M.A. Bulgakov and the “Kiev text”: Based on the “Kiev-gorod” and “The White Guard”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of “Kiev text”. The author analyses two works of M.A. Bulgakov, created and completed after visiting to his hometown of Kyiv in 1923, the sketch “Kiev-gorod” and the novel “The White Guard”. To this end, at first, we examined the research history and research trends of “Kiev text” in Russian literature , and revealed the characteristics of “Kiev text”. We also saw that in “Kiev-gorod” and “The White Guard” the figure of Kyiv is depicted in ‘history’ as the image of falling Babylon, in the memory of the lyrical self and in Alexei’s dream as the image of the heavenly Jerusalem. As such, the myth of the confrontation between these two cities is the basis of Bulgakov's “Kiev text”. Meanwhile, Bulgakov's ‘city’, which contains an eternal ‘culture’ that is not destroyed by any ‘history’, is unique in that it has myth and eternity. In this way, this paper ultimately tried to find the literary meaning of the Bulgakov ‘s “Kiev text”, and to read the most famous “Kiev text” of the 20th century, “The White Guard” and its documentary version, “Kiev-gorod”, from a new perspective.