Mitka’s Rule of Revenge

Mitka’s Rule of Revenge is a personal code that makes self-respect depend on answering injury, while measuring retaliation by the suffering the injured person actually feels. Taught to the unnamed boy narrator by Mitka the Cuckoo, the rule gives private judgment priority over public opinion: wrongs cannot all be weighed by an outside tribunal, and each person must decide what justice requires. Its apparent simplicity carries a grave consequence. Retaliation is presented not merely as a response to violence but as a means of remaining able to live with oneself, even when that means defying the expectations of others.

Self-Respect and the Duty to Answer

The rule begins with a warning against accepting mistreatment. Mitka teaches that a person who allows others to abuse him loses self-respect, and that life without self-respect becomes meaningless. The countermeasure is revenge against those who have done wrong. This is not framed as a general law administered by a community; the injured person must decide what was suffered and what answer is due.

The teaching makes retaliation a duty to oneself. A wrong left unanswered can become an enduring injury to a person’s sense of who he is, rather than a slight that simply disappears when the immediate encounter ends. Mitka’s account therefore joins outward action to inward judgment: the avenger acts against an offender, but also tries to restore an image of himself that would otherwise be damaged by acquiescence.

Proportion Measured by Pain

The rule does not set a fixed punishment for a particular act. Instead, retaliation should correspond to the pain, bitterness, and humiliation caused in the person who suffered it. A rude remark may feel like a lash to one person; a slap may be experienced as a thousand blows by another. Mitka’s examples insist that identical actions need not produce identical injuries. One person might forget a slap within an hour, while another, whose experience recalls hundreds of days of beatings, might be tormented by it for weeks.

The principle also limits revenge in the other direction. If a blow from a stick hurts no more than a slap, Mitka says, the answer should be for a slap, not for the weapon’s apparent severity. The measure is neither the offender’s intention as an outside observer might assess it nor the visible force of the act alone. It is the harm as experienced by the person who must live with its consequences. Yet the rule leaves that person to judge the scale of the injury, with no shared authority to settle competing accounts or prevent retaliation from becoming another wrong.

The Teaching in the Narrator’s Life

The unnamed boy narrator recalls Mitka’s teachings whenever he faces the violence of orphanage life. He believes he cannot let himself be mistreated, and the rule offers a way to interpret the assaults and humiliations around him as injuries that demand an answer. At the orphanage, fights and sudden attacks are ordinary; the boys’ nicknames make their different forms of violence almost into a catalogue. The Tank uses his fists, the Cannon throws heavy objects, and the Sniper throws rocks from a distance. Among the girls, the Grenade cuts faces with a hidden nail, while the Partisan trips passersby and the Torpedo attacks a fallen opponent. In this setting, Mitka’s code is not an abstract argument detached from danger: it is a principle the boy carries into a place where violence has many forms and can arrive without warning.

The rule does not, however, give the boy control over his body in a fight. He describes his hands as taking on a life of their own, remaining locked to an opponent, and says that he cannot calm down after a scuffle. Nor can he make himself flee when a group of boys approaches. His legs grow leaden, and he stops to wait for his attackers. These reactions complicate any simple picture of revenge as confident mastery. Mitka’s teaching tells him how to interpret an injury and what self-respect requires, but it does not erase fear, involuntary physical responses, or the turmoil that follows a fight.

Private Justice and the Solitary Summit

The rule’s fullest example is Mitka’s own revenge for the deaths of his friends. He acts regardless of what others may think, risking his place in the regiment and his title as a Hero of the Soviet Union. The narrator understands that public honors cannot settle the matter for Mitka: what counts is whether he can still respect himself. Mitka’s training as a sniper—the discipline of eye, hand, and breath—would, in this understanding, lose its value if he failed to act on behalf of his dead friends. Revenge becomes a test of the identity he must answer to privately, even when the outward cost is his standing among others.

The narrator’s admiration for this act leads him to a larger contrast. He sees that there can be many routes to a summit, but also imagines reaching one alone, or with the help of a single friend, as he and Mitka did when they climbed a tree. This private ascent stands apart from the march of the working masses. The rule thus links personal justice to a form of independence from collective judgment: a person may have to make and bear a decision without relying on the approval of the group. Its force lies in this insistence on individual responsibility; its danger lies in leaving each injured person to determine, and carry out, the punishment that justice demands.