Lozinsky

Lozinsky appears only in the testimony of Anatole Kryltzoff, but his execution is the moral pivot on which the novel's critique of state violence turns. A young Pole arrested with the Jewish boy Rozovsky for attempting to escape from a convoy while being transported for a minor political offense, Lozinsky was condemned to death in a trial that no one expected to end in a capital sentence. The prisoners in the jail, Kryltzoff among them, initially believed the sentence was merely a threat and would not be confirmed. But one evening a watchman told Kryltzoff that carpenters had arrived and were erecting the gallows. The news spread through the prison in a silence that was itself a form of horror: no one tapped the walls, no one sang, and the cells remained deathly still all evening. At ten o'clock the watchman returned to say that a hangman had arrived from Moscow. Kryltzoff, trying to hide the truth, gave an evasive answer when Rozovsky called out to ask why there was no singing or tapping that night. The night that followed was, in Kryltzoff's words, "terrible." He listened to every sound until morning, when he heard doors opening and many footsteps. The prison inspector, usually a resolute, self-satisfied man, looked ghastly pale and downcast, seemingly frightened. His assistant, frowning but resolute, called out in a strange voice: "Lozinsky, get up and put on clean linen." Lozinsky emerged from his cell and passed Kryltzoff's door. He was a handsome young man of the fine Polish type, broad-shouldered, with a head covered in fine, fair, curly hair like a cap, and beautiful blue eyes. But his face was dreadful, gaunt, and livid. He stopped at Kryltzoff's window and asked for a cigarette. The assistant hurriedly gave him one, and Lozinsky lit it and began to smoke, seeming to think. Then, as if remembering something, he spoke: "It is cruel and unjust. I have committed no crime." Kryltzoff saw something quiver in his white young throat. Lozinsky threw away the cigarette and stepped from the door. Rozovsky then appeared at the window, his childish face red and moist, also in clean linen, his trousers too wide, trembling all over. He asked pitifully about cough medicine, but no one answered. The assistant called out in a squeaking tone, "Now, then, no nonsense. Let us go." Rozovsky seemed incapable of understanding what awaited him and hurried, almost ran, in front of him along the corridor. Then he drew back, and Kryltzoff heard his shrill voice and cries, then the trampling of feet and general hubbub. He was shrieking and sobbing. The sounds grew fainter, and at last the door rattled and all was quiet. Both were hanged. A watchman later told Kryltzoff that Lozinsky did not resist, but Rozovsky struggled for a long time, so that they had to pull him up onto the scaffold and force his head into the noose. The watchman, a stupid fellow, said it was "not at all frightful"—after they were hanged they only shrugged their shoulders twice, like this, and then the hangman pulled a bit to tighten the noose, and it was all up, and they never budged. Kryltzoff repeated the watchman's words, tried to smile, and burst into sobs instead. From that moment, Kryltzoff said, he became a revolutionist. Lozinsky's death is not merely a biographical detail; it is the novel's most concentrated image of the state's capacity for arbitrary, ritualized cruelty. The execution is presented not as a legal procedure but as a bureaucratic murder, carried out by men who are themselves afraid, who go through the motions of a grotesque ceremony, and who afterward describe the death throes with the casualness of a tradesman reporting a job done. The fact that Lozinsky and Rozovsky were condemned for a trivial offense—attempting to escape from a convoy, without wounding anyone—underscores the disproportion between the crime and the punishment, and the randomness with which the state selects its victims. Lozinsky's fate is the event that shatters Kryltzoff's previous political indifference and drives him into the revolutionary underground, where he will eventually be sentenced to hard labor for life and die of consumption in Siberia. The execution also haunts Nekhludoff's moral awakening: when he hears Kryltzoff's story, he is forced to confront the reality that the legal system he has been serving as a juryman is not merely flawed but murderous. Lozinsky himself has no voice in the novel except through Kryltzoff's memory, but his death is the novel's most powerful argument against the legitimacy of state punishment. The image of the handsome young Pole, his white throat quivering, asking for a cigarette before being led to the gallows, remains as a permanent indictment of the system that killed him.