concept
Philistines
also: Филистимляне, Philistine
An ancient people of the Hebrew Bible, adversaries of Israel in the era of Saul and David; von Steinberg likens the endless line of construction lights on the steppe to a Philistine army camped and waiting for morning battle, an image both he and Ananyev extend into a meditation on the fate of vanished peoples.
Reading notes
- Lights §183 To the Baron these lights recall the Amalekites
The story's closing image returns explicitly to von Steinberg's opening simile (loc 13), with Ananyev now offering his own reading of the same lights as a figure for scattered human thoughts that "vanish somewhere far off" without illuminating anything -- the two competing readings of the lights are left standing side by side, unreconciled, exactly like the philosophical argument that frames them.