"Assuage My Sorrows" by Boris Vasiliev, summary Automatic translate

Boris Vasiliev’s novel, written in 1997, takes place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the personal fate of the young noblewoman Nadezhda Oleksina becomes inseparable from family memory, Moscow life, and Russian history on the eve of catastrophe. The title takes on a particular weight at the end, when the icon of the Mother of God "Assuage My Sorrows" appears during Ivan Kalyaev’s prison visit with Elizaveta Feodorovna, linking personal pain, the bloodshed of Khodynka, and the theme of moral judgment.

Nadya Oleksina grows up the youngest in a large family beset by one tragedy after another. Her mother dies suddenly, then her brother Vladimir dies in a duel. Her older brother, Gavriil, having survived Turkish captivity and lost faith in the empire’s policies in the Balkans, commits suicide. Her sister, Masha, sacrifices herself by covering a bomb she was about to throw at the Ufa governor when her children accidentally happen to be nearby. These deaths shape a family legend where honor, service, and extreme action are more important than a peaceful well-being.

After a series of losses, Nadya is raised by her sister, Varvara, and her husband, Roman Trifonovich Khomyakov. Varvara is a powerful, collected, and devoted woman, while Khomyakov is a former millionaire, a man of rare business acumen and broad intelligence who managed to rise again after collapse, build a fortune, and maintain inner freedom. In the Khomyakov household, Nadya receives both strict care and room for self-love, and the memory of her brothers and sisters makes honor almost a family law for her.

From childhood, she felt special and sought her own path, first in her studies, then in writing. At school, Nadya quickly realized that the usual girlish games, flirtation, and pursuit of admirers were not her cup of tea, but she clearly had a talent for prose. Her teacher, Berezansky, noticed her literary talent, and a Christmas story about a freezing boy brought her her first publication in "Zadushevnoye Slovo," her first fee, and a feeling of almost instant victory. However, this early success also turned out to be her first lesson: the editors rejected her subsequent stories, and Khomyakov convinced Nadya that plots alone are not enough, that a writer needs a storehouse of ideas, acquired through life and the labor of thought.

Nadezhda dutifully completes private courses, earns the right to teach literature, and becomes increasingly drawn to journalism. She believes that journalism is the only way to make educated society hear the people’s voice, that same muffled howl of resentment and need that her maid, Fenichka, so surprisingly simply describes. Nadya dreams of first becoming a famous journalist, gathering observations and materials, and only then returning to long-form prose.

Before this serious life project, a dangerous episode occurs in her life involving Second Lieutenant Sergei Odoevsky. After a girlish infatuation and a moment of emotional blindness, she gives herself to him, almost certain that marriage will follow, but it quickly becomes clear that Odoevsky is a dishonest man. Her brother, Georgy, stands up for his sister’s honor: he finds his former friend, challenges him to a duel, and behaves with rare composure, deliberately not killing his opponent, even though the latter shoots to kill and only narrowly misses Georgy’s heart. The scandal ruins his career in the capital, and Nadya forever harbors a sense of guilt toward her brother, whose life she jeopardized with her actions.

In Moscow, preparing for the coronation of Nicholas II, Nadezhda meets two men at once, each of whom will shape her future destiny in their own way. One is the official Vikenty Kornelievich Vologodov, older than her, composed, reliable, and belonging to the world of state service and order. The other is the very young Ivan Kalyayev, a Nizhny Novgorod nobleman, still almost a high school student, a passionate debater for whom history is not a parade of uniforms and dates, but the soul of the people and a battlefield of moral struggle. Nadya is initially irritated by his insolence, but it is precisely in him that she senses the living nerve of the times, which she herself is only just beginning to tap into.

On the eve of the coronation celebrations, Nadya increasingly yearns to escape the familiar circle of salons and drawing rooms and embrace the real life of the people. Together with Fenichka, she sets off for Khodynka Field, where Muscovites have been promised royal gifts. The night before the distribution passes amid bonfires, songs, conversations, tired bodies, and the vernacular, which Nadya listens avidly to as a future reporter. She tries to find material for her essays here, but for now she views the crowd with both sympathy and a certain bookish naivety, not fully grasping the true scale of the disaster.

At dawn, this naivety perishes. A monstrous stampede ensues at Khodynka, the field turns into a trap, and the coronation celebration turns into a mass death. Nadya suffers a severe shock, lies unconscious for a long time, and Fenichka dies. For Nadezhda, this is no longer a newspaper story or a historical plot, but a personal catastrophe for which she feels guilty, because it was she who led the devoted girl away with her.

After Khodynka, the entire structure of her inner life changes. Nadya survives, slowly recovering, Varvara, Khomyakov, and Vologodov worry beside her, but the old Nadya — dreamy, proud, lively, capable of literary play and magical dreams — seems to remain buried beneath the Khodynka soil with the dead. Her silence, apathy, and fear of hurting others become her new state of mind. She thinks about Fenichka, about her brother Georgy, about the price of reckless actions, and about how no words can undo what has happened.

Both Vologodov and Kalyaev are drawn to her, but each goes their own way. Vologodov loves Nadya patiently and respectfully, tries to be there for her during her most difficult times, and ultimately wins her consent to marry him. Nadezhda marries him in the very village church where Varvara and Khomyakov once wed. Marriage, children, the external structure of her life, and a change of scenery do not restore her lost integrity: she remains fractured within, and what perished at Khodynka is no longer resurrected.

Kalyaev’s fate takes a different turn. A youthful rebellion, a debate about Russian history, and the national tragedy he witnessed lead him to revolutionary terror. For him, Khodynka becomes a moral benchmark, proof of the criminal nature of the regime, and so he decides to execute Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, whom he considers the main culprit of the Khodynka tragedy. Even in this, he maintains his rigid internal discipline: the first time Kalyaev refuses to throw a bomb, upon seeing the Grand Duke’s wife and children in a carriage, because he remembers Masha Oleksina, who bombed the governor’s children.

On his second attempt, Kalyaev carries out his plan. After the Grand Duke’s assassination, he doesn’t flee, accepts his arrest, and in a letter from Butyrka prison, he bluntly states that otherwise it would have been murder, not execution for Khodynka. During their meeting, Elizabeth Feodorovna brings him the icon "Assuage My Sorrows" and promises to pray for him. He, acknowledging the grief he’s caused her, nevertheless refuses clemency, believing his conscience to be clear before the memory of the Khodynka victims.

The novel’s finale shifts the action to 1905. On the night of May 10, Kalyaev is hanged in the Shlisselburg Fortress, and before his death, he manages to express his happiness at carrying out the sentence on the main culprit of the Khodynka tragedy. That same day, Nadezhda Ivanovna’s daughter, Lerochka Vologodova, turns five, and this detail imbues the ending with a bitter, almost familial, closure: life goes on, the children grow up, but old guilts, old victims, and old decisions still linger alongside the living.

Nadezhda Oleksina’s story moves from a proud girl’s dream to a difficult realization about people and herself. Her journey takes her through literary hopes, false love, family shame, fraternal sacrifice, an encounter with living history, and the Khodynka massacre, after which she can no longer live with the same words or feelings. Against this backdrop, Kalyaev’s fate emerges as a tragic offshoot of the same story: the same era, the same moral breakdown, the same inability to come to terms with violence, only escalated to the bomb, prison, and the gallows.