"Doctor Vera" by Boris Polevoy, summary Automatic translate

Boris Polevoy’s novella "Doctor Vera" was written in 1964–1965. This work is a profound reflection on human duty, patriotism, and remaining true to one’s ideals in history’s darkest moments. The book’s most important detail lies in its documentary basis. The main character is based on a real-life figure — a female doctor from the city of Kalinin (called Verkhnevolzhsk in the novella) who accomplished a heroic medical and civic feat under Nazi occupation. The book was successfully adapted into a film in 1967, and its plot continues the tradition of the famous "Story of a Real Man," depicting the heroism of Soviet people on the invisible front.

The tragic autumn of 1926 and the beginning of the occupation

The action takes place in Verkhnevolzhsk during the first year of the Great Patriotic War. The city is undergoing a spontaneous and hasty evacuation under constant bombing and artillery fire from the Nazis. A young surgeon, Vera Nikolaevna Treshnikova, leads a small medical team, which has effectively become an underground hospital. The situation is complicated by Vera’s personal tragedy: her husband, Semyon, an honest party worker and Bolshevik, was slandered and repressed shortly before the war. Despite the unfair stigma of "wife of an enemy of the people," Vera remains loyal to her homeland and professional duty.

On the night of the final exodus of Soviet troops from the city, Vera unsuccessfully waits for the trucks promised by hospital chief Sergei Dubinin to evacuate the wounded. The bridge over the Volga is blown up right before her eyes. Her escape is cut off. Vera returns to the damp, cold basements of the gas shelter in the destroyed Hospital Town, where about sixty seriously wounded Soviet soldiers and civilians remain, along with her own children — teenager Domka and little Stalka.

Organizing an underground hospital

In the underground hospital, Vera is the only qualified doctor. Her first assistants are the stern and practical nurse Maria Grigoryevna Feld’yegereva and the former operating room nurse Fedosya (Aunt Fenya), who has assumed the duties of a surgical nurse. On the very first day of the occupation, a teenager named Vasilko, seriously wounded in the stomach, is brought to Vera in a wheelbarrow. Right during a complex operation, the first Nazi soldiers, led by an officer, burst into the basement. Aunt Fenya and Vera herself demonstrate incredible courage: they drive the armed enemies out of the sterile operating room, demanding respect for medical laws. The German officer complies and leaves.

Maria Grigoryevna demonstrates exceptional efficiency. While Vera operates, she burns all the military uniforms of the wounded Red Army soldiers to save them from immediate execution. Later, Vera receives an official order ("befehl") from the city commandant’s office appointing her chief physician ("shef-arts") of the civilian hospital. The document requires the immediate notification of any Bolsheviks, commissars, or Jews to the commandant’s office under penalty of death under martial law. Vera hides this order from the staff, determined to violate it every day.

Soon, new forces arrive at the hospital. An elderly and experienced paramedic, Ivan Aristarkhovich Nasedkin, with a reputation in the city as the great "healer" of Krasnaya Slobodka, deliberately remains in the city to treat Russians. His merchant background and unruly nature had often caused him problems before the war, but now his dry, strong hands save lives. Also, that night, a severely shell-shocked Colonel Vasily Kharitonovich Sukhokhlebov is brought to the hospital. He is concealed under the guise of civilian agronomist Anatoly Karlov. Sukhokhlebov, an old communist, quickly becomes the spiritual organizer and political leader of the underground collective. He forces every soldier to memorize a fictitious civilian "legend" in case of inspections.

The colonel is brought in by medical orderly Antonina (Anton) and the desperate underground intelligence agent Volodya Mudrik. Both are former circus performers. Mudrik leads a dangerous nightlife in the city, procuring scarce food and medicine for the hospital. The food crisis is temporarily resolved when the ambulatory wounded, led by Maria Grigoryevna, volunteer to dig through the littered storerooms of the destroyed building and find supplies of cereals, flour, and canned goods. Later, they organize expeditions out of town to retrieve the carcasses of dead horses, supplying the hospital with horse meat.

A visit to the commandant’s office and a meeting with Lanskaya

German medical supervision is carried out by Captain Dr. Kraus ("Tolstolobik") — an elderly, intelligent German who clearly sympathizes with Vera and is secretly nervous about the Wehrmacht’s failures near Moscow. However, the situation deteriorates sharply when Vera is sent to the commandant’s office for mandatory passport registration and an Ausweis.

At the commandant’s office, Vera unexpectedly encounters Kira Vladimirovna Lanskaya, a famous actress from the local theater. Lanskaya, presumed dead, remained in the city with her husband, the theater’s artistic director, Vyacheslav Vinokurov, who had agreed to become the vice-mayor for cultural affairs. Lanskaya enjoys Nazi patronage and takes Vera straight to the office of the cruel SS Sturmbannführer Otto Kirchner, without waiting in line. There, Vera encounters the terrified colorist engineer Blitshteyn, whose Jewish family is doomed. Lanskaya behaves provocatively, flirts with the commandant, and takes Vera to her home, where she drinks cognac and confesses her deep contempt for her collaborator husband and herself, torn between creative egotism and nostalgia for her former life.

After visiting Lanskaya, Vera secretly visits Blitshtein’s gravely ill wife in a house on the grounds of the Bolshevichka factory, violating Nazi racial laws. Later, Sukhokhlebov, through underground activists, organizes the evacuation of Blitshtein’s daughters. Zinaida Bogdanova (the mother of Vasilko, who died of peritonitis) hides one of them, little Raya, in the hospital, becoming attached to the orphan as if she were her own.

