Vienna is both a real destination and an imaginative point of reference in the novel: a city of art, travel, and modern technology, connected to Petro’s formation as a sculptor and to the routes by which characters picture lives beyond their immediate surroundings. Its appearances also expose how differently people experience movement: as education or leisure for some, and as labor, care, or a hoped-for escape for others.

Artistic Formation and Petro’s Work

Petro’s connection to Vienna begins with his studies at its Academy of Fine Arts. After the death of Doctor Anger’s wife, the doctor learned of the young sculptor who had returned to Stanislaviv from Vienna and commissioned him to make a monument to her. Petro set to work at once, using white marble so pure that its sheen seemed transparent, like ice from Alpine summits. The commission binds his education in Vienna to the Anger household’s history of grief and to the sculpture that would become part of its domestic world.

Petro later says that an idea for his house’s unusual ornamentation had taken shape while he was still studying in Vienna. His recollection places the city not only in his professional past but also in the origins of his architectural imagination. The money that made his studies possible came, shortly before his father’s death, from the sale of a piece of land in Pasitchny, where a railway line would later run. His account joins artistic education to family inheritance and to the changing infrastructure of the region.

Travel and Unequal Mobility

Vienna is one stop on Adèle and Stefania’s honeymoon journey with Petro, alongside Kraków and Budapest. Adèle had been afraid to leave without Stefania, and Petro agreed only after several nights of her tears. Stefania’s presence on the trip did not free her from service: she arranged for Adèle to receive soft-boiled eggs while Petro was given none, sought the freshest cream for Adèle’s coffee, and continued to dress and prepare her. The shared itinerary thus holds two kinds of travel together—Adèle’s journey as a bride and Stefania’s continued work of attending to her.

The city also belongs to the geography of leisure. Adèle had gone to Carlsbad nearly every year while her father was alive, and also visited Dora or Yaremche. Stefania accompanied these outings, ostensibly to regain color in her pale face, but with the practical expectation that someone still had to empty the chamber pots. Travel offers Adèle rest and a change of scene; for Stefania, it carries domestic duties with it.

Vienna as a Measure of Modernity

The novel sets the city within a rapidly changing technological age. Gas streetlamps have given way to electric lighting at the railway station, though its power still repeatedly fails; moving images and new forms of photography reshape what people can see, while telephones seem to carry voices through air, walls, trees, and hills. Röntgen rays penetrate the human body, and scientific explanation unsettles inherited beliefs about illness and the supernatural. In this account of modernity, Vienna is not isolated from provincial life: it is part of a connected world of education, inventions, transport, and new ways of imagining what can be known.

That connection becomes pointed when Velvele imagines opening a restaurant with Stefania in the New World. He compares her cooking to the work of Franz Sacher at his Vienna restaurant, invoking the city as a standard of culinary distinction. Yet the proposed venture would begin with limited means: he has saved a small amount of capital, and the two have tickets for a third-class transatlantic crossing from Hamburg aboard the Taormina. Vienna supplies a prestigious measure for Stefania’s skill, while the escape she is offered depends on a far less privileged passage and on her decision to leave the household where she has spent her life serving Adèle.

Narrative Significance

Vienna gathers together the novel’s contrasts between artistic ambition, domestic dependence, and movement through the world. Petro’s studies there precede the work that enters the Anger family’s home; Adèle’s visit is part of a honeymoon that Stefania joins through an intense, longstanding attachment; and the city’s name lends authority to a culinary future Velvele proposes across the ocean. The recurring geography makes clear that travel is never simply a matter of distance. Who moves, for what purpose, and whose labor accompanies the journey determine whether a route signifies education, pleasure, or the possibility of beginning again.