradition in Russian literature that includes Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, that depicts tumultuous historical events through the lives and experiences of a group of people living through them. His take on those events was unsurprisingly controversial. The White Guard was first published in serial form in a Soviet-era journal in 1925, but it was shut down before reaching the end. A censored version was published in the Soviet Union in 1966, but the complete version was not published there until 1989. Nevertheless, Stalin was said to have enjoyed the stage adaptation of the novel, The Days of the Turbins, so much that he saw it multiple times.

Bulgakov has also been controversial in Ukraine more recently. In 2022, following the full-scale Russian invasion, there were calls from some quarters for the museum on Andriivskyi Descent to be closed, because Bulgakov, who though born in Kyiv was of a Russian family, could not be considered a Ukrainian writer, and because he was allegedly opposed to Ukrainian statehood. Since the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, there have been widespread calls to reject all Russian culture, to remove statues of Russian cultural figures and to rename streets named after them, all in the name of “cultural decolonisation”. Such calls have reached a new pitch since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. There is, for example, no longer a square named after Tolstoy in Kyiv, who admittedly had no connection with the city. It has been renamed the Square of Ukrainian Heroes. But the then minister of culture rejected the calls to close the Bulgakov museum. My guide assured me it would not be closed. Outside the museum, a statue of a seated Bulgakov has, like many other statues around Ukraine, been covered up for protection against potential missile attacks. So perhaps Bulgakov, a great figure of world literature and one of Kyiv’s most famous sons, might be safe.