As Kyiv changes hands amid the chaos of the Russian Civil War, the Turbin siblings and their circle of friends try to hold onto loyalty, love, and a sense of home while armies, ideologies, and the city itself collapse around them.
Books mentioned in The White Guard (7)
The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin: “The novel's own epigraph: "'A blizzard!' Pushkin, The Captain's Daughter."”
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Talberg... recalled the dense black chords and the tattered pages of the age-old family copy of Faust.”
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens: “...staring greedily at the bindings, undecided as to which to take out first, The Pickwick Papers or the bound volumes of the Russian Herald for 1871.”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: “If you really want to know, I've read War and Peace.”
The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky: “A copy of Dostoevsky lay open and unread on the floor by Alexei's bed, the desperate characters of The Possessed prophesying doom while Elena slept peacefully.”
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin: “Mikhail Shpolyansky was dark and clean-shaven... and he looked exactly like Eugene Onegin.”
Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol: “In the green shadows he looks exactly like the Taras Bulba.”