The Polish–Soviet War appears in 2666 as the absent center of a brief but formative episode in Boris Abramovich Ansky’s youth. At fourteen, Ansky leaves his village to join the Red Army, only to find in Moscow that the campaigns he hopes to enter are already over. A veteran’s account of two comrades who died near Warsaw suddenly gives the distant war human meaning: Ansky imagines their lives and deaths with extraordinary intensity and resolves that he does not want to be a soldier. Yet the recruitment process has already made the choice for him. The episode turns a history of battles into a story of belated knowledge, imaginative witnessing, and constrained agency.

The war as belated news

Ansky’s journey to Moscow is his first departure from Kostekino beyond two earlier trips with his father to sell shirts in the region. Along the way, he is struck by unfamiliar faces, conversations, speeches, and proclamations promising a new paradise. He arrives eager to enlist, but the war he wants to join has receded into news that reaches his village too late.

At the recruitment office, Ansky asks to fight Wrangel and is told that Wrangel has already been defeated. He then names the Poles, only to hear that they, too, have already been defeated. He continues proposing other opponents, among them Krasnov, Denikin, the White Cossacks, the Czechs, Kolchak, Yudenich, and Allied troops; each time the answer is that the fighting is over. The repeated mismatch between his eagerness and the completed campaigns makes the war’s chronology feel almost absurd: Ansky has arrived ready for action, but history has already passed him by.

A veteran’s testimony

An old, smoking soldier asks where Ansky comes from and whether he is Jewish. The boy answers that he is from Kostekino, near the Dnieper, and says that he is Jewish. The veteran replies that he once had a Jewish comrade during the campaign against the Poles. When Ansky asks the man’s name, the veteran challenges the assumption behind the question: Ansky cannot know every Jew in the Soviet republic.

The comrade was Dmitri Verbitsky, the veteran says, and he died fifty miles from Warsaw. The veteran adds that their commander, Korolenko, died the same day. These names and deaths are all the testimony supplies. The novel does not reconstruct the fighting or explain the circumstances of either man’s death; instead, the sparse account becomes the point from which Ansky’s imagination expands.

Imagination, refusal, and enlistment

On hearing of Verbitsky and Korolenko, Ansky imagines the two men at extraordinary speed. He enters the shifting field of their relations, thoughts, dreams, convictions, and movements through forests and flooded lands. His vision carries them across landscapes and through the sounds and conversations of military life to the gray day on which both die. The imagined scene lasts scarcely a second, but it changes the meaning of the war for him: the abstract enemies he had hoped to fight give way to particular people whose lives and deaths he has just tried to apprehend.

At that instant, Ansky decides that he does not want to be a soldier. The refusal is immediate but ineffective. In the same moment, an officer gives him a paper to sign, and Ansky becomes a soldier. The sequence makes his decision neither a successful escape nor a simple change of heart: recognition arrives at the very point when institutional procedure has already placed him inside the army.

Memory and narrative significance

The war reaches the reader through Ansky’s recalled encounter in a recruitment office, with the veteran’s brief oral account nested inside that memory. Its presentation foregrounds how little can be recovered from an event through a fragment of testimony: the names, the approximate place of death, and the fact that both men died on the same day. Ansky’s imaginative passage fills out the moment emotionally without turning it into a verified account of the campaign.

The episode also sets official momentum against the singular act of attention. Ansky first approaches war through its public language of enemies, victories, and proclamations; the veteran’s story redirects him toward the lives caught within that history. But this recognition cannot undo the enlistment already under way. The Polish–Soviet War therefore matters less as a chronicle of military operations than as the historical pressure behind a scene in which another person’s testimony briefly opens a way to refuse, while the machinery of recruitment closes it.

Event classification

The event belongs to a remembered past, framed through Ansky’s recollection of his youth rather than narrated as an ongoing present-day scene. It is a wartime recruitment episode shaped by the aftermath of the fighting against Poland and by a veteran’s account of comrades killed near Warsaw.