Boris Abramovich Ansky

Boris Abramovich Ansky is a Jewish-born writer and former Red Army soldier whose papers Hans Reiter discovers in a concealed space behind a farmhouse hearth in Kostekino. Ansky’s life, reconstructed through those papers, moves between revolutionary promise and state persecution, between expansive journeys and the return to a village marked by danger. His writing gives Reiter a history to read, but not a complete explanation: the hiding place and the fate of Kostekino’s Jews remain bound to conjecture and loss.

Identity and Background

Ansky was born in 1909 in Kostekino, in the same house Reiter later occupies. His parents were Jewish and made their living through small-scale trade and farming: his father bought shirts wholesale in Dnepropetrovsk and sometimes Odessa to sell in nearby villages, while his mother raised chickens, sold eggs, and tended a vegetable garden. They had Boris late in life and treated their only child as a source of great happiness. His father joked that, rather than sacrifice his son, he had sacrificed a hen—the hen that laid the golden eggs—a family anecdote that places tenderness and comic exaggeration beside the severe history that would later overtake them.

At fourteen, Ansky left home to enlist in the Red Army. His departure was intensely emotional: first his father wept, then his mother, and finally Ansky joined them in tears. The journey to Moscow was his first major departure from the village, apart from earlier trips with his father to sell shirts. He arrived eager to fight, but the conflicts he named had already ended. He asked to enlist against Wrangel, then the Poles, then other White forces and Allied troops, only to be told each time that the enemy had already been defeated and that news reached his village late. The exchange makes his political awakening inseparable from belatedness: he is drawn toward history by the time its immediate battles have passed.

Soldier, Traveler, and Reader

Ansky’s military and later working life took him far beyond Kostekino. Over three years he traveled through Siberia, the lead mines of Norilsk, the Tunguska Basin, Yakutsk, and the Lena River route to the Arctic Ocean. He accompanied engineers and other expeditions, including a journey to the New Siberian Islands where two engineers became mentally ill; the expedition’s neurologist ordered one of them killed. A supply detail bound for lost explorers became lost itself and consumed the provisions intended for the people it was meant to rescue. The episode belongs to the accumulated freight of experience from which Ansky later drew, a landscape of isolation in which official purpose repeatedly gives way to peril and confusion.

After returning to Moscow, Ansky devoted himself to reading, museums, walks, concerts, theater, and literary and political lectures. The narrative presents these not as a pause in his life but as a way of processing what he had seen: he applied lessons from public culture to the experiences he had accumulated in travel and service. At a literary café he met Efraim Ivanov, a science-fiction writer who preferred to call his work science writing. They became friends because Ivanov was interested in Ansky’s unusual ideas and Ansky admired Ivanov’s work without reserve. At this stage Ansky believed the revolution could spread throughout the world and bring progress and happiness; most radically, he imagined that its ultimate task was to abolish death. Ivanov considered that impossible, but Ansky treated the impossibility as the very reason to pursue it.

Friendship, Politics, and Persecution

Ansky’s friendship with Ivanov involved both intellectual attraction and political risk. Ivanov held a disciplined, cautious view of the writer: a responsible artist should be learned but not showy, enterprising but not suspiciously so, and mindful of the institutions and professional bodies surrounding literary life. He distrusted youthful writers who behaved as if no conventions or authorities could command their respect. Yet Ansky had something Ivanov found too tempting to refuse, and the account describes their pact as sealed in Ivanov’s room.

A month later, Ansky joined the party with Ivanov and Margarita Afanasievna, one of Ivanov’s former lovers, as his sponsors. The occasion was celebrated at the writers’ restaurant and continued through Moscow drinking establishments. Ansky’s papers compare the joining to a wedding, making political affiliation appear as a consequential passage into a new life. The writing does not simply turn that commitment into triumph: Ivanov’s reserve, Ansky’s idealism, and the later violence of political repression place the promise of collective transformation under pressure.

