The burning of Veretenniki and the death of Vasia Brykin’s mother mark the intimate human cost of a village crisis in which flight, rumor, and political intervention feed into one another. Yurii Andreievich encounters the aftermath on his journey: a settlement reduced to blackened houses and rubble, and a survivor who explains that the destruction separated him from his mother before either could know the other’s fate.

The ruined village and its survivor

Yurii Andreievich reaches Veretenniki and finds a row of houses beside a river, most of them destroyed and all the remaining structures deserted. Black chimneys rise above the rubble; the few houses still standing are empty. The villagers had made their living quarrying stone for millstones from pits in the cliffs above the river. Three unfinished millstones remain outside one of the surviving houses, a sign of work interrupted rather than completed. The place is not only physically ruined: its former inhabitants have scattered, and the familiar arrangements of village life have vanished.

The doctor meets Vasia Brykin among these ruins. Vasia throws himself down before him, kisses his hands, and weeps. The gesture reunites the two men after their earlier shared journey in a labor-conscription convoy, but the reunion takes place amid the destruction of Vasia’s home. He tells the doctor that his mother is dead and that his sisters, Alia and Aria, are reportedly in an orphanage in another district; he does not know for certain where they are. The family’s separation is therefore both a consequence of the village’s destruction and an unresolved loss.

Flight, accusation, and the fire

Vasia’s account traces the crisis through a series of incidents rather than a single deliberate plan. After escaping labor service, he was accused of desertion, of killing an old woman, and of stirring up trouble in the village. The authorities arrested him, but he escaped by lifting a floorboard and hid in a cave in the old quarry. From that hiding place he did not see the village burn, and he did not know that his mother had drowned herself. His survival thus depended on concealment, while the same concealment prevented him from learning what had happened to his family.

The village’s political tensions were sharpened by the murder accusation. Vasia says that local wealthy peasants used the killing to turn the villagers against people from town, urging them to resist the authorities’ grain demands and to defend their stores. Their agitation culminated in village meetings, while Kharlam carried reports to the town and called for a Poor Peasants’ Committee. Vasia’s story shows how an individual accusation could be absorbed into broader disputes over grain, labor service, and local authority, making it difficult to separate private wrongdoing from political maneuvering.

The immediate fire begins, in Vasia’s telling, after Red Army men sent from town are lodged separately and given liquor. The house where they are staying catches fire at night, and the blaze spreads from one house to the next. Villagers flee when the fire starts. Vasia stresses that nobody ordered them to run or to stay away afterward; fear and rumor keep them from returning. A further rumor claims that every tenth man will be shot, and the villagers remain scattered. The account presents the destruction as a cascading event: an accidental fire, flight, and fear combine with official suspicion and political agitation, while responsibility is repeatedly disavowed.

Vasia’s mother and the consequences of separation

During the destruction, Vasia’s mother believes he has been taken away to town. In grief and without knowing that he is hiding nearby, she drowns herself in the river that runs below the quarry cliffs. Vasia later tells Yurii Andreievich that she died in a hole in the ice. Her death is not narrated as a separate encounter between mother and son, but as the delayed consequence of their forced separation: each is deprived of the knowledge that might have altered what the other understood.

When Vasia emerges from the cave, he finds the village empty. His sisters’ reported placement in an orphanage offers no certainty of reunion, and the family has been dispersed by events whose causes are entangled: the labor draft he evaded, the accusations against him, the town’s intervention, the fire, and the rumor that prevents the villagers from returning. He travels on to Moscow with the doctor, carrying the story of a catastrophe he partly witnessed only through its aftermath.

Narrative significance

The episode moves from the material evidence of destruction to Vasia’s oral account of how it came about. The burned houses and unfinished millstones establish what has disappeared; the survivor’s explanation then reveals the overlapping pressures that made the ruin possible. Because Vasia did not see the fire or his mother’s death, the account is shaped by absence and belated knowledge. The village’s destruction becomes legible through what remains, what Vasia has been told, and what he still cannot know about his sisters.

The repeated insistence that events happened without anyone being responsible gives the account its bitter political force. People act, accuse, flee, and spread rumors, yet each stage is described as if it arose by itself. That pattern does not erase the specific causes Vasia recounts; it shows how responsibility becomes blurred amid fear, coercion, and local conflict. The tragedy is therefore not just that Veretenniki burns, but that its destruction leaves the survivors unable to recover a shared account of what happened or to restore the family and community it broke apart.