Olga Galuzina

Olga Galuzina is a grocer’s wife whose solitary walk on Maundy Thursday opens onto the pressures of war and political upheaval in Khodatskoie. Her reflections gather around an absent family, her son’s impending mobilization, and a past she associates with prosperity and social order. Later reports of imprisonment, disappearance, starvation, and a burned village extend the meaning of her worries beyond the household: the world she longs to recover is being dismantled around her.

Identity and Family

Olga is married to Vlas Galuzin, who travels the highway making speeches to new recruits. Their son, Terioshka, is the immediate focus of her fear: a mobilization order posted that day threatens him, and she resents Vlas for exhorting other men to military feats instead of protecting his own son. Terioshka has also been expelled from school after repeatedly falling behind in his grades. On the eve of Easter he has gone to relatives in Kuteiny village, trying to distract himself from his troubles, leaving Olga to worry about him from a distance.

Olga’s household includes Ksiusha, a ward whose origins Olga cannot confidently determine. She has been told that Ksiusha is the daughter of Vlas’s first wife by a later marriage and that Vlas adopted her, but she wonders whether Ksiusha might instead be his natural daughter—or someone else entirely. These suspicions do not amount to a settled judgment of the girl: Olga acknowledges her intelligence, appearance, and manners, and considers her more capable than either Terioshka or Vlas. The uncertainty is as much about Olga’s isolation as about Ksiusha’s identity; with the rest of the family away, she questions whether she can truly know anyone’s heart.

The Maundy Thursday Walk

At one in the morning, as the monastery’s bell sounds through the drizzle and the congregation goes to mass, Olga leaves the church before the service is over. The crowded, stuffy interior has made her feel faint. Outside, she is sorry and ashamed that she did not stay, and she also reproaches herself for failing to fast during Lent for a second year. Yet religious regret is not the chief source of distress: the mobilization order and the thought of Terioshka weigh more heavily. The pale notices or patches she sees in the darkness repeatedly bring the order back to mind.

Although home is nearby, Olga delays returning to its airless rooms, walking between the monastery gate and the square instead. She finds that her troubles arrive not as an orderly train of thoughts but in clusters, and she walks while turning over family absences, Terioshka’s prospects, and the feeling that everything has gone wrong. The scene makes her movement through the street a form of restless reflection: the short circuit of her walk gives shape to anxieties she cannot resolve.

Memory, Work, and a Lost Past

Olga measures the present against the world of her father, a sober and literate contractor whose household, in her recollection, lived well. She remembers herself and her sisters, Polia and Olia, as a closely matched pair of young women, and recalls master carpenters visiting their father. She and her sisters once knitted six-color wool scarves that became known throughout the province. Church services, dances, manners, and material comfort all belong to the same remembered order, even though her family came from peasant and working people. In her nostalgic imagination, Russia itself had then been like a marriageable young woman, courted by men capable of standing up for it; the present, by contrast, seems diminished and disordered.

The grocery shop gives that memory a precise setting. The Galuzins’ large store had three windows and a bare, splintery floor swept with used tea leaves morning, noon, and night, as Galuzin and his assistants drank tea throughout the day. As a young married woman, Olga had often sat willingly at the cash box. She remembers the violet-mauve color she loved in church vestments, lilacs, her best velvet dress, and a set of crystal wine glasses. The shop’s dim violet atmosphere, with the scents of starch, sugar, and black-currant caramels in glass jars, joined work and domestic happiness in her memory. Her attachment to this color turns a commercial interior into a private emblem of the security and beauty she believes have vanished.

Politics and Competing Ideas of Security

Olga does not attribute the country’s decline primarily to revolution. In her view, the war has killed off Russia’s best men and left a poorer remainder; she contrasts its effects with the supposedly settled society of her father’s time. Her account of present politics is filtered through this longing for lost stability. She distrusts Vlas’s speeches and toasts as inadequate means of restoring what has been lost, and imagines that the men now influential in Khodatskoie will overturn whatever he hopes to preserve.

At the same time, Olga sees independence and practical competence among the countryside’s people. She admires relatives and local farmers who rely on their own hands and judgment, describing productive farms with land, livestock, grain reserves, and machinery. Returned soldiers who know their work, she thinks, remain valuable whether or not they hold military rank. Her picture of rural self-sufficiency stands apart from her fear of political factions competing to recruit or direct these people. It offers a counter-image to the powerlessness she feels in her own family: those who can work their land and use their skills may still find a way to manage.

When Olga thinks about the men who now dominate Khodatskoie, she sees former political exiles and local radicals as calculating and relentless. She includes Tiverzin, Antipov, Vdovichenko, and Gorsheny among those she believes are likely to stir up further trouble. Their mechanical trades become, in her view, a metaphor for their coldness, while Vlas’s public activity seems futile beside their determination. This is Olga’s judgment rather than an objective account of their intentions; the narrative presents it as part of her anxious, politically suspicious walk.

Later Misfortunes and Narrative Significance

A later report links Olga’s family circle to the worsening violence and deprivation. Veretenniki has been raided in reprisal for withholding food supplies; it is said that Vasia’s house was burned and that a member of his family died. Vlas Galuzin, Olga’s brother-in-law, has either been imprisoned or shot, while her nephew has disappeared. Her sister has endured a period of starvation and is now working as a servant for relatives in the village of Zvonarskaia. These outcomes turn the earlier fear of mobilization and family separation into part of a much broader pattern of uncertain survival. The account retains uncertainty about Vlas’s fate and does not establish what ultimately happens to Olga herself.

Olga’s narrative importance lies in the distance between her intensely personal way of recalling the past and the political forces reshaping her surroundings. A shop, a family’s school troubles, the absence of loved ones during Holy Week, and the memory of lilac-colored happiness all register changes that political speeches cannot make secure. Her nostalgia is not a neutral history of Russia, but a measure of what she feels has been lost; set against the reported raid, hunger, disappearance, and death, it also reveals the limits of any private refuge from the war.