The Great Patriotic War

The Great Patriotic War is the name Novotný gives to the Soviet war effort as he follows the Red Army’s advance toward Město. The expression enters the novel through a pub conversation, where military news, local hope, and uncertainty meet: an immense conflict is reduced to a front line on a map, yet that line threatens to reach the city itself.

The News at the Pub

At U Dobrého Vojáka, the pub below the hill past the children’s hospital, Laník hears that the Red Army is coming. The regular group gathered there after the morning shift consists mainly of workers from the armament factory by the river. News and rumor compete for their attention, and the central question is not whether the Soviet forces are advancing but when they will arrive and how close they have come.

The men’s difficulty imagining the front’s distance gives the news its scale. Carpathia, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Don, the Caucasus, and Moldava accumulate as names for vast regions, while the numbers of tanks, aircraft, soldiers, civilians, dead, and dying become almost too large to comprehend. The Great Patriotic War is therefore heard in Město not as a remote label but as a conflict whose geography is immense and whose consequences are approaching.

Novotný’s Map and the Coming Army

The men gather around Novotný, who treats every Soviet advance as a personal triumph. He speaks of Operation Bagration and produces a map showing the Soviet front swelling toward them. Its shape is compared to a bladder filled with red paint, threatening to burst across central Europe. The image gives a visual, almost bodily form to the advance: the front is not static information but a spreading force that could overwhelm the map’s boundaries and the men’s own city.

Novotný’s name for the conflict places the local conversation within the Soviet designation of the war. His confidence contrasts with the uncertainty shared by the group. The advance is cause for celebration to him, but its arrival remains imprecise, and the men cannot convert the immense distances into a reliable answer about when the army will reach Město.

Meaning in the Novel

The expression gathers the war’s competing dimensions into a single phrase. It carries the scale of a continental military campaign, but in the pub it is spoken amid workers’ rumors and practical questions about proximity. The scene lets the historical name circulate through local voices rather than presenting it as detached background: Novotný’s enthusiasm, the map, and the men’s uncertainty show how a vast conflict is understood through the partial knowledge available in a threatened city.

The episode also sets the Red Army’s anticipated arrival against Laník’s more guarded response. Although he may welcome the Soviets, he has no illusions about them. His concern that they might take the valuable onyx wall leads him to carry out Viktor Landauer’s final instruction and conceal it behind a partition of wood and plaster. In this context, the approaching army is both a possible deliverance from the war and a new uncertainty, while the phrase Great Patriotic War marks the distant military movement that is about to enter ordinary life in Město.