Polish–Soviet War

The Polish–Soviet War appears in 2666 through a childhood departure and a fragment of a veteran’s testimony. At fourteen, Boris Ansky left his Jewish family in Kostekino to enlist in the Red Army, only to learn in Moscow that the forces he hoped to fight had already been defeated. A one-eyed, one-armed soldier then named a Jewish comrade who had died near Warsaw. The war thus reaches Ansky as both missed opportunity and another person’s loss, and the brief encounter opens into an expansive act of imagined remembrance.

Ansky’s departure for the war

Ansky’s enlistment begins in a household formed by his parents’ modest trades: his father bought shirts wholesale and resold them in neighboring villages, while his mother raised chickens, sold eggs, and tended a garden. He was their only child, born when they were already approaching old age. His father joked that, instead of sacrificing his son, he had sacrificed a hen; the family’s laughter around that joke makes the leave-taking all the more painful when Ansky actually sets out for the Red Army.

His farewells are described as heartbreaking: his father weeps first, his mother follows, and Ansky finally throws himself into their arms and weeps too. The journey to Moscow is a first departure from the village beyond the short regional trips he had made with his father to sell shirts. The road and train expose him to unfamiliar faces, conversations, speeches, and proclamations promising a coming paradise. The account presents the war through the young recruit’s encounter with political language and a wider world, rather than through a battlefield scene.

A war already passed

At the recruitment office in Moscow, Ansky asks to enlist against successive opponents: Wrangel, the Poles, Krasnov and Denikin, then the White Cossacks, the Czechs, Kolchak, Yudenich, and the Allied troops. Each time he is told that the force he names has already been defeated. The repeated refusals turn his eagerness to fight into a lesson in distance: news has arrived late in his village, and the conflicts he imagines joining have already moved beyond him.

The episode gives the Polish–Soviet War a particularly compressed presence. Ansky wants to fight the Poles, but the answer he receives is that they too have already been defeated. The war is not narrated as a campaign with a strategic account or a sequence of battles. It appears instead in the mismatch between a boy’s desire to take part and the belated information that reaches him in Moscow.

The veteran’s testimony

An old soldier, smoking a pipe, asks Ansky where he comes from, what his name is, and whether he is Jewish. The veteran recalls having had a Jewish comrade in the campaign against the Poles. When Ansky asks whether he might know him, the soldier challenges the assumption that one person could know all the Jews in the Soviet republic, then gives the comrade’s name: Dmitri Verbitsky.

The veteran’s account fixes the loss in one stark detail: Verbitsky died fifty miles from Warsaw. He adds that their commander, Korolenko, died the same day. No further circumstances of either death are supplied. The recollection remains brief and partial, offered by a wounded survivor to a boy who has just arrived seeking a war that is over.

Ansky’s act of imagining

After hearing the names and the place of death, Ansky imagines the two men’s lives at extraordinary speed. He pictures their relations, unspoken thoughts, desires, dreams, convictions, and rides on horseback; he imagines the forests and flooded lands they crossed, the sounds of nights outdoors, and the morning conversations before they mounted again. The narration moves from a few facts supplied by the veteran to a long mental passage through landscapes and imagined experience, ending at the day Verbitsky and Korolenko died beneath a vast gray sky.

That movement distinguishes testimony from invention without separating them completely. The soldier provides names, a campaign, a location, and a shared day of death; Ansky supplies the imagined textures of lives that the brief testimony cannot recover. The war’s significance in this episode lies partly in that gap: its dead are present as historical losses, but their individual experience reaches the reader only through a boy’s urgent, unverified act of imaginative attention.