Mishka

Mishka is the intimate friend whose ideals and memory remain woven into Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s life. Their bond begins at the Imperial University in Saint Petersburg in 1907, when their differences seem to make friendship unlikely; it endures long enough for Mishka’s project and a photograph to accompany the Count into his final departure from the Metropol.

Origins and First Meeting

Mishka, also known as Mikhail Mindich, came from a two-room apartment where he had been raised by his mother. His circumstances contrasted with those of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who had grown up in a twenty-room mansion staffed by fourteen people. The Count moved easily through the capital’s salons and was known for wit, intelligence, and charm; Mishka, by contrast, was little known and preferred reading alone to frivolous conversation.

Their temperaments also pulled them toward different kinds of trouble. Mishka was quick to throw himself into a dispute, even when greatly outnumbered. The Count was just as ready to defend the outnumbered man, regardless of whether his cause was well chosen. On the fourth day of their first year, the two students were helping each other to their feet, wiping dust from their knees and blood from their lips. Friendship began not in agreement but in a shared scrape.

Friendship and Shared Life

In the days after the fight, each became absorbed in what the other had to offer. The Count listened with amazement to Mishka’s impassioned expression of ideals; Mishka listened in turn to the Count’s descriptions of the city’s salons. Within a year they were sharing rented rooms above a cobbler’s shop off Sredny Prospekt. When asked whether he knew Mishka, the Count described him as being like a brother—a brief answer that conveys the closeness their unlikely meeting had produced.

Mishka’s restless pacing became one of the Count’s defining memories of him. The Count observed that no one in Russia could wear out a shoe as Mishka could: he could pace twenty miles in a twenty-foot room, thirty miles in an opera box, and fifty in a confessional. The comic escalation makes restlessness feel less like an occasional habit than Mishka’s natural condition, and it gives their shared life a vivid physical detail.

What He Leaves Behind

Mishka remains present in the Count’s later life through the things he left in the Count’s keeping. In the pages of Mishka’s project, the Count finds a photograph and gives it to Sofia, explaining that he thought she might like a picture of him. He says it is the only one he has. Sofia accepts it, then covers her mouth and laughs when she sees the image. The small exchange joins Mishka’s surviving trace to the Count’s attempt to give his daughter something personal, while allowing the photograph itself to produce an unexpected response.

The project also travels with the Count when he prepares to leave the hotel. From an old trunk he retrieves the rucksack he had used on his 1918 journey from Paris to Idlehour and packs only a few necessities: three changes of clothing, toiletries, Anna Karenina, Mishka’s project, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He intends to drink the wine on June 14, 1963, ten years to the day after his old friend’s death. The date places Mishka’s death on June 14, 1953, and shows how the Count carries remembrance not as an abstract sentiment but as a deliberate appointment with a bottle and a calendar.

Narrative Significance

Mishka’s story is glimpsed through contrasts and remnants rather than through a full account of his later life. His modest upbringing and preference for reading set him apart from the Count’s privileged social world, while his readiness to confront a crowd and the Count’s willingness to defend him give their friendship its first shape. Their exchange of ideals and social observation then turns that encounter into a shared life.

The later objects—the photograph, the project, and the wine reserved for an anniversary—extend the friendship beyond the scenes in which Mishka appears. They reveal the continuing place he holds in the Count’s memory without supplying details about his final years or the circumstances of his death. Mishka’s presence is therefore both intimate and partly absent: established in the bruises and rented rooms of youth, then carried forward through what the Count chooses to keep.