Hunger
Hunger is a terrifying thing that can easily turn any sane person into a beast. It is not about a healthy appetite; it is about famine that kills painfully and slowly. The train that took the Argounov family to Petrograd was full of rather hungry people. Constant lack of food made them aggressive and watchful. One of the ladies – “the lady in fur coat” – knew that she had to be careful and hide a little snack she had with her. She left alone “where no one could watch her.” When she entered the room that was supposed to be a bathroom, she opened her handbag “furtively” and unwrapped “a little bundle of oiled paper.” She didn’t want anyone to know that she had “a whole boiled potato.” The woman ate “hurriedly in big, hysterical bites, chocking, trying not to be heard beyond the closed door.” This imagery evokes a feeling of uneasiness. It is like to be a peeping Tom.
The railway station
Petrograd’s railway station looked almost alive. “A whirlpool of khaki and red” dragged Kira into “the midst of soldiers’ coats, red kerchiefs, unshaved faces, mouths that opened soundlessly.” The screams were “swallowed in a roar of boots shuffling down the platform.” “A stray dog” with ribs “like a skeleton’s” was smelling “the littered floor, searching for food.” “Two armed soldiers” were dragging “a peasant woman who struggled and sobbed.” This imagery helps a reader to imagine the horror a person could feel if he or she were there. The atmosphere of that place was depressing.
Darkness
“Darkness” was coming “not from the gray, transparent sky, but from the corners of houses” where “shadows suddenly grew thicker, as if without a reason.” “Slow whirls of smoke” over chimneys “were rusty in the rays of a cold, invisible sunset somewhere beyond the clouds.” In “store windows kerosene lamps” stood on the sills, “melting yellow circles on the huge, frozen panes, around little orange dots of trembling fire.” It had “snowed.” “Whipped into mud by horses’ hoofs,” the first snow looked “like a pale coffee with thin, melting splinters of sugar.” This imagery evokes a feeling of coldness. The winter in Petrograd is too severe to stay outside too long.
