Renaming the streets of Little Old City village

In wartime Little Starhorodivka, Sergey Sergeyich secretly swaps the signs for Lenin Street and Shevchenko Street, then turns the nocturnal prank into an officially unanimous decision with Pashka. The renaming is both comic and consequential: a makeshift local act of political change that Sergeyich carries into everyday life by correcting addresses on the village’s letters and delivering them to absent neighbours. In a place where residents have scattered and the government is away, street names become a question of who can decide what a community calls itself—and whether any community will still be there to read the signs.

A decision made in the dark

Sergeyich’s scheme grows out of an unsettled night and the need to occupy himself until dawn. He cannot do the work by day: someone on the horizon might be watching through binoculars, a periscope, or an optical sight. Instead, after tea with honey, he dresses warmly, gathers tools from the garage, and sets out with a backpack that once belonged to a man with an earring. The claw hammer is so heavy that the tools make the journey a physical undertaking as well as a furtive one.

At the village entrance, Sergeyich finds the blue sign with white letters marking Lenin Street and tears it down. He works methodically along the fences, discovering that the street names are not displayed at every house as he had assumed. One sign, fixed directly to a wall with ten-millimetre nails, takes him about five minutes to pry loose and bends in the process. By the time he reaches the bombed-out church, his backpack contains twelve signs as well as his tools, and he is tiring.

He returns home, lays the signs on the snow, and realizes the work is only half done. He crosses to Pashka’s street and removes six Shevchenko signs. The unequal tally surprises him, since the two streets have roughly the same number of houses. Sergeyich explains it to himself through the village’s Soviet past: Lenin’s name had been known around the world, while Shevchenko was known only locally. He dismisses the imbalance as no reason to stop. Poets, he thinks, are harmless, unlike politicians; he will live on Shevchenko Street.

The streets exchange names

Sergeyich first puts a Shevchenko sign on his own fence, to the left of his gate. He replaces the sign at the beginning of the street, then installs another by the last house on the right, near the church. The exchange is not simply a new label for his own home: he gives the street that had been Lenin Street the name Shevchenko Street, and reserves Lenin Street for the road where Pashka lives.

At half past four, with hours still to go before dawn, Sergeyich returns to the road now designated Lenin Street carrying the hammer, nails, and the remaining Lenin signs. He fixes one on each side of Pashka’s gate, without considering that the hammering might wake him, then distributes the other ten along the street, including signs at both ends. Its far end lies among the derelict cowsheds of the shuttered Iona Yakir kolkhoz and buildings stripped of slate, window frames, and even bricks. The new street name reaches into a landscape already stripped of much of its former life.

The work leaves Sergeyich’s legs protesting, but his right knee is silent, as if it approves of the cause. His satisfaction is practical and personal: by morning, the names have been physically changed, not merely imagined. The scene’s comedy lies in the gap between the grand machinery of political renaming and one man’s midnight labour; its force lies in the same details, which show how a decision can be made tangible by hauling, prying, nailing, and choosing where a sign goes.

Pashka makes the change official

The next day, while Sergeyich is still struggling to recover a normal rhythm after a day-long doze, Pashka visits. He says he came because he was bored and wanted to see his friend, insists that he is not angry about their earlier quarrel, and thanks Sergeyich for losing sleep on his behalf. Sergeyich initially cannot understand what favour Pashka means. The explanation is that Pashka is delighted to have Lenin Street in place of Shevchenko Street, which he says he had grown thoroughly tired of.

Their tea-table exchange turns an imposed-looking prank into a consensual local decision. Sergeyich asks whether Pashka is happy with the change, and Pashka answers that he is. Sergeyich then proposes that they vote to make it official. Both raise their hands, and Sergeyich declares the decision unanimous. The absent residents, he says, can be held responsible for not attending; when the government returns, the two men will inform it of their decision. The joke depends on the gap between a village-wide claim and a meeting of two neighbours, but the vote also shows the scant means available to people who have been left in place while others have gone.

Pashka suggests they drink to the decision. Sergeyich refuses for now, his expression so stern that Pashka changes the subject. The refusal preserves a boundary within their revived friendliness: the renaming earns acknowledgment and a shared cup of tea, but it does not erase their earlier quarrel or make the act into a celebration on demand.

Paperwork, mail, and an emptied village

The name change acquires a second life when Sergeyich encounters the village’s accumulated letters. At home, he lays them out and uses a purple pen to change every Lenin in the addresses to Shevchenko. He wants the recipients, when they collect their mail, to understand that they live on a newly named street and to pass their new address to friends and relatives who write to them. His question is practical: is this not how a street renaming is usually made known? The revised envelopes carry the decision beyond the signs and beyond the two men who voted.

Sergeyich then sorts the mail carefully, arranging the stacks in descending house-number order from the houses near the church. The task costs him energy, but completing it brings pride: he imagines himself doing what real postmen do when they receive their bags from a regional or district office. He takes the letters for houses up to number 40 and walks the street, putting envelopes into fence-mounted letterboxes or slipping them under doors. Delivering each one feels like greeting a neighbour; he can imagine faces and voices, although he knows almost nothing about where the recipients have gone or how they are doing.

That imagined return gives the renaming its most poignant consequence. Sergeyich hopes the letters will be waiting when their addressees come home, so that the villagers will be eager to return once the war is over. He can describe the village as lucky—its church has been bombed, and other shells have fallen, but he minimizes the damage as he addresses absent residents in his mind. The signs and corrected envelopes preserve a civic routine in a village made nearly vacant by war, but they cannot themselves restore its people. Renaming is thus less a completed political transformation than an act of maintenance: Sergeyich gives the streets new words, then prepares the village to receive those who may still come back.