Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War is a historical time marker in the novel, linking Admiral Stepan Makarov’s fatal naval action in 1904 to the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905 and, from there, to the upheavals that followed in Russia. It enters the story less as a campaign history than as remembered experience: a war whose end offered a moment of national relief, but whose personal losses and aftermath remained close at hand.

The war and the peace of Portsmouth

In September 1905, members of the Delegation signed the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War. Seventeen years later, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov recalls that peace while raising a glass with his companions at the Metropol. He does not treat the treaty as proof that the country’s troubles were over. Rather, it stands at the threshold of a succession of calamities: in the years since, Russia had endured a world war, a civil war, two famines, and the Red Terror.

That retrospective gives the war a particular place in the novel’s chronology. Its end is a fixed date against which the Count measures how much history can happen in less than a generation. The peace becomes an occasion to drink to the nation across political divisions, because the intervening upheaval had spared neither those on the left nor those on the right, neither Red nor White.

Admiral Stepan Makarov at Port Arthur

The war also returns in a story the Count recalls from his godfather, Grand Duke Demidov. On April 13, 1904, with Port Arthur under attack, Admiral Stepan Makarov led his battleships into action and drove the Japanese fleet back into the Yellow Sea. The immediate success did not secure his survival: as his flagship returned to port over calm seas, it struck a Japanese mine and began to sink.

Makarov went up to the helm in full military dress and went down with the ship. The remembered episode turns a naval engagement into a stark reversal: victory and the sight of home are followed by sudden death. The Count’s recollection presents Makarov as a figure of resolve, but also makes the cost of that resolve inseparable from the story of the battle.

A personal inheritance of the war

The war reaches the Count through Grand Duke Demidov, whose life connected public service to family memory. Demidov had represented his country at Portsmouth, but he had also served alongside the Count’s father as a cavalry cadet and later became the Count’s watchful guardian. The war’s history is therefore carried into the novel through both national events and a personal chain of remembrance: the treaty belongs to Demidov’s public life, while the story of Makarov is one of the lessons he passed on.

The Count’s later toast gathers these layers together without suggesting that every guest shares the same politics or circumstances. Their good cheer is not simply a celebration of his narrow escape; it reflects the sense that, after years of upheaval, a gathering might at last offer a reason to wish the nation well.

Historical time and remembered loss

The novel’s references place the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of a compressed historical sequence. The treaty is recalled from the vantage of 1922, while the account of Makarov reaches further back to 1904. These different distances make the war at once a dated conflict, a source of inherited stories, and a measure of the disasters that followed.

Its narrative importance lies in this contrast between public chronology and private endurance. The war has an identifiable end in the Treaty of Portsmouth, but peace does not close the larger history of suffering. By returning to the conflict through a toast and a remembered death, the novel makes national time intimate: treaties and battles persist in the memories through which people understand what their country has survived.