In 1937 Ivanov was arrested. He underwent a prolonged interrogation and was left in a dark cell, where his interrogator focused on whether he had met members of the Trotskyist opposition and showed no interest in literature. During his imprisonment Ivanov befriended a rat he named Nikita, and their conversations concerned childhood and family rather than politics or literary work. The episode marks the point at which the political world that had once drawn Ansky and Ivanov into public life becomes a machinery of isolation. Ivanov’s arrest is directly recounted in Ansky’s papers; the available narrative does not establish a matching arrest or final fate for Ansky at this point.

Return to Kostekino and the Missing History

The final part of the papers follows Ansky out of Moscow without documents and back toward Kostekino. The passage is presented through landscapes seen through glass, broken scenery, dirt roads, unnamed stations, streams, and hard bread; its episodic movement offers no single explanation for his departure. At the village, his mother opens the door without recognizing him. That estrangement is followed by another family loss: a few months after his return, his father dies. Ansky’s mother arranges the funeral, while Ansky sits at his father’s grave at night and sleeps by day in the attic. He reads by firelight beside the bed where his mother sleeps.

In his final notes, Ansky reflects on the chaos of the universe, the possibility of parallel universes, and what might remain if time and space themselves ended. He laughs at the prospect of nothingness and records a saying attributed to the peasants of Kostekino: behind every answer lies a more complex question. Around this time, Germany invades Poland and the Second World War begins; Warsaw and Paris fall, and the Soviet Union is attacked. Ansky dreams of a sky like an ocean of blood, and the last page of his notebook contains a map for joining the guerrillas. The notes end not with a narrated account of what he does next, but with an intended route toward resistance.

The Papers and the Hidden Space

Reiter finds the papers while searching the farmhouse for a clean bandage. He has looked at himself in a mirror, taken the bandage from his healed throat, and decided to throw it into the fire; the search for a replacement leads him to the hiding place behind the hearth and to Ansky’s documents. The chance discovery turns a soldier’s abandoned farmhouse into an archive. Reiter reads the papers there, sometimes sitting inside the concealed space with a candle until deep into the night, physically entering the enclosure as he follows the account of its possible earlier inhabitants.

The hiding space is made within the farmhouse hearth, whose depth is hard to judge from outside because soot-darkened walls conceal a gap large enough for one person to crouch at the rear. Reiter reasons that it would work best with two people: one hidden and another remaining in the room to tend a fire and prepare food. He tests the arrangement, managing to light a fire from within only once and finding it impossible to hang a pot or light the samovar. From these practical limits he imagines a relation between rescuer and rescued, survivor and victim, without being able to verify who built or used the space.

Reiter suspects Ansky’s father built the hiding place. He considers whether it was made before Ansky returned, or afterward, when his parents may have learned that their son was an enemy of the state; although the latter timing seems more logical, Reiter feels the construction had been conceived long before. He ultimately concludes that no one used it, while allowing that Ansky may have hidden there when party officials searched the farmhouse. At the decisive arrival of Einsatzgruppe C, however, Reiter imagines that nobody was concealed inside—not Ansky, nor his mother. In his dream, Ansky’s mother finds somewhere to protect her son’s notebook and then goes with Kostekino’s other Jews toward death. This ending is explicitly Reiter’s imagined reconstruction, not a confirmed scene from Ansky’s papers.

Narrative Significance

Ansky’s history reaches the reader by way of a document found by Reiter, rather than through a complete, direct account of Ansky’s life. The nested form gives the papers a double function: they preserve particulars—family trade, military enthusiasm, travel, literary friendship, political arrest, and the return to Kostekino—while leaving the crucial questions about the hearth’s construction and use unresolved. Reiter’s physical experiments with the hiding place make the limits of the record palpable; the archive can prompt a plausible reconstruction but cannot turn conjecture into proof.

Ansky’s history also places political aspiration beside the vulnerability of individuals and communities. He imagines a revolution capable of abolishing death, yet the account of Ivanov’s imprisonment and the final image Reiter constructs for Kostekino lead toward confinement and mass killing. The contrast is not resolved by a lesson or a complete biography. Instead, the papers survive as a partial, precarious record: a notebook can be hidden, found, and read, while the lives around it remain only partly recoverable.