Bulgakov’s The White Guard and Flight

Abstract

The plays discussed in the last chapter are sometimes hailed by Soviet critics as the cornerstone of Russian drama of the 1920s, but this is a judgement that owes more to politics than to art. Artistically, such works as Lyubov Yarovaya and The Gale lag far behind much of the drama of the pre-revolutionary period. The lessons of Chekhov about the representation of reality on the stage have here been completely overlooked, and the complexity of motivation which he revealed so expertly has been reduced to the single dimension of class allegiance. For a while, critics and theoreticians tried to steer Russian drama away from the path indicated by Chekhov, whom they regarded as a spokesman for Russia’s bourgeois past. Any dramatist or theatre appearing to be ‘Chekhovian’ was considered artistically outmoded and politically dangerous. To critics of this persuasion, Mikhail Bulgakov’s two plays about the Civil War, The White Guard (The Days of the Turbins) and Flight, served the cause of Bolshevism’s enemies by portraying them sympathetically as complex human beings rather than with the stereotyped satirical strokes of the poster artist. For many years Bulgakov’s plays were banned or limited to production in certain theatres only. Yet today this most talented of Soviet dramatists is widely acknowledged, in the Soviet Union as in the West, to be a worthy successor to Chekhov, and his leading place in the history of modern Russian drama is assured.