Pamphil Palykh’s killing of his wife and three children is a domestic catastrophe precipitated by wartime terror. After hearing a dying deserter report the violence of General Vitsyn’s forces and warn the partisans that their enemy had broken through, Pamphil imagines his family subjected to similar suffering and kills them himself. The act does not save or restore anything: it leaves him, in the narrative’s account, beyond rescue, and he disappears from the camp at dawn.

The threat brought to camp

The episode follows an attack of gunfire in the forest that first sends the camp into alarm. The shots prove to be a false alarm, but the crowd that gathers at their source encounters a gravely wounded man who has managed to reach the camp. He carries an inscription threatening the partisans with retaliation for alleged atrocities attributed to a Red unit unrelated to the Forest Brotherhood. The message also demands that the partisans surrender their arms by a specified date to representatives of General Vitsyn’s army corps.

The man explains that Vitsyn’s investigating and punitive squads had tortured and killed people. His own sentence, he says, was changed: instead of being hanged, he was sent toward the camp as a warning, under orders to crawl from the outposts while his captors fired into the air. He identifies the forces responsible as Vitsyn’s men, including Hetman Bekeshin and Colonel Strese, and describes the wider town as suffering under their violence. He dies before finishing his account. The gathered partisans remove their caps and cross themselves, while the message that survives his death makes the distant threat immediate.

Pamphil’s fear becomes action

Pamphil has been among those who surround the wounded man. He hears the report and reads the threatening inscription himself. The narrative connects those two acts of witnessing to a fear that had already centered on what might happen to his family if he were killed. Now that fear reaches a crisis: he imagines his wife and children in the hands of torturers, their suffering beyond his ability to prevent.

In desperate anguish, Pamphil kills his wife and their three children, believing this will forestall the future suffering he has pictured and end his own torment. He uses the same sharp ax with which he had carved toys for his children. The detail ties the tool of the killing to an earlier sign of care, making the reversal within the family especially stark. One of the children had been his favorite; the narrative does not present the act as a loss of affection, but as a terrible transformation of protective fear into violence.

Aftermath and disappearance

Pamphil does not kill himself immediately afterward. The narrator presents this survival as baffling and identifies his condition as a clear case of insanity, while emphasizing that nothing can now save him. As the doctor, Liberius, and members of the army soviet debate what to do, Pamphil wanders freely around the camp, withdrawn and unresponsive. Others avoid him; some call for him to be lynched, but their proposal is not acted on.

At dawn Pamphil vanishes from the camp. The narrative offers no destination or later outcome, describing his flight as an escape from himself rather than a return to safety. His disappearance leaves the murder without a restorative aftermath: his family is dead, the camp has not resolved what to do with him, and the wartime danger that triggered his fear remains.

Narrative significance

The episode joins public violence to private catastrophe through a specific chain of witnessing. A punitive force threatens the partisans; a dying man bears that threat into their camp; Pamphil, having heard and read the warning, imagines the same violence reaching his family. The feared possibility is not shown occurring to them. Instead, the terror of anticipated suffering becomes the cause of the suffering Pamphil inflicts himself.

That reversal makes the episode a grim instance of war’s reach beyond the battlefield. It also changes the meaning of the toys and ax: the object associated with making playthings becomes an instrument of destruction, while the father’s wish to protect his family turns into their killing. The account neither treats this as a calculated political act nor offers a simple moral explanation. It links the horror to a particular moment of terror and leaves its consequences visible in Pamphil’s isolation and flight.