“Christ’s judgment”

“Christ’s judgment” is Lara’s childhood name for the gunfire she remembers from the 1905 uprising. When Osip Gimazetdinovich Galiullin’s questions and account bring that winter back to her, the phrase becomes a hinge between two eras of violence: the first remembered as a child’s piercing experience, the second involving grown children who are now soldiers.

The phrase in Lara’s recollection

Lara recalls the words while speaking to Galiullin, who has cared for Pavel Antipov’s belongings and memory. Realizing that she has never properly asked who he is or where he comes from, she makes a point of asking him about himself on her next morning round. His connection to the Tiverzins and to Brest Street, No. 28, revives her memories of the 1905 revolution and that winter.

Her recollection gathers details in a rush: the street address, the Tiverzins, the gunfire, and the phrase she had once used for it. She cannot remember whether she met Galiullin then, and apologizes for the lapse; what she recognizes vividly is the house, the year, and the emotional force of her childhood experience. “Christ’s judgment” is not introduced as a formal doctrine but as the striking name the child Lara gave to the gunfire.

Memory against renewed violence

The phrase returns in a contrast between childhood and adulthood. Lara reflects that feelings experienced for the first time as a child are unusually strong and sharp. The remembered gunfire belongs to a past that can be suddenly recovered, yet the present offers no comforting distance from it: shooting has begun again, and, she thinks, it is much more frightening now.

The difference is expressed through the people caught in the violence. In the earlier memory, Lara could think of the shooters as boys. Now, she cannot use that explanation: the children have grown up, and the boys are in the army. The phrase’s religious scale makes the remembered gunfire sound like a judgment beyond ordinary human violence, while the present-day comparison insists on its human cost and on the passage of time.

A motif carried into the war

In a letter describing army disintegration and his work with Antipova, a correspondent reminds the recipient that the schoolgirl who shot at the public prosecutor on the night of the recipient’s mother’s death was the same Antipova he now works with. The letter places that earlier episode in the period of the Presnia uprising and recalls that Misha and the recipient had once seen her as a schoolgirl. It does not repeat Lara’s phrase, but it reinforces the way remembered episodes of revolutionary violence return inside later wartime experience.

“Christ’s judgment” thus names a child’s attempt to make sense of gunfire, while its recollection exposes how little the violence has receded. The phrase survives not as an explanation of what happened but as a vivid trace of Lara’s first encounter with it; the present makes that trace newly legible, and more frightening.