person
Staff-Captain Yaroshevich
Yaroshevich
also: штабс-капитан Ярошевич, лях Ярошевич
A staff-captain of Klimov's regiment, evidently Catholic and of Polish extraction, who appears among the faces streaming through Klimov's delirium; the delirious Klimov shouts a garbled joke about him to Father Alexander.
Reading notes
- Typhus §38 "the Pole Yaroshevich has run off to the woods!"
"Лях" (lyakh) is an old, originally neutral but by this period folk-humorous Russian word for "Pole," and "до лясу" mimics the Polish-accented Russian sometimes put in the mouths of Polish characters for comic effect (playing on "lyakh"/"lyas," "woods"). Klimov recalls that Father Alexander habitually ribbed the regiment's Catholic (and typically ethnically Polish) officers with this nickname in a spirit of collegial teasing, and tries to repeat the joke to make the priest laugh; that Father Alexander does not laugh, and instead grows more solemn, is the detail that signals how gravely ill Klimov appears to the one person at his bedside licensed to say so plainly.