The dual identity of Albat and Kuybyshevo

The dual identity of Albat and Kuybyshevo is Sergey Sergeyich’s way of seeing one village as two distinct places, its identity seeming to shift with the electric light. At night, glowing windows and street lamps reveal to him an intimate Albat with its own name and language; without that illumination, he sees Soviet Kuybyshevo, a place that resembles his abandoned home village. The lights do more than brighten the landscape: in Sergeyich’s imagination, they make a community visible, and their recurring failure seems to erase it again.

One village, two names

From his vantage point above the village, Sergeyich first sees Albat in its night-time illumination. The street lamps trace the roads and show him the settlement’s considerable size: at least two dozen streets and lanes. In this light, he feels he can finally see the village indicated by the unusual, enchanting name Albat, even though that name does not appear on road signs. Behind its bright windows, the place seems to live and breathe, speaking an Albatian language of its own.

The same houses and streets present a different identity before the darkness settles, or when the power is out. In daylight, Sergeyich sees Kuybyshevo, which speaks Russian—or, in his phrasing, Kuybyshevan—and differs little from Little Starhorodivka apart from the vegetation to the south. The contrast is not between two settlements on a map, but between two ways of perceiving one place: a named, animated community and a more familiar, Soviet-seeming locality.

Light, darkness, and belonging

The distinction is sharpened by the village’s unreliable electricity. Sergeyich imagines that when the settlement is deprived of power, it remains Kuybyshevo even at night. Its usual lack of cosiness, as he understands it, can then be dispelled only by candles. Electric light makes Albat appear present and particular; darkness returns the village to an identity that feels more ordinary and less welcoming.

One evening, after standing for half an hour or more until sunset and the air loses its transparency, Sergeyich feels he may somehow have restored the village’s power. He imagines that his vigil had a purpose: controlling the delivery of night-time light to Albat. The thought grants his solitary watch a temporary sense of agency. The village’s transformation is not something he controls, but the lights allow him to feel, briefly, that his attention has mattered.

A borrowed calm

Watching the illuminated village brings Sergeyich into a calm, joyful mood. Thinking of Albat as alive behind its windows helps dry the sadness in his eyes, even as his mind turns to his home in the grey zone. He remembers the potbelly stove in the middle of his room and the warmth it provided through winter and into spring. The house and stove are far away now, being looked after by Pashka; Albat’s lights offer a momentary counterweight to that absence.

The calm is real but precarious. The narration describes it as a balance that can create the illusion that calmness itself is happiness. That qualification matters: Sergeyich is not at home, and the village he watches cannot replace the warmth he remembers. Its illuminated windows soothe him for a time, while the possibility of their disappearance remains built into the scene.

The recurring blackout

The imagined Albat repeatedly gives way to the blackness of Kuybyshevo. Later, most evenings, Sergeyich walks out to the road overlooking the vineyards and the village, hoping to feast his eyes on the life suggested by glowing windows and street lamps. But the district has serious electricity problems. Instead of the enchanting Albat he hopes to see, the darkness shows him what he calls the black hole of Soviet Kuybyshevo. He sighs and returns to his tent.

The change also registers in his daily life. He finds it easier to fall asleep, but wakes anxious, now preoccupied with the honey in his own and Akhtem’s nearly full hives. The contrast between the village’s failing lights and the bees’ seasonal work places the identity motif alongside practical pressures, without resolving either. The lights may briefly make the place feel whole, but the blackout keeps exposing the distance between Sergeyich’s temporary refuge and the home he has left behind.

Narrative significance

Albat and Kuybyshevo are not presented as competing official names so much as identities activated by perception. Albat is the village Sergeyich can see when its lamps define the roads and its windows suggest lives within; Kuybyshevo is what remains visible in daylight, before the lights come on, or during an outage. The pattern makes electrical illumination a fragile condition for recognition: when it vanishes, the settlement does not physically disappear, but its distinctiveness does for Sergeyich.

Because the alternation is filtered through the beekeeper’s gaze, it also reveals his own unsettled position. He watches a village that can offer calm without becoming home, while his thoughts return to the stove, room, and grey-zone life entrusted to Pashka. The recurring shift from luminous Albat to dark Kuybyshevo gives that displacement a visible form: belonging appears vivid for a moment, then recedes with the light.