The Days of the Turbins

The Days of the Turbins
Stanislavski's production of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Days of the Turbins (1926), with scenic design by Aleksandr Golovin.
Written by	Mikhail Bulgakov
Date premiered	5 October 1926 (1926-10-05)
Place premiered	Moscow Art Theatre
Original language	Russian
Subject	Russian 1918-1920 Civil War
Genre	Realistic drama
Setting	Kiev, 1919

The Days of the Turbins (Russian: Дни Турбиных, translit. Dni Turbinykh) is a four-act play by Mikhail Bulgakov based upon his novel The White Guard.

It was written in 1925 and premiered on 5 October 1926 in Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. In April 1929 the MAT production was cancelled as a result of severe criticism in the Soviet press. On 16 February 1932, resulting from the direct interference of Joseph Stalin, it was re-started and continued until June 1941, to considerable public acclaim. It ran for 987 performances in the course of these ten years.

There are three versions of the play's text. The first was written in July-September 1925. The title The Days of the Turbins was also used for the novel itself, the latter's Paris (1927, 1929, Concorde) edition was titled The Days of the Turbins (The White Guard). The play's second version (never published in Russian) was translated into German and first came out in Munich in 1934. The third version of the text was published in Moscow in 1955, supervised personally by Elena Sergeyevna Bulgakova.

When the Moscow Art Theatre approached Bulgakov in 1925, suggesting that he should write a play for them to stage, the author has been toying with the same idea for some time. In 1920, while in Vladikavkaz, he'd written a play called The Turbin Brothers, which was set during the times of the 1905 Revolution, and since then has been thinking of coming up with some kind of sequel.

As well as the novel The White Guard, which served as a blueprint for it, the play was based upon its author's personal experience in Kiev of late 1919 and early 1920, when, at the height of the Russian Civil War, the city succumbed to anarchy and violence.

As the novel before it, the play had a strong autobiographical aspect to it. The description of the house of the Turbins corresponds to that of the house of the Bulgakov family in Kiev, now the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum.