White Guard - Tapa blanda

The setting is Kiev in 1918, a time of revolution, turmoil and civil war. The Germans have occupied the city, Petlyura's Socialists are camped outside awaiting their moment, while the Bolsheviks watch, contemplating their buried armaments. The once wealthy Turbin family are in anguish as their world grows smaller and smaller. Called a modern classic by C. P. Snow, this novel first appared in 1923, and was banned by Stalin in the '30s.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and lived most of his adult life in Stalinist Russia. A journalist, playwright, novelist, and short story writer, he is best known in the West for his novel "The Master and Margarita," Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning Russian translator who recently received her second Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate Olga Slavnikova's newest novel, "2017," She has translated classic literary works by Nina Berberova and Yuri Olesha, as well as Edvard Radzinsky's "The Last Tsar," She lives in Austin, TX.