wartime silence

Wartime silence is the novel’s name for a changed way of hearing: the sounds of war gradually become so familiar that they settle into the quiet they once interrupted. Through Sergeyich’s attention to bombardments, snowfall, clocks, footsteps, and bees, the expression marks a civilian world in which violence can become ordinary without becoming harmless. Silence registers not peace, but the adjustment by which a person learns to live beside war.

Meaning and Formation

The expression grows out of the experience of people who remain in the grey zone between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists. The war has emptied villages, closed shops and public services, and made survival the chief concern of those who stay. In the account of the novel’s origins, the narrator describes witnessing fear of war and possible death gradually turn into apathy, as people learn to live with conflict like a rowdy, drunken neighbour. The novel therefore shifts attention away from military operations and heroic soldiers toward ordinary residents whose days continue inside the conflict.

Sergeyich’s quiet makes that change audible. Before the war, ordinary sounds—a plane overhead or a cricket that has entered through an open window—could be absorbed into silence because they did not demand attention. During wartime, military sounds displace peaceful, natural ones; with time, however, those sounds too nestle under silence’s wings and cease to draw notice. The movement is not from noise to calm, but from disturbance to habituation. What once announced danger becomes part of the background against which daily life is heard.

Silence as a Habit of Attention

A winter snowfall briefly disrupts this adaptation. After feeding his stove and pinching out a yellow church candle, Sergeyich prepares to sleep, but the snow’s rustling makes the silence feel incomplete. The distant bombardment has become so familiar that its absence, rather than its presence, unsettles him. The episode turns listening into a measure of habituation: he has learned to accommodate the war’s sound, and now notices the gap it leaves.

The narration explicitly treats silence as personal and adjustable, not as an objective absence of sound. Sounds that cause no irritation and do not turn a person’s head eventually fuse into quiet. That formulation explains how wartime silence can contain military noise without cancelling the reality of violence. The guns remain; what changes is their place in attention. The language gives a psychological process a sensory form, showing normalization not as a decision to approve of war, but as a gradual alteration in what the ear registers as exceptional.

The Dead, Snow, and Imagined Spring

The dead man in the field reveals the moral cost of that altered hearing. As he lies awake, Sergeyich tries to comfort himself with the thought that heavy snow will cover the body until the spring thaw. He imagines that birdsong will drown out cannon fire, because the birds will be nearby and the cannons far away. Yet even this hopeful picture makes room for shells: perhaps, through drunkenness or drowsiness, the gunners will drop one or two on Little Starhorodivka once a month at most. He imagines them falling only where nothing living remains—the cemetery, churchyard, or abandoned, windowless kolkhoz administration building.

The hope is therefore inseparable from an accommodation to continuing danger. Snow may cover the dead, spring may return birdsong, and the bombardment may become infrequent, but none of these thoughts ends the war. The imagined quiet depends on the guns being distant and on the village being treated as already empty of life. The passage’s measured, almost practical reasoning shows how a person living amid violence can make room for consolation without mistaking it for safety.

Moments When the Pattern Breaks

Elsewhere, the soundscape briefly appears to reverse. On a morning walk toward the church, Sergeyich finds the silence almost unbelievably peaceful and becomes convinced that even the distant sounds of war have disappeared. A raven’s wings pass close enough to make him pull his head down between his shoulders. He then follows the bird with his eyes, smiles, and walks on. The bodily flinch preserves the memory of danger even when the morning seems free of it: the body reacts before the quiet can be trusted.

A later yard scene distinguishes peacetime silence from military silence by the absence of even the muffled roar of distant explosions. Sergeyich rests his shovel against the fence, enters the bee-shed, moves aside a protective sheet of metal, and presses his ear to a hive. He can hear no sound, but feels its wall tremble. The hive’s wall functions like an inward-turned eardrum: vibration is sound registered through the body of the wood rather than heard directly. His whispered approval that the bees will soon return to work locates a fragile continuity in their seasonal life, while the distinction between peacetime and wartime quiet remains present in the scene.

Clocks, Bees, and the Novel’s Soundscape

During a February meal, an alarm clock occupies the middle of the table beside a candle. Its soothing tick-tock flows into the silence of Sergeyich’s home, which the narration compares to a huge bottle of thick glass: near sounds can be made out at its mouth, but only with difficulty. The image makes quiet feel like a container that holds, rather than eliminates, sound. Even within it, Sergeyich anticipates releasing his six hives in spring, imagining them as six regiments sent out across flowering fields. The military comparison carries the war into his thoughts, but his bees belong to work and renewal rather than combat.

Across these scenes, silence repeatedly shifts according to what Sergeyich expects and what his surroundings permit him to hear. Snow can mask bombardment and make its absence conspicuous; a clock can become a soothing centre in a room; a raven’s wings can trigger a defensive gesture; a hive can communicate through vibration. The novel gives its civilian experience of war no single dramatic sound. Instead, it traces the slow change by which explosions enter the ordinary, and uses small breaks in that pattern to show what the habit of listening has not erased.