Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday is both a date in the Christian ritual calendar and a recurring measure of sacred time in the novel. Its significance emerges in contrasting registers: a rain-soaked town hears the monastery bell and watches worshippers go to mass, while the day’s place in the approach to Easter also enters poetry. Around it, prayer, loss, everyday hardship, and seasonal renewal occupy the same narrative world.

The bell and the congregation

At one in the morning, the monastery’s deepest bell gives off a low, sweet humming. The sound seems to sink into the drizzle and dissolve, compared to a clump of riverbank earth sinking into the water of spring floods. The hour is not merely marked by the clock: the bell makes the night feel held within a religious calendar, while its dispersal into the rain binds sacred observance to the material landscape.

It is Maundy Thursday, and candles move indistinctly through the rain as the fasting congregation crosses the monastery yard on its way to mass. The scene is collective but not seamless. A quarter of an hour later, the grocer’s wife, Olga Galuzina, leaves the stuffy church before the service has ended. Outside, she feels ashamed that she has not kept the Lent fast for a second year, but the mobilization order posted that day weighs more heavily on her: it affects her son, Terioshka. The religious day therefore gathers private worry and public upheaval without making either disappear.

Worship and everyday life

The novel’s other Maundy Thursday service offers a different picture of communal worship. In a new church, the psalmist Prov Afanasievich Sokolov sings, “Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless His holy name.” The church is half empty, its sounds echoing hollowly; the worshippers are crowded near the front, while a church warden loudly reproves a deaf, half-witted beggarwoman by the window. The plain glass lets in the gray, snowbound street without transforming it. Sacred words, ordinary indifference, and hardship share the building.

Lara makes her way past the worshippers with pennies clutched in her fist, buys two candles for herself and Olia, and returns. During that short errand, Sokolov has already rattled through nine of the beatitudes. Her candles are a small, concrete act of observance, set against the service’s hurried delivery and the surrounding church’s unadorned, everyday atmosphere.

Private grief and religious language

Elsewhere in the novel, a bereaved child’s prayer shows how religious language can become intensely personal. Alone among fallen branches, Yura asks his guardian angel to keep him on the path of truth and to tell his dead mother he is all right. He asks God to receive her into heaven, because she was good and should not suffer. Calling to his mother as if she were another patron saint, he falls unconscious in his anguish.

When Yura comes to, he hears his uncle calling from above and begins to climb. Only then does he remember that he has not prayed for his missing father, as his mother taught him. Yet the fainting spell has left him feeling light and well; unwilling to lose that feeling, he decides he can pray for his father another time. The contrast makes faith more than a prescribed duty: prayer carries filial memory, but the child’s immediate experience of relief also shapes what he can bear to do.

From Holy Week to Easter

Maundy Thursday also belongs to a larger poetic rhythm. In a verse sequence, the day opens a stretch lasting until the eve of Easter, when waters gnaw at riverbanks and weave their way onward. The image places liturgical time inside an active natural process: the days advance toward Easter as water works at the land, not as an abstract calendar but through change in the world.

Across these scenes, Maundy Thursday does not impose a single mood. Its observances hold prayer and song, but also grief, shame, a mother’s worry about mobilization, and the sounds of an ordinary town. The recurring date gives those disparate experiences a shared frame, while its movement toward Easter keeps the possibility of renewal present without erasing what has been lost or feared.