Ustinia

Ustinia, a woman from Zybushino known for her spells and stubborn defense of truth, becomes a forceful public speaker in Meliuzeievo. Her defense of the talking deaf-mute turns local superstition into a challenge to political authority: she refuses to let officials decide in advance which experiences deserve to be believed.

Background and Temperament

Ustinia is described as clumsy and pear-shaped, with the appearance of a brood hen. Her practical, dry manner can seem almost malicious, yet it coexists with an unrestrained belief in superstition. Born in Zybushino and said to be the daughter of the local sorcerer, she knows countless spells. Before leaving home, she mutters protections over the stove and keyhole, guarding the house against fire and the Evil One.

For years she can keep quiet. Once roused, however, she is difficult to stop; her defining passion is to defend what she considers the truth. This contrast—reserve giving way to insistence—shapes her public emergence. The woman who performs protective rites in private will also stand before a crowd to resist the confident dismissal of a local story.

From Listener to Public Speaker

After the fall of the Zybushino republic, the Meliuzeievo Executive Committee begins a campaign against local anarchistic tendencies. Peaceful nightly meetings take place at the Platz, where the Meliuzeievo cultural soviet invites local and visiting speakers to guide discussion. Many visitors treat the tales of the talking deaf-mute as nonsense. Small craftsmen, soldiers’ wives, and former servants, by contrast, defend the stories rather than accept the visitors’ judgment.

Ustinia gradually joins that defense. At first womanly reserve holds her back; in time she becomes bolder, heckling speakers whose views are unwelcome in Meliuzeievo. The narration marks a further change: she develops into an expert public speaker. Her authority is not granted by office or education but acquired in the disputatious meetings, through repeated willingness to answer those who try to define the community’s beliefs for it.

A Voice Heard Beyond the Square

The square’s voices reach the hospital through its open windows; on quiet nights, fragments of speeches carry inside. When Ustinia takes the floor, Mademoiselle Fleury hurries into rooms where people are sitting and urges them to listen. She imitates Ustinia’s denunciations in broken Russian, repeating words such as “Disorder…Disorder…Tsarist, bandit…Zybushi…deaf-mute…traitor! traitor!” The fragments convey the heated political vocabulary surrounding the dispute, while their repetition makes Ustinia’s presence audible even to those who are not in the square.

Mademoiselle is secretly proud of the spirited, sharp-tongued cook. The two women are fond of each other despite their continual bickering. Through this affectionate, comic response, Ustinia’s speaking becomes more than a public performance: it is also a local event that those nearby recognize and eagerly follow.

Confronting the Commissar

At a later meeting, Commissar Gints appeals to the people of Meliuzeievo to abandon their disorganized ways and blames the Bolsheviks for instigating the Zybushino disorders. He invokes the country’s hour of trial and a powerful, ruthless enemy. The crowd heckles him; a man who has come with Gints takes up the role of chairman and tries to control the floor. When some people insist that a woman who wishes to speak should be allowed to do so, Ustinia makes her way through the crowd to the wooden box used as a platform.

She does not climb onto it. Standing beside the box, she addresses the familiar crowd and turns Gints’s own warning against deception back on him: she argues that he himself plays with the labels “Bolsheviks, Mensheviks,” while speaking of brotherhood as a religious principle and the transfer of factories to the poor as ordinary human decency. Her speech refuses to let party terminology claim ownership of either moral solidarity or social justice.

Ustinia also rejects the meeting’s fixation on the deaf-mute. She asks what objection the speakers can have beyond his having been dumb and then begun to talk without their permission. To make her case, she invokes the biblical story of Balaam’s ass, which warned its master not to proceed along a dangerous path. The comparison gives the supposedly absurd voice a precedent: dismissing a speaker as dumb or lowly, she suggests, does not make its warning worthless. Ustinia’s significance lies in her insistence that political authority and conventional ideas of credibility cannot settle the question of whose testimony deserves a hearing.