Pavel Ivanych

Reading notes

• Gusev §39 Foolish, pitiful man that you are

  Pavel Ivanych's contempt here is aimed at Gusev's incuriosity about natural causes (the wind, the fish), not at the beating just described in the previous section, which he does not remark on at all -- one of several moments where Pavel Ivanych's self-styled moral clarity as "protest incarnate" (loc 65) proves selective.

• Gusev §65 I served three years in the Far East

  Pavel Ivanych's own service record -- three years in the same Far Eastern military-colonial world as Gusev's five -- undercuts the sharp distinction he draws a few lines earlier between himself, who "sees everything," and the "dark, blind" soldiers like Gusev; both men are being shipped home from the same institution.

• Gusev §85 He was a restless man!

  The bandaged soldier's brief epitaph for Pavel Ivanych -- offered without elaboration, immediately after his body has been carried above -- is the only direct assessment any other character makes of him in the whole story; neither his grand rhetoric nor his real suffering earns more than this one word, "restless," from the men who shared the sick bay with him.

• Gusev §92 he's of clerical rank, and priests have a lot of relations. They'll pray him through

  Gusev's folk-pragmatic theology -- salvation as something arranged through a well-connected family's prayers rather than earned by conduct -- answers the bandaged soldier's question about whether Pavel Ivanych will reach the kingdom of heaven with the same unreflective confidence Gusev brings to the story's other beliefs (the chained winds, loc 8-13; the baptized-versus-unbaptized rescue, loc 118).