The Church of the Ascension in Petrovskoye is both a landmark in Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s memories of winter celebrations and the site of a brutal act of revolutionary desecration. Its twenty bells once carried their sound across the frozen countryside; in 1918, soldiers tore them from the campanile, and the attempt to stop them ended in the abbot’s death. The church’s changing fate turns a familiar landscape of family ritual into a record of political violence and the uncertain afterlife of material things.

Setting and architecture

The Church of the Ascension stood in the village of Petrovskoye, close to the walls of its monastery. It had been erected in 1814 to commemorate Napoleon’s defeat. Its campanile was said to be rivaled only by the tower of Ivan the Great in the Kremlin, giving the church a vertical presence in a landscape otherwise marked in the story by roads, snow, and the distant lights of home.

The bells themselves carried a history of war within their metal. They had been forged from cannons abandoned by the Interloper during his retreat. In the church’s former life, that transformation made the bells sound as though they proclaimed the survival of Russia and the Tsar: instruments of war had become the voices of a sacred building. The story does not treat this conversion as final, however. The metal’s previous use remains present in the sound, and its later fate will turn the cycle in the opposite direction.

Bells across the winter countryside

In the Rostov siblings’ remembered Christmas journeys, the church belongs to a landscape animated by family custom. After celebrations filled with food, fire, music, and visits, the siblings would return by troika through Petrovskoye. At the bend where Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov would ordinarily snap the reins and hurry the horses home, Helena Rostov placed a hand on his arm to signal that he should slow them. Midnight had arrived, and the church bells were beginning to swing.

The pause made listening part of the journey. The Ascension bells rang over the frozen land; in the intervals between their hymns, the sound of St. Michael’s bells could be heard ten miles away, followed by those of St. Sofia’s at a still greater distance. Their calls seemed to pass from one church to another like geese crossing a pond at dusk. The scene makes the campanile more than a visible landmark: its sound helps join separate places in a shared ritual, while Helena’s gesture gives that ritual a precise, intimate place in the siblings’ return home.

The church in 1918

The memory of that resonant journey is set against Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s passage through Petrovskoye in 1918, on his hurried return from Paris. Before the monastery walls, peasants stood in mute consternation. The Red Cavalry had arrived that morning with a caravan of empty wagons, and, on the young captain’s orders, a troop of Cossacks climbed the campanile and lowered the bells one by one.

The removal of the Great Bell required a second troop to go up the stairs. The men hoisted the old giant from its hook, balanced it on the rail, and tipped it into the air; it turned over once before striking the dust. The abbot rushed out of the monastery and demanded, in the name of the Lord, that the desecration cease. The captain leaned against a post and lit a cigarette. He answered by invoking the division between Caesar’s things and God’s, then ordered his men to drag the abbot up the belfry steps and throw him from the steeple. The story’s account leaves no ambiguity about the cost of resistance: the abbot was killed, and the bells were taken.

Destruction and material memory

The bells’ destination is left uncertain. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov presumed that the Bolsheviks had reclaimed them to manufacture artillery, returning the metal to the realm from which the church’s bells had first been made. He also speculated that the cannons used for those bells might themselves have been forged from bells at La Rochelle, which could in turn have been made from British blunderbusses seized in the Thirty Years’ War. These are possibilities he entertains, not a confirmed chain of provenance.

That uncertainty gives the episode its larger force. The bells do not simply vanish from the story; their material may continue moving between instruments of worship and instruments of war. The Christmas memory presents their sound as a bond across distance and a marker of shared time. The 1918 episode replaces that music with the fall of metal and the killing of the person who tried to protect the church. By placing these scenes in the same village and around the same campanile, the novel makes the Church of the Ascension a measure of historical change: the building remains in the landscape, but the community’s old ritual and the sound that sustained it have been violently interrupted.