Kiev is an ancient city. His street still keeps an imprint of the past existence was passing through it...

Kiev is an ancient city. His street still keeps an imprint of the past existence was passing through it...

I want to introduce you translation description of the City by Mikhail Bulgakov. Reconstructed in the "White Guard" atmosphere of Kiev life during the 1918!

---

Like a multi-tiered honeycomb, Smoke and the noise and the city lived. Beautiful in the frost and fog on the mountains, above the Dnieper. For days on end, smoke from the innumerable pipes of smoke to the sky was coming down the screws. The streets were smoked with haze, and the giant snow fell down. And at five, and six, and seven floors piled at home. In the daytime their windows were black, and at night they burned in rows in a dark blue vysi.

Chains, as far as the eye could see, like precious stones, sparkled electric balls, high suspended on the scribbles of gray long pillars. In the daytime, trams with yellow thatchy, puffy seats, like foreign models, ran with a pleasant even buzz. From the ramp to the ramp, cabbies rode, shouting, and the dark collars-silver and black fur-made women's faces enigmatic and beautiful.

The gardens stood silent and calm, aggravated by white, untouched snow. And there were gardens in the City as much as in any city in the world. They spread everywhere with huge spots, with alleys, chestnut trees, ravines, maples and lindens.

The gardens were beautiful on the beautiful mountains that hung over the Dnieper, and, stepping up, stepping up, occasionally gauding with millions of sunspots, sometimes in the twilight the eternal Tsar's garden reigned.

The old decayed black parapet beams did not block the way straight to the cliffs at a terrible height. The steep walls, swept up by the snow, fell to the lower far terraces, and they dispersed farther and farther, passed into the coastal groves, over the highway winding along the banks of the great river, and the dark, bounded ribbon left there, into the haze, where even from the urban heights there are not enough human eyes, where the gray rapids, Zaporozhskaya Sich, and Chersonese, and the far sea.

In winter, as in no other city in the world, peace and quiet in the streets and alleys and the upper city, on the mountains, and the City of the lower one, stretched out in the bend of the frozen Dnieper, fell all the engine buzz, softened and grumbled rather deafly. All the energy of the city, accumulated over a solar and thunderous summer, poured out in the light. Light from four o'clock in the afternoon began to light up in the windows of houses, in round electric balls, in gas lamps, in street lamps with fiery numbers, and in glass continuous windows of electric stations that suggest the terrible and vain electric future of mankind, in their solid windows where you could see tirelessly shaking your desperate wheels of the machine, to the roots shaking the very foundation of the earth. I played with light and shone, glowed and danced and shimmered the City at night until the morning, and in the morning faded, dressed in smoke and fog.

But the best thing was that the electric white cross glittered in the hands of the huge Vladimir on the Vladimir Hill, and he was seen far away, and often in the summer, in the black mist, in the muddy creeks and bends of the old river, from the willow, the boats saw it and found it watery way to the city, to its piers. In winter, the cross shone in the black thick of the sky and reigned coldly and calmly over the dark, gentle gaps of the Moscow shore, from which two huge bridges were thrown. One chain, heavy, Nikolayevsky, leading to the village on the other bank, the other - tall, arrow-shaped, along which trains from where very mysterious Moscow sat very, very far, stretching its mottled cap.

And so, in the winter of 1918, the City lived a strange, unnatural life, which, very probably, will not happen again in the twentieth century. Behind the stone walls, all the apartments were crowded. Their long-standing ancestral inhabitants huddled and continued to squeeze further, by will-nilly admitting new aliens, rushing to the City. And they just arrived on this swept bridge from there, where mysterious blue haze.

Seventh bankers fled with their wives, talented businessmen fled, leaving trusted assistants in Moscow, who were instructed not to lose touch with the new world that was born in the Moscow kingdom, the homeowners who left the house for the faithful secret clerks, industrialists, merchants, lawyers, public figures . Journalists fled, Moscow and Petersburg, corrupt, greedy, cowardly. Kokotka. Honest ladies from aristocratic families. Their tender daughters, Petersburg pale debauchee with painted carmine lips.

The secretaries of department directors fled, young passive pederasts. Princes and altynniks, poets and moneylenders, gendarmes and actresses of the imperial theaters fled. All this mass, seeping into the gap, kept its way to the City.

All spring, beginning with the election of the hetman, he filled and filled with newcomers. In the apartments they slept on sofas and chairs. They dined with huge societies at tables in rich apartments. Opened innumerable food shops, pastry, selling until late at night, a cafe where coffee was served and where it was possible to buy a woman, new theaters of miniatures, on the stage of which all the most famous actors flocking from the two capitals were laughing and mixing, the famous "Lilovy" theater was opened Negro "and the majestic club" Dust "(poets - directors - artists - artists) on Mykolayivska street, clattering with white plates till white in the morning. Immediately new newspapers appeared, and the best feathers in Russia began to write feuilletons in them and to vilify Bolsheviks in these feuilletons. The cabmen for days on end dragged riders from the restaurant to the restaurant, and at night in the cabaret played string music, and in the tobacco smoke glowed the unearthly beauty of the face of white, exhausted, crooked prostitutes.

The city swelled, expanded, climbed like a lice from a pot. The gambling clubs rustled until dawn, and Petersburg and city people played in them, important and proud German lieutenants and majors played, which the Russians feared and respected. Played arab from the clubs of Moscow and Ukrainian-Russian, already hanging by the hair of the landlords. In the cafe "Maxim" a charming nightingale whistled with a nightingale on his violin, and his eyes were wonderful, sad, languid, with a bluish white, and his hair velvety. Lamps, twisted with gypsy shawls, threw two lights - down white electric, and sideways and upwards - orange. The ceiling of the starry blue dusty silk was spreading, large diamonds sparkled in blue boxes and the reddish Siberian furs glistened. And the smell of burnt coffee, then, alcohol and French perfume. All summer of the eighteenth year, Nikolayevsky scuffed furious dudes, in woolen caftans, and cars burned in a row to the light with cones. In the windows of shops the flower forests were fading, the bales of golden fat hung balyks, the bottles of fine champagne wine "Abrau" were languidly glittering with eagles and seals.

I hope you liked it, read excerpt from the work of a great writer Mikhail Bulgakov helped you understand the soul of ancient city Kiev a bit bether

Illustration from book photo by myself.

---

This post was created to participate in the competition from a remarkable community that helps people better understand the culture of different countries of the world and together enjoy the fruits of creativity and art, history to which this community is dedicated.