Ansky’s notebook

Ansky’s notebook is both a record of a vanished writer and the material link that binds Hans Reiter to him. Reiter reads it repeatedly amid wartime displacement, carries it under his jacket across the Eastern Front, and uses its reflections on semblance to reconsider freedom, love, and the reality imposed by political power. In the end, a dream turns the notebook into a vulnerable physical object, its pages dissolved by water; Reiter wakes and leaves the remaining notebook behind in its hiding place at Kostekino.

The Notebook and Its Custody

The notebook belongs to Boris Abramovich Ansky, whose life Reiter comes to know through reading. At Kostekino, Reiter opens it at random each morning. He returns to it in the farmhouse, where he reads by the hearth, and at times retreats to the forest or sits in the snow before going back to the pages. Its repeated reading becomes part of his daily life in a place where he feels estranged from his fellow soldiers and believes he may have killed Ansky.

The notebook travels with Reiter when he is returned to his division in the summer of 1942. He carries it under his jacket, between his makeshift clothing and his soldier’s uniform, preserving it through the division’s movements across Crimea and the Caucasus and its later retreats. During pauses in the fighting, he takes it out to read, sometimes alongside a piece of bread. Its physical place against his body makes a private text part of his equipment for enduring the war, though it offers neither safety nor a way out of the violence around him.

Reading Amid War and Guilt

Reiter’s relationship to the notebook begins in a crisis of memory and responsibility. For several days, he thinks he may have shot Ansky; nightmares repeatedly awaken him, and he weeps. He no longer thinks about suicide because he believes himself already dead. Against that sense of self-erasure, reading Ansky’s words gives him a repeated task and an imagined proximity to the family whose farmhouse and hiding place he occupies.

At the fireplace, Reiter sometimes imagines a timid, benevolent figure looking out at him. He imagines himself living with the Ansky family and pictures Ansky, his mother, and his father traveling through Siberia. These visions do not establish what happened to Ansky; they show how Reiter’s reading and guilt shape his experience of the abandoned farmhouse. The notebook is an actual object he can return to, while the family life he imagines around it remains a scene of memory and projection.

The writing also accompanies Reiter through a changing military landscape. After returning to the front, he continues to carry it as his division retreats, losing men along the way. He inspects the dead for food, as Wilke does, and reads during whatever free time remains. When Wilke asks whether Reiter wrote the notebook, Reiter replies that a friend wrote it. His answer marks a distinction between the person who carries and reads the text and the person whose writing it preserves.

Semblance, Freedom, and the Limits of the Text

At Kostekino, the notebook’s discussion of semblance becomes a framework through which Reiter examines his own sudden sense of freedom. Weak and malnourished, he feels able to prolong an impulse toward sovereignty, yet fears that this freedom might itself be only semblance. He understands semblance as something that occupies reality and orders people’s actions, memories, priorities, and will; it can establish rules and rebel against them without ceasing to be semblance.

Reiter’s reflections extend from political power to private feeling. He calls National Socialism the ultimate realm of semblance, but also considers ordinary romantic love a kind of playacting, bound up with daily routines and material concerns. He distinguishes his love for his little sister Lotte from that ordinary model: she is not semblance to him, but the child who calls him a giant. He likewise treats Ansky’s wandering and youthful revolutionary life as something real rather than a performance. The notebook does not simply supply conclusions; its ideas prompt Reiter to sort his attachments and wartime experience into competing claims about what is genuine.

That distinction remains unstable. Reiter’s freedom at the farmhouse exists amid occupation, retreat, and the traces left by German soldiers. The abandoned building bears crude drawings that include Reiter himself, represented as a bearded figure watching a procession of animals. Seeing himself in the mural, he recalls his earlier muteness and his repeated reading of Ansky’s notebook, alongside a mixture of happiness and guilt. The written pages, like the image on the wall, enter a world where identity and experience are mediated by representations whose truth cannot be settled at a glance.

The Dream and the Notebook’s Abandonment

Three days after returning to Kostekino, Reiter dreams that he escapes Russian fire by swimming down the Dnieper. He travels beneath the water, past corpses, and eventually reaches the Black Sea. Only upon arriving at the shore does he discover that the notebook he has been carrying under his jacket has become pulp: the ink is blurred, part of it clings to his clothes or skin, and the rest has washed away. The dream gives the object a physical fate that Reiter’s earlier routine of reading could not control. The words that had accompanied him through the war are suddenly threatened with material disappearance.

Reiter wakes and decides to leave Kostekino as quickly as possible. He gathers his few belongings without lighting a lamp or stirring the fire, then returns the notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place. He leaves it for someone else to find and departs the village. The gesture changes the notebook’s role: no longer a text he carries and rereads, it becomes a concealed record entrusted to an unknown future reader.

Narrative Significance

The notebook connects private reading to the novel’s larger concern with how war and political violence are remembered, interpreted, and made legible. Reiter’s attachment to it is intimate, but its ideas are not confined to personal consolation: they lead him to examine how power shapes reality and how love, youth, and freedom may be experienced as either substance or semblance. His carrying of the notebook places a writer’s words inside the movements of a soldier’s life, without making the text a simple explanation of that life.

Its final disposition also preserves uncertainty. The dream imagines the pages dissolving, while Reiter’s waking action leaves the notebook in the chimney rather than confirming that it has actually been destroyed. The object therefore ends both damaged in the dream and available, potentially, to another reader in the story’s material world. That unresolved passage—from a friend’s writing, to a soldier’s burden, to a hidden document—makes the notebook a durable but vulnerable form of transmission.