The Dnieper is both a physical setting and a point of narrative convergence: its banks locate the isolated village of Kostekino, while later accounts place the soldier Reiter in its waters amid conflicting reports of his wartime movements. The river also gives the title and organizing image to Archimboldi’s fourth book, where it stands as the central subject among Europe’s rivers.

Setting and Kostekino

Kostekino lies on the banks of the Dnieper, though the passage stresses how little it resembles a settled village. A handful of scattered houses stand among hills beside decaying fences and two rotting granaries. A dirt road links the settlement to a railway town, but snow and mud make the route impassable in winter. On the outskirts, five German soldiers attempt to restart an abandoned sovkhoz.

The Dnieper’s local tributary is known for water of unusual sweetness and purity, giving the bleak, damaged landscape a contrasting feature. Even the village’s names are uncertain: some call it Budienny Model Farm, while others call it Sweet Spring, after the nearby watercourse. The accounts likewise disagree about the empty houses—whether their inhabitants fled the German advance or were conscripted into the Red Army.

An Occupied House and a Displaced Life

The soldier Reiter is sent to Kostekino with three other wounded men from the 79th after he cannot remain in the hospital. He occupies the same house where Boris Abramovich Ansky was born in 1909. The narrative thus makes the soldier’s temporary refuge overlap with the childhood home of a man whose history belongs to the village itself.

Ansky’s Jewish parents supported themselves through small-scale trade and household work. His father bought shirts wholesale in Dnepropetrovsk and sometimes Odessa, then resold them in nearby villages; his mother raised chickens and sold eggs, while the family maintained a small garden. Boris was their only child, born when his parents were already approaching old age, a circumstance associated with the biblical Abraham and Sarah and described as a source of happiness. The house therefore carries a civilian family history into a wartime scene of abandonment and displacement.

River, Rumor, and Literary Form

Later, when Lotte asks after Reiter, the answers come from a column of spectral soldiers visible only to her. Their accounts contradict one another: some claim he fled through Soviet territory, others say he swam in the Dnieper and drowned. The river appears here not as a confirmed site of his death but as one possibility among a series of incompatible reports. Its presence intensifies the uncertainty surrounding Reiter rather than resolving it.

The Dnieper returns in Archimboldi’s fourth book, Rivers of Europe. Despite its plural title, the book concerns one river alone. Mr. Bubis reads it in a single sitting, and the narration presents the Dnieper as its protagonist, with the other rivers functioning as a chorus. The book earns Archimboldi a larger advance than before; when his secretary questions the amount, Bubis insists on it, then reflects that a sum is always approximate and that no sum is truly correct. The river’s movement from wartime landscape to literary subject links place, memory, and the novel’s recurring uncertainty without turning the conflicting reports into a settled account.