What remains of Bulgakov on Andriivskyi Descent?
Removing the writer's monument cannot erase the memory of him or his literary legacy, so deeply infused with Christian meaning.
There is something special about walking down Andriivskyi Descent (Saint Andrew's Descent) late in the evening, when the day's heat has faded and Podil slowly sinks into twilight. Away from the busy streets of central Kyiv, even time seems to move differently. The Descent has a life of its own, with its own sounds and its own air – a mingling of blooming linden trees and the cool breath of the Dnipro River.
Not long ago, the bronze statue of writer Mikhail Bulgakov was removed from outside No. 13 Andriyivskyi Descent. All that remains on the granite base are the marks left by crowbars and a few deep scratches in the stone. That small, empty patch of ground now catches the eye of nearly everyone passing by. People used to stop here, take photographs, and lay flowers on the writer's bronze knees. Now they simply glance at the vacant spot and move on.
These days, the demolition of monuments to politicians and cultural figures, like the renaming of streets, hardly surprises anyone. Yet here, on this steep Kyiv hillside, the sense of loss is particularly acute. Those who ordered the monument's removal have overlooked one thing: Bulgakov cannot simply be erased from Kyiv's history. To a remarkable extent, he helped create the very image of the city we know today.
The roots of Kyiv's literary identity
Literary scholars have long recognized a phenomenon known as the "Kyiv text." The concept was first developed by scholar Vladimir Toporov and later explored in depth by Kyiv philologist Myron Petrovsky. At its heart lies the idea that Kyiv possesses such a distinctive character that its hills and streets come together to form a single living organism.
And Bulgakov did more than perhaps any other twentieth-century writer to give that vision literary form. In his books, the City is always capitalized. It is not merely a place on a map but an eternal city, a place where earthly history meets eternity.
To understand where Bulgakov's profound attachment to his hometown came from, we must look at his family and the world in which he grew up.
Mikhail was raised in the household of Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, a professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy. The family belonged to the intellectual elite of its day. Their home on Andriyivskyi Descent was filled with serious theological debates, discussions of biblical meaning, readings of ancient texts, and reflections on the end times, as the approaching catastrophes of the new century cast their shadows.
The head of the family was a distinguished intellectual and Church historian who translated some of the most demanding Latin works of St. Augustine and St. Jerome.
From his earliest years, the future writer absorbed this world of ideas. Christianity was never merely a collection of outward rituals to him. It became the lens through which he would later view revolution and the collapse of the world he had known.
His great Kyiv novel, The White Guard, opens with an epigraph from the Book of Revelation concerning the judgment of the dead.
For Bulgakov, the Civil War was not simply a change of governments or a struggle between political factions. It was an apocalypse in miniature.
And the Turbins' home, with its cream-colored curtains, old books, and glowing lamp, becomes something like an ark amid the surrounding chaos. Bulgakov transforms an ordinary Kyiv household into a refuge where the last remnants of humanity survive while the world outside descends into madness.
When medicine can do no more
Halfway through the novel comes a scene that defies the conventions of secular literature of the period.
Alexei Turbin is dying of typhus. The doctors have exhausted every possibility. Medicine has failed, and they tell the family plainly that there is no hope. The death agony has begun; only hours remain.
At that moment, his sister Elena shuts herself in her bedroom, falls to her knees before an old icon of the Mother of God, and begins to pray.
Her desperate appeal to God is the cry of someone from whom the upheavals of history have taken almost everything. First she lost her mother. Now she is about to lose her brother. And all around her, the very fabric of ordinary life is unraveling.
Bulgakov writes the scene without sentimentality, tracing every movement of the praying woman's soul.
"Mother, our Protectress... Entreat Thy Son, entreat the Lord God to send a miracle," Elena pleads. And death retreats.
The following morning, the doctors at Alexei's bedside discover, to their astonishment, that his fever is subsiding. Life is returning to a body that had already begun to grow cold.
Bulgakov had himself practiced medicine and understood the course of typhus intimately. Yet at the very heart of his novel, he places an unmistakable testimony to a miracle.
Raised in the scholarly world of the Church, he understood that there are moments when human strength and knowledge reach their limits, and Divine Providence takes over.
How to survive when the world falls apart
The people of Kyiv today are living through the same blizzard that engulfed Bulgakov's characters a century ago.
The parallels are frighteningly precise.
Once again, danger lurks beyond the windows. Once again, people struggle to protect their families, desperately searching for answers to questions no one should have to face. The world seems to have gone mad, and the familiar rhythms of life are breaking under the weight of events.
The empty pedestal on Andriivskyi Descent has, in a strange way, become a monument to our own age.
We live in an era that has learned to dismantle the remnants of the past with remarkable speed – tearing down monuments, changing street names, and replacing signs. Yet it has not learned to create works and ideas of equally enduring power.
Attempts to judge a great writer by the political standards of the present inevitably diminish the judges rather than the writer.
Culture outlives the slogans of its age because it speaks of things that endure: the fragility of the human soul, the struggle to preserve one's humanity, and the questions that reach far beyond the interests of any political faction.
Bulgakov left us a reminder of what it means to remain human in the midst of catastrophe.
The fresh scars on the granite pedestal now evoke something quieter than outrage.
They evoke sorrow.
The City will remember Bulgakov long after the officials who placed his monument on a demolition list have been forgotten. His voice, his characters, and his descriptions of Kyiv's streets have long since become part of the city's very landscape.
And the way to survive this blizzard of history has not changed in a hundred years.
Draw the curtains. Guard the world within. Keep your home warm. Pray for those you love.
And hold fast to the roots of your culture.
For those are things no one can ever truly take away.
