Hans Reiter—Boris Abramovich Ansky

Hans Reiter’s relationship with Boris Abramovich Ansky is formed through a manuscript found in hiding, not through face-to-face acquaintance. In a farmhouse in Kostekino, Reiter discovers Ansky’s papers behind the hearth and returns to them by candlelight; their pages bring the life of a vanished writer into Reiter’s present and make the act of reading a meeting across violence, distance, and time.

Discovery in the farmhouse

Reiter comes upon the papers after looking at himself in a mirror and removing the bandage from his throat. The wound seems to have healed, but the bandage is dirty and stiff with dried blood, so he decides to replace it. Searching the house for something suitable, he finds both Ansky’s papers and the concealed space behind the hearth. The discovery thus begins as a practical search for a bandage and opens into an encounter with another person’s hidden history.

The hiding place is built into a wide hearth and deep flue. From outside, its soot-blackened walls disguise a gap at the rear, just large enough for someone to sit with knees drawn up. Reiter reasons that the space could only work as intended if one person hid while another remained in the room, tending a fire and keeping up the appearance of ordinary domestic life. His imagined pairings—the person concealed and the person helping him, the survivor and the victim, the one who flees and the one who stays—turn the architecture into a problem about dependence and exposure. The papers make that problem personal: Reiter tries to understand what kind of desperation led Ansky, or someone close to him, to need such a refuge.

Reading as an imagined encounter

Reiter tests the hiding place from within. He can light a fire there only once, and finds that hanging a pot or lighting the samovar is impracticable. He concludes that the hiding place was designed for two people, one in danger and one outside who could sustain the concealment. The distinction between being rescued and being left behind becomes part of his reading before Ansky’s life has even been unfolded.

At times Reiter climbs into the space with Ansky’s papers and a candle and stays there reading until night has advanced and his limbs have grown stiff and cold. This repeated act makes the manuscript more than a found document: it becomes the means by which Reiter occupies, however temporarily, the position of someone hidden. Ansky’s writing is not presented as a simple explanation of the place. Instead, Reiter uses the physical difficulty of the refuge to imagine the conditions that may have produced it, while the papers supply a voice and a history that the house itself cannot disclose.

Ansky’s life and the historical record

The notes establish that Ansky was born in 1909 in Kostekino, in the same house Reiter now occupies. His Jewish parents made their living by selling shirts: his father bought them wholesale in Dnepropetrovsk and sometimes Odessa and resold them in nearby villages; his mother raised chickens and sold eggs, while the family also kept a small, carefully tended garden. They had one son late in life, and Ansky’s father joked that he had sacrificed a hen rather than his firstborn. The detail gives the hidden writer an ordinary family history before the larger political catastrophes enter his story.

At fourteen, Ansky enlisted in the Red Army. His departure from home is remembered as a shared family grief: his father wept first, then his mother, and finally Ansky joined them. On the journey to Moscow, he encountered the wider political world through unfamiliar faces, conversations, speeches, and proclamations promising a coming paradise. His attempts to enlist against Wrangel and then against the Poles were thwarted because both opponents had already been defeated. The papers consequently connect personal coming-of-age to revolutionary history while showing how quickly the promised future can recede behind events already decided.

After Ansky’s friend Ivanov is executed, the notes become chaotic but, as Reiter reads them, retain an underlying order. They range across literature, sexuality, illness, addiction, violence against children, and the fate of revolutionaries. Ansky repeatedly records names, including young Russian Jews who helped make the revolution and were later killed by the political order it produced. Reiter understands the repeated names as an effort against forgetting: the revolution’s makers are also among those consumed by its aftermath. The manuscript preserves lives and references that would otherwise remain outside Reiter’s knowledge.

Art, interpretation, and inheritance

Ansky’s notes also lead Reiter through reflections on the painter Courbet. Ansky considers Courbet a revolutionary artist, disputes simplified Soviet readings of his work, and follows the paintings into their contested histories. The fate of The Return from the Conference becomes especially charged: rejected by official exhibition institutions, it is bought by a wealthy Catholic who burns it. As Reiter reads that the painting’s ashes seem to float across Paris, Moscow, Rome, and Berlin, the artwork’s destruction links political and cultural histories across places and regimes.

Ansky’s discussion of Courbet extends from artistic friendship and political power to the artist’s participation in the Paris Commune, his arrest, and his later exile in Switzerland. Reiter encounters these episodes not as detached background but as part of the manuscript’s wider concern with what survives political defeat. Ansky’s attention to the destroyed painting, the absent or endangered revolutionaries, and the persistence of names gives his papers the character of an alternative archive. Reiter, in turn, becomes the reader who gathers these fragments into a provisional order.

Significance of the relation

The relationship remains necessarily asymmetrical. Ansky cannot answer Reiter, and Reiter cannot confirm every inference he draws from the hiding place or the notes. Yet the manuscript gives the two men a concrete point of contact: Reiter’s present is joined to Ansky’s past through the shared house, the concealed space, and the pages carried into it. Reading does not erase the difference between their experiences; it makes that distance perceptible and allows Reiter to consider the roles of the hidden, the helper, the survivor, and the victim.

The encounter also gives narrative form to the passage of history. A wound leads to a search for a bandage; the search uncovers a hiding place; the hiding place yields papers; and the papers unfold a life shaped by revolution, repression, and art. Ansky’s notes preserve what political upheaval threatens to erase, while Reiter’s attention supplies a later witness. Their relation is thus both intimate and mediated: a solitary reader finds, in another man’s surviving words, a history that turns the farmhouse into more than shelter and the act of reading into an inheritance.