Berlin enters the narrative through two distant moments rather than through a sustained description of the city: Ilya’s death in the Battle of Berlin near the end of the Second World War, and a passage from a 1904 letter in which Anton Chekhov recalls enjoying a comfortable hotel stay. The contrast gives Berlin a double association, with catastrophic loss on one side and remembered comfort on the other.

Wartime Loss

Just months before the war ended, Andrey and his wife learned that their only child, Ilya, had been killed in the Battle of Berlin. They responded by leaving his blankets, books, and clothes exactly where they had been when the news arrived. The preserved room initially comforted Andrey: when he entered it alone, the depression on the bed let him imagine where his wife had sat while he was at work.

Over time, however, the room seemed to sustain their grief rather than ease it, and Andrey recognized that they would eventually need to part with their son’s belongings. He did not raise the matter with his wife. He also knew that the housing authorities might learn of Ilya’s death and force the couple to move into a smaller apartment or take in a stranger. In this account, Berlin is inseparable from the loss that made one room a memorial—and from the pressure of ordinary housing needs that threatened to reclaim it.

Chekhov’s Berlin

A separate reference to Berlin appears in the final pages of Mikhail Fyodorovich Mindich’s discourse, which Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov reads after Mindich’s death. The cited passage ends its long survey of quotations in June 1904, with sentences from a letter by Anton Chekhov that Mishka had cut out years earlier. Chekhov describes a comfortable room in Berlin’s best hotel, good coffee and dinners, and, above all, excellent bread.

The letter’s cheerful abundance acquires a different force in the Count’s present. He can understand why a censor, during the hardships of the 1930s, might have feared that Chekhov’s praise would encourage discontent. Yet the observation has also become outdated: the Count reflects that Russians now know better than anyone in Europe how good bread can be. Berlin thus survives in the passage as the setting for a remembered pleasure whose meaning has been altered by later deprivation.

A City Across Two Memories

The two references do not describe the same Berlin or connect the characters’ experiences directly. Instead, they set different measures of time and circumstance beside one another: a hotel guest’s delight in food in 1904, and a family’s enduring grief after a child’s death in the Battle of Berlin decades later. In the later reflection, bread carries the irony of historical change; in Andrey’s story, the city’s name marks the event that transformed a bedroom into a place preserved around absence.