Petro Skolyk

Petro Skolyk is a sculptor whose work builds and adorns churches and chapels, while his household depends on Stefania’s constant, largely unrecognized labor. The novel places his craft at the meeting point of sacred art and ordinary material life: stone angels rise from his workshop, but the home he built leaks in relentless rain, and the food, cleaning, and care that sustain him are supplied by Stefania. His later recognition that her work deserves payment complicates, without erasing, the unequal arrangement on which the household rests.

Identity and Work

Petro is identified through the scale and religious purpose of his sculpture. He devotes himself to carving seraphim for the Chapel of the Resurrection of Christ at the penitentiary and works on sculptures for the chapel of Father Josef. His projects also take him to the cathedral and the Bembnowycz workshop. Stefania brings him meals wherever he is working, making her care a routine accompaniment to his artistic labor.

The contrast between his public craftsmanship and his neglect of the house is sharp. He can build a home, but does not attend to its maintenance; while rainwater pours through the roof, Stefania changes the buckets and keeps the household functioning. Petro curses the workers responsible for repairs, but in the narrator’s account the leaking roof and the workers’ failures cannot be separated from his own indifference to the domestic consequences.

The Household and Stefania’s Labor

Stefania’s duties extend far beyond cooking. She cleans, shops for provisions, carries Petro’s lunch to the cathedral or prison chapel, massages Adèle, and prepares iron-nailed apples to ease Adèle’s anemia. In a year of extraordinary storms, she repeatedly empties the buckets collecting rainwater from the roof, alongside all the other tasks that the household expects of her.

This work is bound up with an obligation imposed by Doctor Anger, who told Stefania on his deathbed that she must serve Adèle. Stefania imagines leaving for a monastery or another position, but fears Adèle could not manage without her and might injure herself or set the house on fire. The promise thus operates not merely as a remembered instruction but as a force keeping Stefania in a cycle of service. Petro benefits from the same cycle: her domestic work makes it possible for him to continue his craft without having to tend to the house or its daily needs.

Adèle describes Stefania’s upbringing as a deliberate education of servants, calling it a process of training conducted with tenderness and affection. That language casts the household’s dependence as benevolent guidance while also making its hierarchy explicit. Stefania, meanwhile, continues to work in two houses, maintaining order and cleanliness and cooking in both. She says her strength has multiplied, but the expanded capacity does not mean the labor has become less demanding or more visible.

The Workshop and Felix

Petro’s workshop beside the prison is a disorderly wooden building, crowded with damaged cloth, stone fragments, ruined wooden icons, tools, boards, ladders, and unfinished work. Sunlight enters through gaps between the planks and irregular windows, striking the marble fragments and the pale figures of child-angels, whose agile limbs and instruments give the sculptural space an image of lightness amid its clutter.

When a cry of alarm sends Stefania and Adèle running toward the workshop, they find Petro asleep beneath a crust of marble dust, so still that he resembles a carved body. His hand still grips his chisel. Beside him lies a living child dressed in a long robe embroidered with bright pearls. Petro and the child open their eyes together; Petro looks at him in fear and incomprehension, drops the chisel, and falls to his knees. The scene places the sculptor beside a presence that seems to cross the boundary between the figures he makes and living flesh, without resolving the encounter into an ordinary explanation.

Petro’s later connection with Felix develops through work rather than the gifts and gestures with which Adèle had tried to draw the child close. Stefania watches Felix pass Petro tools, gather stone chips from beneath his feet, brush dust from the boat, and remove a cigarette butt from Petro’s mouth when it threatens to set his moustache alight. The small practical acts establish a companionship grounded in attention to Petro’s work and immediate safety. Stefania feels both anger toward Petro and pleasure at seeing Felix engage with him, especially after Adèle’s attempts to charm Felix with sweets, soft shoes, ribbons, caresses, and kisses had been rejected.

Labor, Authority, and Recognition

Petro’s relationship with Stefania is shaped by an imbalance that appears in both the household’s practical arrangements and its ideas about service. Adèle tells Ernest Thorn that servants must be educated and trained, and claims that Stefania’s training began with her father and continued under her own care. Petro is part of the household that receives the benefit of Stefania’s work, even where the surviving account does not give him the same explicit speech about her status.

A later exchange offers a significant counterpoint. Father Josef tells Stefania that she works hard for her employers and that he cannot let her work for him as well without compensation; he promises to pay her for what she has already done. Stefania collapses into a chair, an immediate physical response that registers the strain of the exchange without explaining it further. The moment makes explicit a principle that the Anger household’s language of familial closeness tends to obscure: labor has a claim to reward.

At Adèle’s birthday gathering, the guests praise the food while Stefania silently returns to her routine of preparing, cooking, baking, washing, cleaning, and mending. Petro takes the loaded tray from her hands and carries it toward the kitchen, telling her that he is grateful and that she is family, without whom their house would not be the best of homes. His gesture and words acknowledge her centrality, but they do not by themselves alter the division of labor that leaves her to serve while the guests celebrate.

Narrative Significance

Petro’s craft gives the novel a material counter-image to the domestic world Stefania maintains. He shapes stone into angels and sacred figures; she repeatedly catches water entering the house, prepares food, and tends to the people who inhabit it. The contrast is not simply between art and housework: the household’s admiration for sculpture and hospitality rests on care that is treated as ordinary, even when it consumes Stefania’s day.

His workshop scene also sharpens the novel’s recurring uncertainty between representation and life. Petro is found dusted white like marble, gripping his tool in sleep, beside a child who appears as startlingly alive as the angels he carves. His artistic world makes the uncanny encounter visually legible, while his later, practical cooperation with Felix brings the child into a different relation with the household. Across these scenes, Petro is both a maker of sacred images and a beneficiary of service, a figure through whom the novel tests how recognition can coexist with dependence.