Wartime silence and the normalization of war

Wartime silence is not an absence of sound but a learned way of hearing: in Sergey Sergeyich’s village, bombardment gradually settles into the background of everyday life, while familiar peaceful sounds can become startlingly conspicuous. The novel uses this shifting soundscape to show how war is normalized among people who remain in the grey zone. Yet Sergeyich’s apparent indifference has a limit: his attention and responsibility persist most strongly in his care for his bees.

Meaning and setting

The concept emerges from a broader account of Donbas, where the conflict has left a grey zone between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists. Many residents have fled, but some remain among shuttered shops, post offices, and police stations, trying to survive while treating both sides with careful diplomacy. The narrator describes fear of war and possible death gradually giving way to apathy: people learn to live with the conflict as they might with a disruptive neighbour. The novel therefore shifts attention away from military operations and heroic soldiers toward ordinary people who have not been forced from their homes.

Sergeyich embodies this condition. In Little Starhorodivka, he and Pashka are the village’s last two residents, while Ukrainian troops are dug in on one side and local fighters and Russian military personnel occupy positions beyond Pashka’s street on the other. The village has been quiet for two weeks, but quiet does not mean that the war has ended. Sergeyich has become confused and indifferent to much around him; the exception is his sense of responsibility, concentrated on his bees. Even in winter, when the hives are insulated in the shed, the possibility of a stray shell remains part of the conditions he must live with.

How war enters the sound of silence

The novel explains the change as a process of habituation. In peacetime, Sergeyich’s silence absorbed ordinary sounds such as an aeroplane or a cricket at the window. In wartime, military sounds displace some of those peaceful sounds, but eventually they, too, are absorbed: distant firing ceases to command attention and becomes part of the silence he recognizes as normal. The transformation is not that bombardment has become harmless; it is that repeated exposure has altered what registers as an interruption.

A winter scene makes that adjustment perceptible by reversing the expected relation between noise and danger. Sergeyich has grown used to distant bombardments, but falling snow blocks them out with its rustling. The snowfall seems too loud, and its interruption of the familiar wartime background leaves him anxious rather than reassured. He lies awake thinking of the dead man in the field and imagines that the snow will cover him until spring. His mind then reaches for a consoling future: birdsong might drown out the cannon fire, shells might fall only occasionally, and he could leave the village with all six hives. The imagined return of seasonal quiet comforts him, but it also shows how thoroughly his expectations have accommodated the war: even the possibility of shells falling once a month is folded into a vision of a livable future.

The soundscape shifts again on a morning when Sergeyich walks toward the church and cemetery. The silence seems almost unbelievably peaceful and free of even distant war sounds. A raven flies close enough to make him duck before he follows it with his eyes and smiles. The brief startle registers how war has trained his body to anticipate danger, even when the immediate sound belongs to a bird rather than an attack. His memory of Vitalina’s winter coat, boots, and the shawl he gave her follows this moment, placing an intimate recollection inside a landscape where ordinary peace can still feel uncertain.

Household sounds and the return of work

At home, the alarm clock’s tick-tock occupies the silence like a small, steady presence. Sergeyich keeps glancing at it while eating his millet dinner, with a candle beside it on the table. The passage compares the quiet to a thick-glass bottle that holds nearby sounds, detectable only with difficulty. This domestic stillness is not separate from the front: it is a space in which the sounds of war have become so familiar that a clock can claim the foreground.

The approaching spring brings Sergeyich a different sound and purpose. He imagines releasing six regiments of bees onto flowering fields, turning the hive into an army barracks in his private comparison. The military vocabulary enters even this hopeful thought, but the bees’ work is not combat. Their return to the fields promises seasonal labour, and the prospect helps him imagine life continuing beyond the winter quiet.

His attention to the hives also distinguishes resignation from complete numbness. After sorting snow in the yard, Sergeyich finds it strangely quiet and recognizes the absence of the muffled roar of explosions. He goes into the bee-shed, moves the protective metal sheet aside, and presses his ear to a hive. Although he hears no sound, he feels the wall trembling and reads that vibration as evidence that the bees are alive. He replaces the sheet and tells them they will soon return to work. The scene turns listening into care: the war may have receded from his conscious attention, but the condition of the bees still demands close observation.

Public accounts and competing versions of war

The book sets this intimate, lived soundscape against public speech about the conflict. At Nastasya’s, Sergeyich watches men on television discuss Ukraine and claim that America and Europe are holding the country together with money taken from their own poor citizens. When the channel changes, he recognizes a local politician on screen, her face stained green, asserting her right to speak as a member of the Verkhovna Rada. These broadcast scenes bring mediated political arguments into the same domestic space where Sergeyich listens to an alarm clock and worries about his bees.

At the border, a television crew asks Sergeyich why he has come from Donbas. He starts to explain that he is from the grey zone, where Ukrainians are on one side and Russians on the other. A young crew member stops him and tells him to repeat the account without saying Russians; Sergeyich then describes the opposing side as separatists from Karuselino. The interview thus edits his description of the war as it happens, making the public account less direct than his first answer.

The crew also redirects attention from the war’s broader circumstances to the damage visible on camera. Asked about his car, Sergeyich says it was smashed in the Zaporizhia region and explains that one shell-shocked man, drunk at a wake for a soldier killed by Russians, attacked it. The interviewer stops the exchange and instructs the crew to record the bees and the axe mark on a hive instead. The scene contrasts Sergeyich’s awkward, situated account with the images and wording the crew chooses to capture. Across both the television broadcast and the border interview, public narratives compete to define the conflict, while the ordinary consequences of war appear in his damaged property and threatened apiary.

Narrative significance

The motif of silence makes normalization visible without confusing habituation with safety. Distant firing can become inaudible in practice even while shells remain a threat; snowfall can unsettle a man precisely because it masks the sound he has learned to expect. By lingering on small acts of listening—hearing a clock, responding to a raven, checking a hive—the narrative restores attention to sensations that the routine of war has dulled or rearranged.

Sergeyich’s care for the bees supplies a counterpoint to his indifference toward much else. He can imagine leaving the village, calculates the danger to the wintering hives, and checks for the faint vibration that tells him they remain alive. Wartime silence is therefore both a sign of adaptation and a measure of what adaptation cannot extinguish: the obligation to protect living things, and the hope that they may return to work when the season changes.