The Southern Russian steppes are the setting of Armand’s childhood abduction, an origin remembered through sudden violence rather than through a stable account of home. The scene makes the place significant as the point from which his familiar world is severed: carried away as a child, he cannot even identify the country he is leaving.

Setting and Abduction

The steppes appear in a vision that begins with horsemen gathering on the horizon. Their approach gives way to screams and a child running in crude peasant’s clothes; the horsemen catch him, struggle with his kicking body, throw him over a saddle, and carry him away. The child is Armand. The sequence offers no domestic detail about life on the steppes; instead, it defines the landscape through the abrupt arrival of the raiders and the forced departure that follows.

A Homeland the Child Cannot Name

The narration identifies the place as the southern steppes of Russia, but Armand does not know that it is Russia. He recognizes only the immediate terms of his world—Mother, Father, Church, God, and Satan—without understanding the name of his home or even the name of his language. The gap between the reader’s geographical knowledge and the child’s bewilderment makes the abduction more than a change of location: it is a rupture in the foundations by which he could understand where he belongs.

The First of Many Displacements

From the steppes, Armand is taken into a succession of unfamiliar worlds. The ship’s darkness, tumult, and unending sickness lead to Constantinople, whose vast buildings, slave-auction blocks, foreign speech, and threats by gesture confront him as an environment he cannot interpret or escape. Only years beyond a mortal lifetime will he look back and give names and histories to the officials, keepers, warriors, and Venetians he encounters. The steppes therefore mark the beginning of a long retrospective process: the child is removed before he can understand his loss, and the adult must later reconstruct the worlds through which he was carried.