Ivanov’s execution in 1937 is the abrupt end of a sequence of arrest, interrogation, and isolation, and a turning point in the surviving account of Boris Ansky’s notes. The narrative dwells not on a political confession or a public trial but on Ivanov’s private conversations with a rat in a dark cell; after he signs documents, he is taken directly to a courtyard and shot. His death is followed by a formal change in Ansky’s writing: the notes grow chaotic, though Hans Reiter can still discern an underlying order.

Arrest and imprisonment

In 1937 Ivanov was arrested and subjected to a long interrogation. His interrogator knew nothing about literature; the investigation focused instead on whether Ivanov had met members of the Trotskyist opposition. Afterward, Ivanov was left in a dark cell and, in the account’s stark phrasing, forgotten there. The contrast between the interrogator’s political question and Ivanov’s literary life establishes the terms of his confinement: the state treats him as a suspected political connection, while the concerns that occupy his cell are intimate and personal.

Nikita in the cell

During his imprisonment, Ivanov befriended a rat he called Nikita. At night, when she emerged, the two spoke about their childhoods. Ivanov told her about his mother, who often occupied his thoughts, and his siblings, while avoiding his father. Nikita, in turn, described the Moscow sewers and their imagined sky, where stars appeared among debris through an unexplained phosphorescence; she also recalled her mother’s warmth and her sisters’ antics. The conversations do not supply a political defense or a route to freedom. Instead, they give the confinement a fragile domestic dimension, built from memories each companion can offer the other.

The exchange also changes the scale of the scene. Ivanov’s world has narrowed to a cell, but Nikita’s account opens an unlikely image of stars beneath Moscow. When despair overtakes him, he rests his cheek on his palm and asks what will become of them. Nikita looks back with sadness and perplexity, and her expression seems to tell him that she is even more innocent than he is. Their companionship offers no escape from the cell; it makes his isolation legible by setting one vulnerable creature beside another.

Execution

A week after Ivanov was locked up—a duration that felt to him more like a year—he was interrogated again. No one had to hit him to make him sign several papers and documents. The account does not identify what the papers said or describe the contents of the interrogation, so the signature cannot be treated as a revelation of guilt, a confession, or a change in Ivanov’s political position. What follows is stated without delay: he was not returned to his cell but taken straight to a courtyard, shot in the back of the head, and placed on the bed of a truck. The transition from paperwork to execution makes the administrative procedure and the killing part of one continuous sequence, without explaining the decision behind it.

Aftermath in Ansky’s notes

After Ivanov’s death, Ansky’s notes become chaotic and apparently haphazard. Reiter nevertheless discerns a structure and a kind of order amid the disorder. The entries continue to move among writers and literary viability, sex, parents, sickness, and political violence, but the reported shift in their form registers the death as a break in the notes’ texture rather than as a conclusion to their subjects. Ivanov’s execution is therefore both a terminal event in his life and a point after which Ansky’s writing carries on in altered, unstable form.

Narrative significance

The scene gives the execution its force through postponement and contrast. Its central stretch is not the interrogation itself but the nocturnal conversations with Nikita: recollections of family, the rat’s account of the sewers, and Ivanov’s question about what will become of them. The return to interrogation and the sudden movement into the courtyard end that small, shared world. The account then turns from the individual death to the changing shape of Ansky’s notes, connecting political violence to a literary record that persists but no longer proceeds in the same manner.