Wolves

The Wolves near Varykino are at once animals at the edge of the clearing and a force shaped by fear and anticipation. Their howling interrupts Yurii Andreievich’s night of writing; their repeated presence unsettles Lara and seems to confirm that the lovers’ stay cannot last. As their calls return, the wolves grow from a concrete danger into the image through which Yurii gives form to the hostile pressure closing around him and Lara.

First appearance in the night

At three in the morning, Yurii looks up from his papers, restored for a while by his work to a feeling of peace. The stillness outside is broken by a mournful sound. He goes to look through a window, but the glass has frosted over. After pulling the carpet away from the front door and putting on his coat, he steps outside into the moonlight.

The snow’s white glow dazzles him at first. Then another long, deep howl reaches him from a distance, and he makes out four narrow shadows at the edge of the clearing, beyond the gully. The wolves stand in a row, muzzles raised toward the house, baying at the moon or its silver reflection in the windows. The scene gives the animals a striking orientation: they face the house, while Yurii watches from its threshold, suddenly exposed to the country beyond it.

The encounter is brief. No sooner has Yurii recognized the wolves than they turn and trot away almost like dogs, seeming to vanish before he can determine where they have gone. Their speed and directionlessness leave him with a question of practical danger rather than an explanation. He wonders whether their lair lies in the gully and fears they may have scented Samdeviatov’s horse in the barn.

A warning shared by Lara

Yurii keeps the sighting to himself for the time being because he does not want to frighten Lara. Back inside, he shuts the doors between the cold rooms and the heated part of the house, stuffs rugs and clothes into the cracks to block the draft, and returns to his desk. The lamplight is still welcoming, but he can no longer write: his thoughts circle around wolves, danger, and complications. The animals have crossed the boundary of the house in his imagination even as he tries to secure its doors against the cold.

When the wolves howl again, Lara hears them as dogs and takes the sound for a bad omen. She comes to Yurii pale and frightened, asks whether he hears the howling, and says that they will leave in the morning because she cannot stay. After much persuasion she calms down and falls asleep. Yurii goes outside once more. This time the wolves are nearer; they disappear even faster, grouped together so that he cannot count them, though he thinks there are more than before.

Their approach is never described as an attack on the house or its occupants. Instead, the distance between them and the couple becomes the measure of suspense: first shadows at the clearing, then a nearer, uncounted bunch. Lara’s mistaken identification and fear of an omen coexist with Yurii’s concern about a real lair and a horse. The same sound sustains both interpretations without settling either.

From animal to symbol

The howling recurs after an interval of several days. On the thirteenth day of their stay at Varykino, the wolves are heard again, and Lara once more mistakes them for dogs, is frightened by the omen, and announces that she will leave the next day. The narrative connects these episodes with the instability of her anxiety, but the wolves’ return also gives that anxiety a recurring external shape: the refuge is not wholly sealed off from what waits beyond it.

For Yurii, the image changes more decisively. He feels that his dream of staying at Varykino will fail, that he is about to part from Lara, and that losing her may cost him his will to live, perhaps life itself. The wolves he has remembered throughout the day are no longer merely animals on a snow-covered plain under the moon. They have become a theme, a symbol of a hostile force bent on destroying him and Lara and driving them from Varykino.

The image swells beyond what he has actually seen. By evening, the hostility appears in his mind like a prehistoric beast or fabulous monster, a dragon whose tracks have been found in the ravine and which thirsts for his blood and lusts after Lara. This transformation does not establish that a supernatural creature exists; it records how the wolves’ real, unexplained presence becomes available to Yurii’s imagination as a figure for dangers he cannot master. The ravine and the tracks belong to this enlarging image, while the four shadows and the howls belong to the observed encounter.

The last account and the limits of the threat

Later, Strelnikov warns that Yurii and Lara must leave Varykino if they value their lives. He says he is being hunted, that anyone connected with him is implicated, and that he had to shoot his way out of the Shutma the other night because of the wolves. Yurii recognizes that the shooting he heard was Strelnikov’s. The exchange changes the meaning of the earlier sounds: the danger surrounding Varykino is not only an omen or an animal’s possible threat, but also part of the perilous circumstances of a man moving between hide-outs.

The wolves’ place in the novel remains deliberately double. Their baying is heard, their bodies are briefly glimpsed, and their movement toward and away from the house can be described; the account does not explain their behavior or identify a single cause for their appearances. For Lara they are a terrible sign; for Yurii they become the image of the force that will end the refuge; in Strelnikov’s warning, they are part of the immediate danger of a night escape. The recurring howls make the approaching separation felt before it can be fully spoken, while the actual animals preserve the scene’s stubborn, physical uncertainty.