Blessed are the downtrodden; blessed are the deceived

“Blessed are the downtrodden; blessed are the deceived” is a phrase through which Lara recognizes her own suffering in the Gospel and then, during the Presnia uprising, turns that recognition toward the violence outside. The movement from a church recitation to her thought of bullets makes the expression a meeting point of Christian compassion, personal injury, and revolutionary upheaval.

The Beatitudes in the Church

Lara hears the phrase during a service she has entered with Olia. As the psalm “Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless His holy name” is sung, the church is half empty, its sounds echoing in the plain new building. Lara makes her way through the worshippers, buys two candles, and turns back as Prov Afanasievich Sokolov rapidly recites the Beatitudes.

The words draw on Christ’s blessing of those who are poor in spirit, mourn, and hunger and thirst for righteousness. Lara stops when she recognizes that the passage concerns her. She understands the blessing not as an abstract promise but as a judgment that the downtrodden have something to tell and still have everything before them. The phrase gives suffering a voice and a future without denying the condition that produced it.

From Recognition to Rebellion

The expression returns in a different register during the Presnia uprising. The Guishars’ flat lies in the rebel area, where a barricade is being built in Tver Street; residents carry water to freeze the stones and scrap iron into place. Amid this immediate setting of resistance and danger, Lara listens to the gunshots and thinks, “How splendid,” before repeating, “Blessed are the downtrodden. Blessed are the deceived.”

Her thought continues, “God speed you, bullets. You and I are of one mind.” The biblical blessing has not become a general endorsement of violence so much as a startling alignment between Lara’s sense of injury and the uprising’s armed defiance. The phrase’s repetition connects the religious language of the church to the political crisis outside, while the bullets give that connection a dangerous, literal edge.

Meaning and Tension

The expression holds compassion and exhilaration together. In the church, the Beatitudes offer Lara a way to interpret being downtrodden and deceived: suffering does not make its bearers insignificant, and the promise that they have “everything before them” points beyond present humiliation. During the uprising, the same words accompany her swift movement and her response to gunfire, as religious consolation takes on the charge of revolt.

That change in setting does not erase the phrase’s spiritual source; it makes its consequences more ambiguous. Lara’s thought fuses the language of blessing with a wish for the bullets’ success, bringing mercy and violence into close proximity. The phrase’s significance lies in this tension: it dignifies the wounded while revealing how readily recognition of injustice can become bound to the force meant to answer it.