borzoi

The borzoi occupies a distinctive place in the novel’s rural and aristocratic world as a Russian hunting dog bred and trained for pursuit. At the Rostov estate, the animal belongs to an elaborate institution of sport: kennels, huntsmen, whippers-in, horses, calls, leashes, and inherited expertise all converge in the chase. Yet the borzoi is never reduced to a decorative emblem of wealth. Its value is tested in motion, where speed, courage, fatigue, instinct, and chance repeatedly overturn human expectations.

Identity and Setting

The borzois are central to the Rostov family’s autumn hunt at Otradnoe. The season is introduced through the changing countryside: morning frosts have hardened the rain-soaked ground, winter rye has emerged beside trampled stubble, and the young wolves have grown larger than dogs. The hounds have been so heavily worked that the huntsmen decide to rest them for three days before the expedition. This detail establishes the borzoi as a working animal whose condition matters materially, not as an ornamental possession.

The scale of the Rostov hunt reveals the social organization surrounding the breed. The old Count Ilya Rostov has maintained an enormous hunting establishment but has now handed its management to Nikolai Rostov. On the appointed morning, the party takes fifty-four hounds, six hunt attendants and whippers-in, eight borzoi kennelmen, more than forty borzois, and twenty horsemen. Including the dogs carried on family members’ leashes, the procession contains about a hundred and thirty dogs. Each dog knows its master and its call, while each human participant knows a particular place and duty. The borzois therefore embody both aristocratic abundance and disciplined coordination.

The Wolf Hunt

The most intense demonstration of the borzois’ capacities occurs when Nikolai Rostov sees an old gray-backed wolf running across an apparently deserted field. He has long wished to take an old wolf only once in his life, and the sight produces an almost disbelieving happiness. His attention narrows to the animal and to the dogs that might intercept it. The chase is not presented as a simple victory of command over quarry; it unfolds through hesitation, error, changing distances, and the independent reactions of each borzoi.

Milka, a black-marked dog with powerful quarters, gains on the wolf and moves ahead of it, but she suddenly raises her tail and stiffens her forelegs when the wolf turns to face her. Lyubim then rushes in, seizes the wolf by the hindquarters, and jumps away in terror. The wolf crouches, bares her teeth, rises, and continues forward while the pack follows without closing the distance. Nikolai’s calls cannot make the dogs perfectly obedient to his intention. Their pursuit remains an encounter between trained bodies and a frightened, dangerous animal.

Karay, the old borzoi, becomes Nikolai’s final hope. Age and felted hair weigh upon him, and his slower pace makes his initial interception seem badly calculated. A young yellowish borzoi from another leash then attacks from the front and nearly knocks the wolf over, but the wolf springs up, turns on the dog, and leaves it lying with its head on the ground and a bleeding gash in its side. The injury makes the hunt’s excitement inseparable from vulnerability: the dogs are hunters, but they are also exposed bodies capable of pain and defeat.

The interruption gives Karay time to come within five paces. The old dog finally reaches the wolf, and the two roll together into a gully. For Nikolai, the sight of Karay pinning the wolf by the throat is the happiest moment of his life. Even then, the apparent victory collapses. The wolf thrusts up her head, frees herself when Karay loses his grip, leaps from the gully, and runs on. Karay, bruised or wounded, struggles out behind her. The borzoi’s achievement is therefore real but incomplete: strength and loyalty produce the decisive contact, yet the quarry escapes.

The Hare Hunt and Competition

The borzois also structure the later pursuit of a hare, where the hunt becomes a contest among dogs, owners, and reputations. Erza and Milka repeatedly close on the hare but fail to secure it. Erza pauses at the critical instant as if measuring the distance needed to seize the hind leg, allowing the hare to dart along the raised strip between winter rye and stubble. The dogs’ beauty and speed do not eliminate uncertainty; a moment of hesitation can restore the prey’s advantage.

The decisive animal is Uncle’s red borzoi, Rugay. Straining and curving his back, Rugay overtakes the leading dogs, pushes past them despite the effort required, drives the hare off the balk into the muddy rye field, and continues until both animals roll together in the mud. The surrounding dogs form a ring, and the humans gather around them. Uncle cuts off a pad from the hare and throws it to Rugay, declaring that the dog has beaten both the thousand-ruble and the one-ruble borzois. The contrast turns the chase into a judgment on breeding and price: the expensive dogs do not automatically win, while the successful dog earns recognition through action.

Nikolai insists that Milka had already tired the hare by running it down three times, whereas Ilagin’s groom argues that, after Erza’s earlier failure, any mongrel could have taken it. The disagreement shows how the borzois generate competing interpretations of merit. Their performance is measured not only by the final capture but also by endurance, timing, tactical pressure, and the circumstances created by other dogs. Natasha Rostova’s ecstatic cry completes the scene’s collective release, expressing through sound what the hunters express through excited speech.

Bodies, Discipline, and Human Control

The borzoi scenes contrast carefully organized human systems with the unpredictability of living bodies. The hunt appears orderly before it begins: dogs know their calls, riders know their positions, and the estate supplies the personnel and equipment needed for a large expedition. Once the chase starts, however, command becomes partial. A dog stiffens instead of seizing, another attacks and recoils, an old dog misjudges distance, and a wounded dog falls. The humans can call, spur, and interpret, but they cannot fully program the animals’ decisions.

This tension also links the borzois to the novel’s wider treatment of animals in aristocratic and military life. Elsewhere, horses carry troops through rain, dust, and retreat; a bear becomes the center of a drunken spectacle at Anatole Kuragin’s house; and military animals suffer from shortages alongside soldiers. In the Rostov hunt, the borzois are not passive scenery. Their fatigue, physical training, wounds, and successes determine the action. At the same time, the hunt reveals an unmistakably human-centered economy in which dogs are bred, priced, directed, rewarded, and judged according to their usefulness in pursuit.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The borzoi gives the hunting episodes their kinetic form and their emotional scale. Nikolai’s happiness depends on a chase whose outcome cannot be secured, while Uncle’s pride is vindicated by a red dog that defeats more expensive competitors. The dogs make visible a recurring contrast between plans and events: preparation creates the conditions for action, but instinct, terrain, fatigue, and chance decide what actually happens.

The narration also slows perception around the animals’ movements, changing a familiar aristocratic pastime into an unusually exact study of bodily sensation and risk. The wolf’s pauses, the borzois’ altered postures, Karay’s age, the young dog’s wound, and Rugay’s final roll in the mud restore difficulty and physical reality to an activity that could otherwise appear as mere privilege. The borzois thus stand at the intersection of sport, class, labor, affection, and violence. They are valuable possessions, trained workers, competitors, and independent agents whose bodies repeatedly remind the human participants that control over nature is always provisional.