Vlas Pakhomovich Galuzin

Vlas Pakhomovich Galuzin is a provincial contractor turned public speaker whose longing for a supposedly honorable Russia collides with the violence and dislocation of wartime life. He urges young recruits to fight for the motherland, yet his own family is exposed to the dangers he cannot master: his son faces conscription, his nephew disappears, and reports say Vlas himself has been jailed or shot. His trajectory makes the distance between patriotic rhetoric and private vulnerability part of the story’s larger portrait of a society coming apart.

Identity and Background

Vlas is a husband and father in a family whose domestic ties are already uncertain. His wife, left alone during Holy Week, wonders whether their ward Ksiusha is her husband’s daughter, as he says, or perhaps his natural child; she cannot know what lies in his heart. The uncertainty does not establish a secret about Ksiusha’s parentage, but it does place Vlas within a household unsettled by doubt. His son Terentii, meanwhile, has been expelled from school after repeatedly falling behind in his grades.

The family’s past, as Vlas’s wife remembers it, belongs to a more prosperous and settled world. Her father was a sober, literate contractor, and the family lived comfortably. Skilled master carpenters visited the household; church services, dances, good manners, and the sisters’ celebrated six-color wool scarves all belong to a remembered order in which people and customs seemed dependable. The recollection is hers, not Vlas’s, but it helps frame the social world from which his public exhortations claim to recover a lost dignity.

Public Rhetoric and Private Strain

Vlas travels along the highway making speeches to new recruits and urging them toward feats of arms. His wife resents this absence: while he addresses other people’s sons, she thinks, he is failing to look after his own, who is in mortal danger. The contrast gives his public activity a domestic cost, even before its political promises are tested.

At a village gathering, Vlas arrives in a pink shirt and silk sash, stepping down from Pafnutkin’s house above the highway and running to the tables to address the recruits. The villagers have pooled their resources for the feast, serving leftover Easter food: smoked hams, kulich buns, paskha cakes, pickled vegetables, thick slices of bread, and colored eggs. Against this communal setting, Vlas raises a glass of home-brewed vodka for the young men setting out to serve.

His speech presents their departure as a defense of the motherland. He denounces the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by Bolshevik bayonets, invokes the blood of the defenseless, and calls on the recruits to restore the outraged honor of Russian arms while Germany and Austria again raise their heads. The crowd’s hurrahs drown out his continuing words. The vodka gives him no pleasure: accustomed to vintage wines, he nevertheless takes satisfaction in believing that his sacrifice serves the public good.

That performance is not simply a calculated appeal for personal advantage. Goshka Riabikh jokes that Vlas’s eloquence might earn Terentii exemption from the draft, but Terentii rejects the suggestion. He expects to receive his own notification and says he will serve in the same unit as Goshka. Although he laments that expulsion from school has likely cost him a commission, he admires his father’s ability to speak and calls it a natural gift, remarkable in someone without formal education. The exchange makes Vlas’s oratory at once a public spectacle, a source of family pride, and an inadequate shield against conscription.

Nostalgia and Political Outlook

Vlas’s wife interprets the present through a stark contrast with the past. She blames the war, rather than the revolution, for the loss of Russia’s “flower” of manhood and imagines those now left behind as a degraded remnant. In her account, the old Russia was a marriageable girl courted by men who could stand up for her; the present offers only a rabble, civilians, lawyers, and what she contemptuously calls “Yids.” This is her embittered perspective, not an objective account of Vlas’s convictions, but it echoes the patriotic and anti-Bolshevik language he uses before the recruits.

The gap between nostalgia and action is sharpened by her judgment that toasts and speeches cannot restore a lost love: recovering what has vanished would require moving mountains. Vlas’s address likewise sets a grand national claim beside modest means—a village feast and poorly distilled vodka—and the recruits’ response is immediate but cannot settle the war’s larger outcome. His confidence in public words thus sits uneasily beside the scale of the upheaval around him.

Family and Fate

Terentii’s fate exposes the limits of Vlas’s influence within his own household. Expelled from school, the boy leaves home for relatives in Kuteiny village on the eve of the great feast, hoping to amuse himself and forget his troubles. His mother is eating her heart out, while Vlas is away addressing recruits. Terentii’s willingness to serve alongside Goshka despite his father’s speeches being suspected of influence confirms that the family cannot simply convert Vlas’s prominence into safety.

Later, reports of disaster reach Terentii’s aunt Pelagia Tiagunova. Veretenniki has been raided in reprisal for withholding food supplies; Vasia’s house is said to have been burned and a member of his family killed. At Krestovozdvizhensk, Vlas has either been imprisoned or shot. The account leaves his fate unresolved rather than confirming his death. His nephew has vanished, and his sister-in-law Olga has endured starvation before finding work as a servant in a peasant household in Zvonarskaia.

These reports transform the earlier contrast between public speech and private danger into a concrete reversal. Vlas had urged recruits to defend the country and condemned political violence; now the narrative reaches him through uncertain news of state or wartime punishment, while his relatives suffer displacement, hunger, disappearance, and the burning of a home. The uncertainty surrounding his fate is itself significant: in a collapsing social order, even whether a man has been jailed or killed may be impossible to establish.