Live and Remember

In the Siberian village of Atamanovka, Nastya Guskova lives with her elderly in-laws, laboring at the collective farm and in the lumberyard alongside other women whose husbands are away fighting in the Great Patriotic War. Her husband, Andrey Guskov, has been at the front from the early days of the conflict, serving in a ski battalion near Moscow, carrying reconnaissance duties near Smolensk, and later joining a howitzer battery after being wounded at Stalingrad. When he’s discharged from a hospital in Novosibirsk in October 1944, he makes a brief, unauthorized trip home but quickly realizes he won’t be able to return to his unit on time, effectively becoming a deserter. He hides in an abandoned cabin in the taiga, confiding only in Nastya and begging her not to reveal his location. As time passes, she discovers she is pregnant—a long-awaited joy shadowed by the stigma and accusations of infidelity from her in-laws and the village, who believe she betrayed a husband they assume to be lost at the front.

As Victory Day approaches, the village gathers to celebrate and remember the fallen, mentioning Andrey among those lost without knowing that Nastya has kept his secret all along. Rumors of Andrey’s desertion spark a police investigation led by Officer Burdak, who, with a group of men, begins to follow Nastya, suspecting she knows his whereabouts. In a bid to warn her husband, she rows across the river to reach him, but realizing she cannot escape the relentless pursuit, she drowns in the water. Her death shakes the community, and the villagers later mourn her, attributing her tragedy to the harsh, unyielding scrutiny she endured.

The story ends in 1965, with a solitary Andrey living in the nearly abandoned Atamanovka, where a passing beacon keeper stops briefly to wish him well on the 20th anniversary of Victory Day, marking the passage of time and the unhealed scars left by the war.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 09:34