Krestovozdvizhensk is a provincial town where familiar streets and commercial rooms hold the uneasy overlap of private memory, wartime upheaval, and clandestine political action. Its market and monastery lanes are not merely scenery: they organize the account of Galuzina’s anxious return through a town changed by revolution, while a concealed meeting in a nearby yard gives its ordinary buildings a second, hidden use. Later, the town shelters people uprooted by violence, but only provisionally; hunger, disappearance, and official requisition reach even its pharmacies and homes.

Streets, Market, and Remembered Life

The town’s market place is described on the scale of a field. In earlier years, peasants’ carts crowded it on market days; its far end met Eleninskaia Street, while the opposite side curved past low buildings used as warehouses, offices, and workshops. This working landscape gives the place a visible economic structure, from rural trade to the town’s small businesses, and also supplies the route along which Galuzina circles rather than going home.

The market’s shops preserve sharply different fragments of local life. Brukhianov, a leather, oats, and hay dealer who also sold cart wheels and harness, used to sit outside his imposing iron door reading a penny paper. Nearby, wedding candles and boxed posies gathered dust in a dim window, while agents representing an absent millionaire candle manufacturer made thousand-ruble deals in a nearly empty back room. The contrast between visible trade and concealed wealth makes the market a record not just of commerce but of uneven access to it.

At the center of the row stood the Galuzins’ large grocery, marked by three windows and a bare, splintery floor swept repeatedly with used tea leaves. Galuzin and his assistants drank tea throughout the day. As a young married woman, Galuzina had willingly sat at the cash box there; in her recollection, the shop’s violet dusk, the smell of starch and sugar, and purple black-currant caramels in glass jars become inseparable from her preferred color and from happiness. She extends that private association to prerevolutionary Russia, which she remembers as lilac-colored in its “virginity.” The shop thus joins a particular woman’s vanished domestic and commercial past to a larger, idealized memory of the country before revolution.

Galuzina’s Circuit and the Monastery Lanes

The town is first experienced as a route repeatedly walked rather than a place entered. After leaving church feeling faint, Galuzina is ashamed that she did not remain through the service and troubled that she has failed to fast during Lent for the second year. More urgently, the day’s mobilization order threatens her son, Terioshka. Her thoughts arrive in clusters as she walks between the monastery gate and the corner of the square, and the short circuit lets her hold several worries at once without resolving any of them.

Near Easter, the house is empty because the others have gone away. Galuzina counts her ward Ksiusha as no real company, then turns over uncertainties about the young woman’s identity and loyalty: she may be a friend, an enemy, or a secret rival. Her husband, Vlas, says he adopted Ksiusha, supposedly the daughter of his first wife by another marriage; Galuzina wonders whether Ksiusha might instead be Vlas’s natural daughter, or not his daughter at all. Yet she acknowledges that Ksiusha has intelligence, looks, and manners, and is cleverer than both Terioshka and Vlas. The town’s deserted Holy Week streets give these unresolved domestic suspicions room to recur without an answer.

Galuzina’s house lies just around the corner, but she repeatedly changes her mind about going inside and turns back into the alleys beside the monastery. The movement is a small but telling form of delay: her familiar home is near, yet the open street feels preferable to its airless rooms. Krestovozdvizhensk is therefore presented through a gendered, private passage across public space, where a woman’s anxieties about family, work, and the coming mobilization surface in the intervals between church, market, and home.

The Photographers’ Yard and the Hidden Meeting

One of the town’s crowded buildings contains a pharmacy, a notary’s office, a tailor’s household, lodgers, a watch repairer, a cobbler, an engraver, and two photographers working in partnership. The photographers’ young assistants have set up a darkroom at one end of a large woodshed because their first-floor premises are overcrowded. Its red lamp signals that work is under way; beneath the window, a chained puppy yelps along Eleninskaia Street. The yard’s routine sounds and trades establish a densely inhabited space before it becomes a setting for political secrecy.

A clandestine meeting takes place in the same yard, in the large barn where the wood has been pushed aside to clear a space for the gathering. A wall of logs, piled to the ceiling, screens the meeting from the small darkroom at the entrance. Behind this improvised barrier, participants have a second means of escape: a trapdoor descends to an underground passage that emerges in a lonely alley behind the monastery. The architecture links the town’s ordinary workspaces to a concealed route through its older religious precinct, turning a woodshed and barn into a temporary political refuge.

The meeting’s speaker argues that the alliance of the urban and rural poor can be achieved only through the Soviets. He describes Siberian peasants as pursuing a goal workers had long fought for: overthrowing the autocracy of hetmans and admirals and establishing the power of peasants’ and soldiers’ Soviets through armed uprising. The speech anticipates a long, stubborn war against officers and Cossack forces armed on behalf of the bourgeoisie. In this setting, revolutionary politics are not an abstraction detached from the town: they occupy a room physically hidden behind fuel, guarded by a lookout, and connected to escape by a tunnel.

Refuge, Requisition, and Wartime Displacement

Krestovozdvizhensk later becomes a stopping place for Pelagia Tiagunova, who settles with her married sister, Olga Galuzina. After sharing a railway car with the unlawfully conscripted Vasia, Pelagia had stayed with his mother in Veretenniki and been happy there. But villagers treated her as an outsider and falsely accused her of an affair with Vasia; to avoid being pecked to death by the community, she had to leave. Rumors that Prituliev had been seen nearby then drew her toward Pazhinsk, but the report proved false and left her stranded in the small town, where she eventually found work.

The news that reaches her shows how little security the move to town has provided. Veretenniki has reportedly been raided in reprisal for withholding food supplies; Vasia’s house is said to have burned, and one family member to have died. In Krestovozdvizhensk, her brother-in-law Vlas has either been jailed or shot, while her nephew has vanished without trace. Olga has suffered hunger and now works for her keep as a servant in Zvonarskaia, among peasants related to her. The uncertain reports and scattered consequences make the town a point from which rural violence is heard and endured, not a shelter outside it.

Pelagia is employed as an assistant at the Pazhinsk pharmacy when a doctor is about to requisition its stock. The measure threatens ruin for the pharmacist’s dependents, including Pelagia, even though the doctor is powerless to stop it. Her presence as the stock is taken over makes the consequences concrete: an administrative seizure of medicines also threatens the livelihood and support of the people attached to the pharmacy. Across these episodes, Krestovozdvizhensk changes from a setting of remembered trade and private unease into one of precarious refuge, where households and work are exposed to mobilization, political violence, hunger, and state requisition.