Prolonged power outage in Small Starohorodivka

The prolonged power outage in Small Starohorodivka is not merely a domestic inconvenience but a force shaping the village’s isolation and Sergey Sergeyich’s sense of time, contact, and abandonment. Lasting three years, it leaves electricity-dependent media and communications unavailable, contributes to the withdrawal of public services from a village with only two remaining residents, and makes the arrival of Ukrainian postal workers seem almost astonishing. In Sergey’s life, a dead phone and a clock that will stop ticking become intimate signs of how infrastructure failure reaches into relationships and the experience of home.

Duration and Daily Conditions

The outage has lasted three years by the time Sergey speaks of it. He tells Nastasya that the lights have been off throughout that period, while she initially reacts with disbelief that no one has come to repair them. The power failure is thus a prolonged condition rather than a brief interruption, one that has become part of the village’s ordinary life even as it remains striking to outsiders.

Without electricity, Sergey has no television. Petro points out that the lack of power explains why Sergey has not heard about the proposed street-name changes; Sergey answers that the power has been out for a long time. Petro advises him that it may be better not to watch television anyway, since the news would only distress him. The exchange makes the blackout both a practical barrier to information and a filter separating the village from the public narratives carried by broadcast media.

The outage also coexists with a household economy organized around fuel and stored heat. In the damp approach of spring, Sergey cooks on a potbelly stove, feeding it half a bucket of coal; after twenty minutes the water is boiling. The stove’s warmth keeps the cold air from crossing the threshold, and the house retains heat longer as the season changes. Power is absent, but domestic life continues through labor, coal, and careful attention to the stove—an improvised routine that makes the missing electrical service tangible without making the home itself unlivable.

Isolation and the Retreat of Public Services

The outage has material consequences beyond the darkened houses. Sergey explains that officials considered restoring electricity not worth the effort because only two residents remained in the village, and the two lived on different streets. He imagines that a dozen or so returning residents might have changed that calculation. The explanation turns population loss into a cycle: depopulation makes repair seem unjustifiable, while the absence of basic services further marks the village as a place people have left behind.

The village is exposed to fighting, but Sergey distinguishes the nearby danger from the wider frontline conditions. Nastasya describes the opposing forces as only a few kilometres apart near Gnutivka, where the contested strip of land narrows and firing continues through the day. Sergey counters that the guns are not so close to his own village: in three years, shelling has damaged the church, a couple of yards, and the collective-farm administration building, while most houses remain standing. The Baptist community periodically brings aid, but it cannot bring his pension. His comparison places the power failure among several forms of wartime abandonment—interrupted services, limited assistance, and the loss of ordinary means of support—without equating the village’s experience with the more intense fighting elsewhere.

Communication Without Power

The outage does not mean that every device is unusable, but it narrows what a device can do. Sergey’s mobile phone and charger lie unused in a sideboard, described as dead weight. If electricity returned, he could charge the phone and check whether mobile service still reached the area; even then, a working signal would not solve the question of whom he could call. He could walk to Pashka’s rather than phone, and he does not have Pashka’s number.

Contacting his former wife, Vitalina, carries a different difficulty. Sergey thinks he would have to choose his words carefully in advance, perhaps writing them down so that he could read them to her, because he fears she might otherwise hang up. He would like to ask how their daughter is doing and, if the conversation continued, how life in Vinnytsia is. The blackout therefore intensifies an estrangement that is not reducible to technology: electricity might permit a charged phone, but it cannot guarantee a conversation or repair a broken relationship.

A later attempt makes that distinction painfully concrete. Sergey finds the number, picks up the phone, and almost by accident presses the call button. A familiar voice answers, asking who is calling. He cannot speak; swallowing only brings pain in his heart, and he hangs up. Tears come as the phone drops back to the tabletop. The brief connection confirms that a call can get through, yet the exchange ends in silence. The obstacle is no longer simply the lack of electricity or service: even when the technical route opens, Sergey cannot cross the emotional distance.

Time, Departure, and the Meaning of Home

The outage’s most intimate consequence appears in Sergey’s fear for the alarm clock he has left behind. As he drives away, he realizes he wound it the previous evening and that it will soon stop. He considers whether Pashka might wind it, then dismisses the thought: Pashka is occupied with crossing days off a calendar, not tending the clock. Returning just to keep it running seems foolish, yet Sergey cannot easily dismiss the image of the house without its ticking. He reflects that time matters when someone remains to keep track of it; if no one remains, time seems to stop and disappear too.

The clock gives the blackout a human scale. The village’s electrical system has already ceased to sustain ordinary life, and now the small mechanism Sergey wound by hand may fall silent in his absence. Its stopped ticking would not literally stop time, but it would make the empty house feel as if its living routine had ended. That anxiety accompanies his departure alongside a sense of unreality: the landscape seems like a pre-recorded film, with Sergey alone feeling alive within it.

Even as powerlessness marks the village’s abandonment, a rare public connection briefly crosses that isolation. During the Postal Ceasefire, Sergey sees the inscription UKRPOSHTA above the arriving van and is overcome with joyful surprise. The scene does not restore electricity, but it shows that the village can still be reached through another network, and that an official service arriving at its gate carries emotional weight precisely because such connections have become exceptional. Against the phone that cannot sustain a conversation and the clock destined to fall silent, the postal van offers a short-lived sign that the outside world has not entirely forgotten Small Starohorodivka.

Narrative Significance

The outage links infrastructure to both public abandonment and private separation. It leaves Sergey without television and makes news of changing street names pass him by; it accompanies the decision not to repair a service for two remaining residents; and it shapes a household dependent on coal heat. Yet its force is clearest in the contrast between possible connection and actual contact: a phone may be chargeable and a call may reach a familiar voice, but Sergey still cannot speak to Vitalina.

The novel also makes the loss of power perceptible through objects rather than treating it as background. The unused mobile and charger, the stove fed with coal, the approaching silence of the alarm clock, and the unexpected UKRPOSHTA van each register a different relation between the isolated village and the systems beyond it. In this pattern, the outage is a condition of war-torn everyday life, but also a measure of what remains possible: heat can be made at home, a message can arrive from outside, and a call can connect—while none of these can by itself restore the community or relationships that have receded.