Bulgakov | Thornfield Hall

This year I am reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s early novels and stories. One of my favorites is A Country Doctor’s Notebook, a charming, posthumously-published collection of autobiographical short stories chronicling his 18 months as a country doctor.

Unlike his satiric masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, this quiet little book introduces Bulgakov’s serious side. The protagonist, a young, sardonic doctor, has a wry sense of humor, but is racked with self-doubt and loneliness. After qualifying as a doctor in Kiev in 1916, he was drafted to a remote country practice and the sole doctor of a 40-bed hospital.

Bulgakov deftly captures the country doctor’s loneliness and isolation. He misses Kiev: in this tiny hamlet, there are no shops, theaters, street lights, or electricity. The weather is glum, cold, and generally terrible.And he is awakened in the middle of the night during a blizzard to drive miles in a horse-drawn buggy to treat a patient.

Although his knowledge of medicine is textbook-perfect, the 25-year-old doctor is hampered by inexperience. Once he dashes back to his room to consult a reference book, and then recovers his near-photographic memory of a technique used during a difficult delivery. When a farmer brings in his beautiful daughter with her legs mangled from falling into a flax brake, he feels he is looking at a living corpse. The midwife whispers, “What’s the point of smashing her up anymore? She’ll die any minute now… you won’t save her.” The doctor, too expects her to die in surgery, but she survives the amputation of both legs. Months later, she walks in on crutches with her father to thank him and give the doctor the gift of an embroidered towel.

Throughout the book, he has many touching, often humorous encounters with country folk. He is astonished when a patient decides to take all of his medicine at one time, thinking it will be more efficient that way. The doctor treats many cases of siphylis, whole families at a time, even children and is grieved when a patient has left it too late to recover. Eventually, he decides to leave the practice to become a venereologist in Kiev. A few years later, Bulgakov gave up medicine to be a writer.

This book is touching, though never sentimental. In some ways I prefer Bulgakov’s gruff, sardonic realism to his satiric brilliance. Of course, my favorite of his books is The White Guard, a kind of miniature War and Peace set during the Russian revolution. It has the perfect balance of gravity and humor.

THE POSSIBLE TBR: TEN BOOKS I MIGHT READ IN 2024

I was given a planner for Christmas, so I must plan. Here are ten books I might read in 2024.

1. Little, Big, by John Crowley. I am a fan of Crowley’s Aegypt trilogy, but have never read his famous novel, Little, Big, which won the World Fantasy Award. The jacket copy says: “This is the saga of the Drinkwater family, the sparkling inhabitants of Edgewood, and the ever-changing house that sits on the border between what we know is real and what we’ve always hoped is real.”

I rather think I live on that border!

2. Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal. I enjoyed Hrabal’s bizarre short novel, Dancing Lessons for the Advance in Age, which I read on vacation and promptly forgot. Closely Watched Trains is said to be a classic, and the 1966 film is is famous.

3. The Sojourner, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Last year I read The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize. It is one of those sad animal books, beautifully-written but weepy. The Sojourner sounds fascinating, a historical novel that follows the life of a farmer, Ase, from the 1860s to the beginning of World War II. Throughout his life, he tries to find his adventurous brother, Ben, who left the farm to travel and never returned.

4. Christopher and His Kind, by Christopher Isherwood. The jacket copy says: “He describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggle to save his companion…from the Nazis.” I once wrote a paper on this exquisitely-written memoir.

5. The Death of a Nobody by Jules Romains. According to the jacket copy, this is not the story of a man, but of an event. The death of Jacques Godard inspires brief passing memories in the minds of the porter, his fellow lodgers, and others who casually knew him.

6. The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard. Perhaps I will read a few of stories in this enormous anthology, which I bought years ago. However, I read Ballard’s The Drowned World and Drought last year and was not impressed. In fact, they were abysmally bad.

7. Heaven and Hardpan Farm by Nancy Hale. Library of America has reissued Nancy Hale’s short stories and her novel, The Prodigal Women. I find her work uneven, but this is one of her later novels, and perhaps I’ll give it a try..

8. Women in the Wall by Julia O’Faolain. I have a Virago edition of this historical novel, set in Gaul in the Dark Ages.

9. Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome. By the author of Three Men in a Boat.

10. Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce. Well, this is a classic, isn’t it? I’m not inspired, but it is a very slim volume of stories.

What’s on your TBR this year? Or your MTBR (Maybe TBR)?

In that winter of 2018 the City lived a strange, unnatural life that is unlikely to be repeated in the twentieth century. — Bulgakov’s The White Guard

Mikhail Bulgakov’s best-known novel, The Master and Margarita, is wickedly satirical and surreal. The characters include the Devil, a talking cat, Pontius Pilate, a witch, and a temporarily insane poet. In the 1930s this political satire was considered unpublishable. In the mid-1960s, a censored version was serialized in a Russian journal. In 1973, the complete novel was published in Moscow.

Compared to The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s early work has struck me as very slight. I changed my mind when I read The White Guard, set in 1918 in Kiev during the Civil War. Tjis short, realistic first novel, published in 1925, balances scenes of everyday life with the horrors of war, like a miniature War and Peace, which influenced Bulgakov.

In smooth, understated, impersonal prose, Bulgakov portrays the life of the city as a single, living entity. It “steamed and hummed like a many-layered honeycomb. All day long smoke spiraled in ribbons up to the sky from innumerable chimneys.” On all sides they are besieged by different armies: there are the Ukrainian nationalists, the Red Guard, the White Guard, and the Germans. The people are terrified. They especially hate the Bolsheviks.

Bulgakov contrasts the daily lives of civilians with the chaos of battle and army life. Like Tolstoy, Bulgakov describes the ineptness of battle plans and the unpredictable pandemonium which skews all strategy and is the cause of victory or defeat. No one understands what is going on, or even which army is fighting which when.

Bulgakov’s focus is on a single Russian family, the Turbins, three siblings who share an apartment. Alexei, 28, is a doctor who despises the men lining up to fake illness to escape military service; his sister, Elena, 24, is left on her own when her husband, Talberg, flees the city middle of the night; and Nikolka, the idealistic adolescent, volunteers as a raw cadet for the White Guard.

Life is grim, food is scarce, and the war rages on senselessly. Yet Alexei’s friends socialize: they have card parties, discuss politics, and drink too much. When Alexei volunteers as a military doctor for the White Guard, Elena is terrified. And, indeed, the brothers are both in danger. They know so little about combat.

Bulgakov depicts cynical army officers and bewildered cadets. Mikhail Shpolyansky, a poet-soldier who has velvety sideburns and “looks exactly like Eugene Onegin,” belongs to a poetry club. When he gets bored, he says it is because he hasn’t been throwing enough bombs.lately. And he goes off to reap chaos and death.

On the other hand, Nai-Turs is a canny, experienced colonel who recognizes the humanity of his platoon of 200 men. When Nai-Turs demands felt boots for his men, the general of the supply division refuses. Nai-Turs forces him to sign the requisition and calls in his platoon to load up the felt boots. And later, in the city, when a battle is lost, Nai-Turs saves lives by ordering his men to run away and go home. Nikolka is confused: aren’t they supposed to be heroes? But Nai-Turs repeatedly commands the “stupid boy” to run away through the back lots. Finally he obeys.

Alexei also is incredulous when an officer tells him to run out the back door of the house and run. Both brothers want to be heroes, and are bewildered by the lost battles. Elena anxiously waits for them to come home. Survival is difficult on one’s own.

There are a few awkward scenes, but it is a remarkable war novel. And the more I think about it, the more I admire it. I read Michael Glenny’s excellent translation.