The Presnia Uprising transforms the neighborhood around the Guishars’ flat into a dangerous enclosure of barricades, militia activity, and gunfire. Seen chiefly through Lara’s perceptions, the uprising is at once a public armed conflict and an intimate crisis: boys she knows take part in a war that could cost them their lives, while she and Amalia Karlovna struggle to find safety inside a surrounded district. The violence does not remain outside the home; it sharpens Lara’s longing for release from the private coercion she associates with Komarovsky.

A neighborhood turned into a front

At the time of the uprising, the Guishars’ flat lay within the rebel area. A barricade was being built on Tver Street only a few yards away, its stones and scrap iron cemented with ice using water carried in buckets from nearby yards. The improvised defenses made the conflict part of the ordinary streetscape: residents themselves supplied the water that helped turn familiar materials into an obstacle against armed forces.

The neighboring yard served as an assembly point for the workers’ militia, occupying an ambiguous practical role between a Red Cross post and a soup kitchen. It was both a place connected with the armed struggle and a place of aid. That combination gives the local uprising its human scale: the same neighborhood held preparation for violence and the everyday work of keeping people fed and cared for.

The boys and the war

Lara knew two of the boys who went to the militia yard. Nika Dudorov was a friend of her school friend Nadia; he was proud, straightforward, and taciturn, qualities that made him seem like Lara herself and left him without romantic interest for her. The other was Pasha Antipov, a gymnasium student living with the elderly Tiverzina, Olia Demina’s grandmother. Lara had already noticed the open delight Pasha showed when he saw her. He treated her almost as if she were a summer landscape of birch trees, grass, and clouds, and was so unguarded in his enthusiasm that he seemed unable to imagine being mocked for it.

The two boys were playing what the narrative calls the most terrible and adult of games: war. Taking part in this particular conflict risked deportation and hanging. Yet their woollen caps, tied at the back in a way suggestive of parental care, kept their childhood visible even as their actions exposed them to adult danger. The contrast is central to Lara’s perception. She thinks of the boys as a grown-up might think of children, and their apparent innocence seems to spread over the evening, the frost-darkened streets, the shadows in the yard, the house where they hide, and the revolver shots coming from it.

Lara understands the boys’ shooting not as a contradiction of their goodness but as something made possible by it. Her thought that they are good, decent boys, and that this is why they are shooting, holds together tenderness and violence without resolving the tension between them. The boys’ childlike appearance does not make the danger unreal; it makes the danger harder to separate from the lives and families that the war places at risk.

The danger closes around the family

The family learns that the barricade may be shelled and that their flat will be in danger. Leaving for friends elsewhere in Moscow is no longer a practical option: the quarter is surrounded, and they must seek refuge somewhere nearby, still within the encircling line. They think of the Montenegro Hotel, only to discover that others in the same predicament have reached the same conclusion and filled it. The proprietor, remembering them from earlier times, nevertheless promises them space in the linen room.

The proposed refuge does not immediately become an escape. To avoid drawing attention by carrying suitcases, the family packs necessities into three bundles, but postpones the move from one day to the next. The delay leaves them poised between the threatened home and an overcrowded shelter, their choices narrowed by the uprising’s geography. Their effort to protect themselves is reduced to small, practical measures: finding an available room, concealing their luggage, and deciding when it is safe to cross the neighborhood.

When Lara and Amalia Karlovna eventually go out, the air feels strange to them, like the air after a long illness. Gunshots and volleys echo through the crisp winter space, their impact seeming to flatten distance. Amalia and Lara insist, despite Filat’s attempts to persuade them otherwise, that the shots are blanks. Their denial briefly recasts actual danger as harmless noise, an effort to continue moving through streets where the sounds of fighting are impossible to ignore.

At a crossroads, a patrol of grinning Cossacks stops and searches the women, running their hands over them from head to foot. The soldiers’ jaunty, tilted caps give them a nearly comic appearance, but the search is an intimate assertion of power over civilians. Lara’s passage through the street thus brings the uprising’s danger close to the body: shelter is uncertain at home, movement is constrained by the encirclement, and even crossing an intersection exposes her to armed men.

Gunfire and Lara’s desire for release

The shots acquire a meaning for Lara beyond the immediate threat. As the fighting cuts off the district, she realizes she will not see Komarovsky for as long as the area remains isolated from the rest of the city. Because of her mother, she cannot simply tell Amalia to stop seeing him without risking the exposure of what has happened. The uprising’s physical enclosure therefore coincides with a private entanglement that Lara feels unable to end through ordinary speech.

Her thoughts return to a painting she associates with the beginning of that entanglement, “The Woman or the Vase.” She remembers seeing it before she was a woman, before she could be treated as an expensive work of art. The recollection makes the violence in the street intersect with her awareness of how her relationship with Komarovsky began and what it has made her feel about herself. The public emergency does not explain or solve that history, but it gives her a momentary hope that the interruption of ordinary life might also interrupt her contact with him.

Listening to the gunfire, Lara thinks of the downtrodden and the deceived, and wills the bullets onward as if they shared her purpose. The thought is not a detached political judgment on the uprising’s outcome. It is a personal, morally charged response in which violence appears to offer the forceful ending she cannot bring about herself. The scene’s decisive contrast is between the boys’ innocence, which Lara sees persisting within armed action, and her own urgent wish to be freed from a secret that makes her feel trapped. Through that contrast, the uprising becomes more than a background of barricades and patrols: it is the crisis that places Lara’s private desperation beside the danger borne by an entire neighborhood.