Sergei GonkovSergey Gonkov was born in 1958 in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow Art School attached to the Surikov Institute, after which he entered the Surikov Art Institute on the Faculty of Graphic Arts, specializing in book illustration. For his graduation work in 1982, he completed a cycle of illustrations for Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The White Guard.
The two-story house at number 13 was of an amazing design (the Turbin apartment was on the second floor facing the street and on the first floor facing the small, sloped, cozy courtyard).
The hood slid down, revealing the flat top of an officer's cap with a darkened cockade, and over his enormous shoulders was the head of Lieutenant Viktor Viktorovich Myshlayevsky.
“We have been taught by bitter experience and we now know that only a monarchy can save Russia. Therefore, if the Emperor is dead, long live the Emperor!” Turbin shouted and raised his glass.
Like multi-tiered honeycombs, the City smoked and buzzed and lived. Beautiful in the frost and fog on the hills, over the Dnieper. All day long, smoke went up to the sky in spirals from countless chimneys. The streets steamed with haze, and the giant, trodden snow squeaked. And the houses piled up in five, and six, and seven stories.
But best of all, the electric white cross in the hands of the enormous Vladimir on Vladimir Hill glittered, and it was visible from afar, and often in the summer, in the black gloom, in the confusing backwaters and bends of the old river, from the willow thickets, boats saw it and used its light to find their way on the water to the City, to its docks.
The indecent nocturnal bustle in the palace continued for some time. A German man who came out told some officers lounging in the hall with gaudy chairs and in the adjacent hall, in German, that Major von Schratt had accidentally wounded himself in the neck while unloading his revolver and that he needed to be urgently taken to a German hospital.
The gymnasium, native to Turbin, bordered the parade ground with its huge, four-story, one-hundred-and-eighty-windowed hall.
One hundred and fifty rifles stood in stacks, and cadets were sleeping in heaps on the dirty bunks.
It is not a gray cloud with a serpentine belly spreading over the city, it is not murky, brown rivers flowing through the old streets—it is Petliura's countless army marching to the parade on the square of old Sofia.
