Kubarikha

Kubarikha is a cattle healer, folk singer, and self-proclaimed worker of charms whose many names and shifting stories make her difficult to pin down. When she appears among the Forest Brotherhood’s displaced families, her veterinary work becomes inseparable from song, ritual, and unruly commentary: she tends a cow, sings an old lament beneath a rowan tree, and challenges the camp’s expectations of women. Her comic, theatrical presence gives the crowded wartime camp a voice that is at once practical, irreverent, and steeped in folk tradition.

Names, reputation, and arrival

Kubarikha is also called Zlydarikha and Medvedikha, among other names. Before she enters the partisan camp, a local account says she has disappeared from town: she had been jailed in Kezhemsk for practicing abortion and making pills and powders, escaped, and gone somewhere in the Far East. The same account complains that the roads have been cut in twelve places and that medical help is unavailable. Kubarikha’s absence is therefore part of a larger picture of wartime dislocation: people have fled, communication is severed, and even a doctor in Yuriatin cannot readily be reached.

Her later account of her movements does not neatly match that report. In the camp she says the Reds liberated her from the Kezhemsk jail, where Kolchak had held her for an unexplained reason. She also explains that her distinctive pea-green Royal Scots Fusiliers overcoat came from a prisoner’s cap and uniform. The episode presents her history through competing, loosely joined explanations rather than a settled biography, fitting a character whose aliases and stories circulate as freely as her reputation.

Kubarikha arrives with the partisan families, whose convoy of children and belongings has followed the main force; behind the wagons stretches a herd of several thousand cattle, mostly cows. She is introduced as a soldier’s wife and cattle healer, a veterinarian, and secretly a witch. Her little pancake hat, cocked on her head, and the unusual military overcoat make her immediately recognizable amid the displaced camp. The partisans have moved to a new campground intending to reconnoiter the neighborhood and find winter quarters, but unforeseen developments keep them there for the winter. Against this unsettled backdrop, Kubarikha’s specialized knowledge answers a concrete need: the vast herd must be tended while families live on the move.

A healer among the displaced

Kubarikha’s work has both practical and supernatural dimensions. Svirid reports to Liberius that she asked to be listed as a “woman ventilator” to look after cattle—a muddled version of veterinarian that becomes part of the camp’s comic account of her. But, he complains, she is no longer simply tending animals: she performs cows’ masses and tells young refugee wives that their troubles are their own fault for hitching up their skirts and running after the Red flag. Svirid frames her influence as a threat to women’s prescribed duties and to camp unity, asking whether the women are supposed to be united against Kolchak or fighting among themselves.

The complaint also reveals a clash over who may interpret the women’s suffering. Kubarikha turns their misery into a moral admonition, while Svirid treats her words as a disruptive interference with the refugee camp. The exchange does not establish that she has authority over the women, but it makes clear that her presence reaches beyond livestock: she speaks publicly, attracts listeners, and refuses to confine herself to a narrowly defined service role.

Her healing is shown more directly when Agafia asks about a cow. Kubarikha first attends to the animal, then becomes absorbed in giving Agafia a full set of instructions in witchcraft. The spell addresses ailments such as scab and ringworm, and its rhymes turn treatment into a performance: the cow is told to stand still and not upset the pail, while the sorcerer’s word is declared strong. Yurii Andreievich listens spellbound, recalling the florid talk of the driver Bacchus when he had first arrived in Siberia from European Russia. The comparison links Kubarikha’s speech to the region’s exuberant oral culture, but the scene also keeps its material purpose in view: the spell begins with a sick cow and practical concern for its care.

Song beneath the rowan tree

As the days shorten and darkness comes by five, Yurii Andreievich crosses the highway near the clearing where a mound and rowan tree mark the camp boundary. He hears Kubarikha, whom he jokingly calls his rival, singing a lively jingle in a bold, raucous voice. Peals of approving laughter interrupt her; then the crowd disperses. Believing herself alone, she begins a different song, softly, and Yurii stops on the footpath beside the swamp to listen.

The song is an old Russian folk song, though Yurii cannot tell whether Kubarikha is singing a known one or improvising. The narration dwells on the form of folk song as a means of holding time in suspension: repetitions and similes delay the unfolding of its theme until its sorrowful meaning suddenly comes forward. Kubarikha half sings and half recites a lament beginning with a hare running across the wide world and the white snow. The movement from public jingle to private lament gives her performance two registers—boisterous sociability before an audience, and a quiet, sorrowing voice after the listeners have gone.

Character and narrative significance

Kubarikha’s shifting names, stories, clothes, remedies, and songs resist a single settled identity. She can be approached as a healer responsible for cattle, a reputed witch, a prisoner with conflicting accounts of her release, and a performer whose voice gathers a crowd. The novel does not resolve these aspects into a neat explanation; instead, it lets her presence emerge through gossip, complaint, observation, and performance.

Her role also brings the burdens of wartime displacement into intimate focus. The families and thousands of cattle follow the partisan force, and an improvised winter camp must make room for care, work, and social conflict. Kubarikha’s rituals cannot undo that precarious condition, but they give it a language drawn from animal husbandry and folk tradition. In the camp’s noisy public life she is a comic provocateur; beneath the rowan tree, her song opens onto sorrow and the effort to make time pause. The two scenes together make her more than an eccentric aside: she embodies a resourceful, contentious oral culture surviving within the machinery of war.