The Russo-Japanese War is recalled chiefly through its 1905 peace settlement, the Treaty of Portsmouth, and through the novel’s use of that settlement to connect national upheaval with private memory. Its ending marks a brief historical interval of peace, while a photograph of the delegates gives the event a personal connection to Grand Duke Demidov and the Rostov family.

The War’s End and Its Historical Measure

In September 1905, members of the delegation signed the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War. The novel later uses that peace as a chronological measure: by the time the Count raises a glass to the health of the nation, seventeen years have passed since the treaty. Those years, the narrative observes, brought Russia a world war, a civil war, two famines, and the Red Terror. The settlement therefore stands less as a claim that peace had secured stability than as a marker against which the country’s subsequent upheavals can be counted.

The Treaty in a Photograph

The treaty’s delegates reappear in a black-and-white photograph kept in a long, narrow frame atop a familiar bookcase. Mishka studies the formally arranged Russian and Japanese representatives, whose high collars, moustaches, and bow ties give the image a composed, official air. Their expressions suggest accomplishment, yet the narrative places an irony beside that appearance: the delegates have ended, with a stroke of a pen, a war begun by men like themselves. The photograph makes diplomacy visible as both ceremony and aftermath, compressing a conflict and its negotiated conclusion into a single domestic object.

Grand Duke Demidov and Family Memory

Among the delegates, just left of center, stands Grand Duke Demidov, identified as the Tsar’s special envoy. His presence connects the public history of the treaty to the Count’s family past. Grand Duke Demidov had represented Russia at Portsmouth and was also the Count’s godfather and guardian after the Count’s parents died. The photograph thus records more than a diplomatic gathering: it preserves an image of a man whose public service and private responsibility intersected in the Count’s life.

Historical Remembrance

The war’s ending is recalled from later moments rather than presented as a battlefield episode. Its significance comes through the contrast between the delegates’ formal image and the instability that followed, and through the way the photograph carries national history into a family setting. The treaty’s memory gives the novel a compact emblem of how political events persist: first as public milestones, then as objects and relationships through which later generations encounter the past.