The Narrator and Gavrila: Political Instruction

Gavrila’s relationship with the narrator combines practical care with an ambitious political education. In the regiment, Gavrila looks after the boy, teaches him to read, and offers a comprehensive account of how the world works. His instruction gives the narrator tools for learning and a new sense of purpose, but it also introduces a system in which individual lives are judged and directed by the collective. The boy’s response moves between hope and apprehension: Gavrila makes human action seem meaningful, while the same doctrine leaves the narrator wondering how much authority he will retain over his own future.

Identity and Circumstances

Gavrila is a political officer in the regiment. He is said to have lost his entire family in the first days of the Nazi invasion, a personal bereavement that places him among people whose lives have been shaped by the war. He and Mitka, the regiment’s sharpshooting instructor, are the two men who look after the narrator most of the time. Gavrila’s care is not presented only as protection from immediate hardship: he makes time to teach the boy in the field library, treating education as a practical necessity as well as preparation for a place in Soviet society.

The narrator is already over eleven, and Gavrila points out that Russian boys of that age can read and write and may even fight the enemy. The comparison gives the lessons urgency. The narrator does not want to be regarded as a child, so he studies industriously and watches the soldiers, imitating their behavior. Their relationship thus begins with an unequal but purposeful exchange: Gavrila supplies instruction and a model of adult conduct; the narrator, eager not to remain helpless or underestimated, works to absorb both.

Literacy and a Larger World

Gavrila helps the narrator read his first book, Maxim Gorky’s Childhood. Its young protagonist has lost his father and, after his mother’s death, is left alone, yet grows up to become a great writer. The narrator reads the book several times, drawing hope from a story of childhood hardship that does not end in defeat. Gavrila’s choice of reading consequently connects literacy to the possibility of survival and achievement, rather than merely to a schoolroom skill.

The narrator’s response also reveals how the lessons change his sense of what knowledge can do. Printed pages allow him to enter a world that seems as real as ordinary experience; books disclose what people think and plan, not just what can be seen from the outside. He compares reading favorably with canned meat, finding the world of books richer than everyday life. This imaginative expansion sits alongside Gavrila’s political teaching: books open a world to the boy, while Gavrila explains how that world is organized and who, in his account, has the right to guide it.

Political Instruction and Human Agency

Gavrila teaches that the order of the world has nothing to do with God, and that God does not exist. Priests, in his explanation, invented religious beliefs to deceive people who did not understand the natural order or trust their own powers. This lesson stands in sharp contrast to the narrator’s earlier experiences of religious fear and haunting. The narrator has witnessed the passage of trains carrying Jews and heard villagers interpret their fate as divine punishment; later, he imagines the ash left by burned victims as haunted by a watching ghost. Gavrila’s secular explanation offers a direct alternative to that supernatural framework, recasting human events as the result of human forces rather than divine judgment.

In Gavrila’s account, people determine the course of their lives and are the masters of their destinies. Each person matters because individual actions join with countless others to create a larger historical pattern. He illustrates this with the image of a woman’s seemingly random stitches contributing to a floral design on a tablecloth or bedcover. The metaphor preserves a place for small acts, but also makes their meaning visible only from a higher vantage point. Gavrila extends the image to leaders: a wise person who seeks others’ welfare can guide the nameless mass, directing people as a weaver guides colored threads.

The narrator hears this explanation in a regiment saturated with portraits of such leaders. Gavrila presents Joseph Stalin as the living leader under whose direction the Red Army is defeating the Germans and bringing liberated peoples an equal way of life. In that promised order, there would be neither rich and poor nor persecution of the dark by the fair, and no people doomed to gas chambers. Gavrila and the other soldiers, he says, owe their education, rank, and homes to Stalin; the narrator’s medical care and recovery, too, are folded into this account of collective debt. The political lesson therefore speaks directly to the boy’s dependency: it interprets the care he receives as evidence of a system’s beneficence.

The Collective and the Narrator’s Unease

Gavrila presents the Communist Party as the institution capable of discerning and directing the larger pattern. Its members are selected and specially trained, assigned tasks, and prepared to endure hardship or death for working people. Like an engine pulling a train, the Party leads people toward better conditions; Joseph Stalin is described as the engineer at its throttle. This is not only an abstract doctrine. Gavrila returns from frequent Party meetings hoarse and exhausted, and tells the narrator that members evaluate one another, criticize themselves and their colleagues, and praise or identify shortcomings. Constant vigilance and the removal of those deemed obstacles are described as sources of the Party’s strength.

The narrator absorbs the teaching closely, writing questions on the slate Gavrila has given him and listening to soldiers before and after meetings. He even eavesdrops through the canvas walls of the tent. His attention is evidence of the confidence the lessons have produced, but it is not simple assent. He wonders how the Party might judge him when he grows up and whether the collective would assign him to deep-water diving because his near-drowning under the ice seemed useful to it. His own terror of water, in this imagined example, might not outweigh the group’s assessment of his suitability. The episode exposes a tension inside Gavrila’s promise of meaningful participation: the collective can give purpose to an individual life, but may also claim authority to decide what that life should be.

Gavrila’s mentorship therefore offers the narrator both a route out of isolation and a new source of apprehension. The boy learns to read, finds hope in a fellow child’s story, and encounters an account of history that insists human beings can shape their circumstances. At the same time, the prescribed paths of the Party leave him unsure whether personal judgment can stand against collective judgment. The relationship is significant not because the narrator simply accepts or rejects Gavrila’s teaching, but because the lessons make him imagine, at once, a place within a purposeful community and the possibility of losing control over the direction of his own life.