Escalating struggle and "reverse medicine"

SS punitive units arrive in Verkhnevolzhsk. SS Hauptsturmführer von Schöneberg, a fanatical, rat-eyed Nazi who speaks perfect Russian, arrives at the hospital for a surprise inspection. He demands medical records ("mourning sheets") and announces an imminent visit by a medical commission to determine why the wounded are taking so long to be discharged. Von Schöneberg suspects the soldiers are hiding.

To save wounded soldiers from being sent to concentration camps or forced labor, Vera Nikolaevna and Ivan Aristarkhovich decide on a desperate measure — "reverse medicine." Nasedkin trains the soldiers to feign symptoms, and Vera, the night before the commission’s meeting, deliberately opens the already healed wounds of sixteen soldiers with a scalpel, destroying granulation tissue and applying new stitches to simulate an inflammatory process. Two of them are given false plaster casts. The von Schoneberg Commission overlooks the trick, dismissing the prolonged treatment as a result of "Slavic filth" and poor hygiene.

On Christmas Eve, underground fighters throw grenades into the window of the officers’ variety show where Lanskaya was singing for German officers. Several Nazis are killed, and the actress herself, wounded by shrapnel, is brought by the SS to Vera for treatment. In response to the terrorist attack, the occupiers begin mass arrests. The Nazis arrest Ivan Aristarkhovich Nasedkin, who had previously flatly refused to accept the post of deputy mayor for health, proudly declaring that "Russian conscience is not a commodity." They also arrest Pyotr Pavlovich Nikitin, Semyon’s father and Vera’s father-in-law. It turns out that the old mechanic, who opened a legitimate workshop under a sign emblazoned with a swastika, was in fact harboring underground fighters and a radio.

Execution of patriots and liberation

Vera Nikolaevna is forcibly summoned to the commandant’s office to attend the public execution of the "bandit leaders." On Octagonal Square, von Schoneberg demonstratively takes Vera by the arm and leads her to a "place of honor" next to officers and Mayor Razdolsky, seeking to discredit the Soviet doctor in front of the crowd of townspeople. Nasedkin, Nikitin, and an unknown military commissar are led to the scaffold of a truck. Nasedkin spits in the face of a collaborationist priest attempting to present the cross. Pyotr Pavlovich Nikitin, just before the noose, manages to free his bound hands, knocks down the executioner, hurls a chair at Mayor Razdolsky, and manages to shout into the crowd, "Their time is up!" The occupiers machine-gun the patriots right on the scaffold. At that moment, Mudrik throws anti-tank grenades from the crowd, destroying the truck and its guards.

Soon, the Nazis attempt to take valuable equipment and the autoclave repaired by Pyotr Pavlovich from the hospital. Vera Nikolaevna fakes a typhus outbreak in the basement. Panic-stricken, Lieutenant Prusak declares a strict quarantine in the hospital, hangs a yellow flag, and posts a guard outside. The hospital is sealed off and without food. Vasily Kharitonovich Sukhokhlebov assumes command of the basement’s defense. The steel doors are sealed, and the soldiers scavenge for axes and crowbars.

A few days later, a powerful artillery barrage by Soviet troops under the command of General Ivan Konev begins. German torchbearers attempt to burn down the basement with gasoline, but Mudrik and Antonina attack the enemy through a secret passage. Antonina dies, shielding Volodya, while Domka and the medics drag the seriously wounded Mudrik into the operating room. Vera operates on Mudrik amid the roar of the cannonade, saving his life. The city is liberated by Soviet troops. Sergei Dubinin, who lost his right arm in the fighting, returns to the hospital.

The ordeal of the investigation and return to life

Despite her heroic act of saving the wounded, Vera Nikolaevna Treshnikova is arrested by the NKVD on charges of collaborating with the occupiers and espionage. The main evidence against her is the false testimony of the arrested Vice-Mayor Vinokurov. Out of a selfish, twisted love for Lanskaya, Vinokurov slandered both his wife and Vera, wanting to "go to the grave together." Vera shares a cell with Lanskaya, broken by her husband’s betrayal and the loss of her beauty, and with the timekeeper Kislyakova, who betrayed Blitshtein’s children to the Germans for their belongings. Unable to bear the shame and the investigation, Lanskaya secretly takes a lethal dose of a German sleeping pill and dies in her cell, leaving a note declaring her innocence.

Investigator Petrov, a curly-haired young man, harshly interrogates Vera, linking her case to that of her repressed husband, Semyon. In a fit of despair, Vera gives him her husband’s last letter, which he had once thrown out of a prison train, in which Semyon explained that his confessions were forced lies, encrypted in capital letters.

Justice soon prevails. State security agencies thoroughly investigate the testimony of the wounded soldiers from the underground hospital and Colonel Sukhokhlebov’s report. Vinokurov’s false accusations are exposed. Vera Nikolaevna is fully exonerated, her passport is returned, and she is released from prison with the address "Comrade Treshnikova."

Vera returns to Pyotr Pavlovich’s surviving house to her children, Domka and Stalka, who have been taken in by her sister-in-law, Tatyana. Colonel Sukhokhlebov, having regained his health and assumed command of the Guards Division, leaves his salary certificate to the children. Vera meets Vasily Kharitonovich on the streets of the resurgent Verkhnevolzhsk, where the first tram has already been launched. A deep, mature feeling blossoms between them. The front’s chief surgeon, Professor Krivonogov, and Valentina Gromova, who has returned to command, acknowledge the excellent results of the underground hospital. The head of the medical battalion, Svetlichny, offers Vera a position as a surgeon in Sukhokhlebov’s division. Vera Nikolaevna Treshnikova, strong and renewed by her trials, prepares to accept this offer in order to continue saving the lives of Soviet soldiers on the road to final victory.