War in Afghanistan

The War in Afghanistan is a remembered conflict whose presence in the novel is felt through a village funeral rather than through a battlefield scene. Sergeyich recalls the burial of a fellow villager who had returned dead from the war, then mentally joins that earlier loss to the funeral of a soldier killed in the war in Donetsk. The memory makes visible a change in how the village receives its dead: the older funeral’s crowd stood, while the later one had people kneeling along the road.

The Afghan War Funeral

Sergeyich’s recollection centers on a funeral attended by the whole village. At the cemetery there were long eulogies and much talking, but nobody knelt. The dead man’s mother tried to fall onto the fresh grave; relatives and friends held her upright and led her away. Soldiers fired their rifles into the air, and wreaths covered the grave. The account gives the ritual a collective shape, while preserving the mother’s grief as a moment that the gathering could neither absorb nor leave unaddressed.

Joined to a Later War

The Afghan War returns when Sergeyich is thinking about a more recent roadside ceremony for a soldier killed in the war in Donetsk. He wonders what the kneeling had been for, since the dead soldier was not a hero or a cosmonaut. The earlier funeral comes back to him, and he thinks that the Lord is with both soldiers; in his mind, the two dead men merge. The connection does not make the wars identical: it shows how one remembered death supplies a frame through which Sergeyich understands another.

Memory and Public Ritual

The contrast between the ceremonies rests on a physical gesture. At the Afghan War funeral, everyone remained standing; at the later reception of the fallen, people knelt along the roadside. The recollection therefore places a changed communal ritual beside a persistent fact of mourning: families and villagers must face the return of the dead. Sergeyich’s memory carries the earlier funeral into the present, making the Afghan War part of the novel’s account of how successive conflicts accumulate in individual and village experience.