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ellauri434.html on line 189: In “Kiev — town” Bulgakov gave full rein to his nostalgia for the Kyiv of his childhood and to his antipathy to Ukrainian nationalism. The essay belongs to a genre of modernist city sketches and ironic travel guides that were popular among male prose writers at the time. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Guide to Berlin” and Viktor Shklovsky’s “Petersburg in the Blockade” were published in the same year. Shklovsky’s decision to give Petrograd, soon to be Leningrad, its pre-revolutionary name parallels Bulgakov’s choice to spell place names in the language of the Russian Empire rather than in Ukrainian. For Bulgakov, modernity had brought devastation to the “mother of Russian cities” causing it to regress to the status of a provincial town. His accounts of local opportunists, citizens’ shifting religious and political affiliations, an ugly new sculpture of Karl Marx, and even the actions of the competing armies who tried to seize Kyiv during the Civil War are affectionate and mildly cynical. However, the essay’s ironic comparisons of the former glory of the Russian Empire with its inferior modern Soviet version turn to crude hostility when Bulgakov describes his native city’s burgeoning Ukrainian identity. The section labelled ‘Science, Literature and Art’ contains a single damning word: “none”. Kyiv’s citizens are dependent on American charitable aid and find it hard to believe their fashionably dressed visitor’s stories of Moscow nightlife. Had he wished, Bulgakov could have told a vastly different story of Kyiv in the mid 1920s, one of the “jubilant experimentation” demonstrated in the multilingual title of Irena Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz’s 2017 collection of essays Modernism in Kiev/ Kyiv/ Київ/ Киев/ Kijów/ קייעוו
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