5. Is there any element of surprise in the way Wilbur takes his disappointment? Comment fully upon his varied emotions.
6. What is the marked contrast between Aunt Susan and Wilbur’s father?
7. Which paragraph is most interesting from the point of view of setting? Why?
8. Comment on the aptness of the title.
BABANCHIK
CHRISTINA KRYSTO lived the first nine years of her life, from 1887 to 1896, in Russia. She then came with her father’s family to America, settling on a ranch. Her vocation is ranch-work; her avocation is writing. Miss Krysto’s The Mother of Stasya is published in the June (1918) Atlantic.
An Armenian, a Revolutionist, a voluntary exile, desiring in his old age nothing so much as the privilege of serving Russia, whose government, institutions, and rulers he had fought all his seventy years—such is Babanchik. Russia had driven his twenty-year-old daughter into an exile of hard labor, had imprisoned his son for the best ten years of his life; and Babanchik died because his strength was too weak to carry him back to serve her. Shall you call it patriotism in a man who cursed his native land with a hymn of everlasting hate? racial instinct in one whose Armenian birth made him an object of official suspicion? Here there could be no overpowering conviction that his country’s civilization must be protected against the dreaded Kultur. Yet the desire comes—not only his own, but the command of his imprisoned son, that he serve Russia.
There are other beautiful things in Christina Krysto’s story, not the least of which are the suggestive bits of description of the life in the Georgian village. Yet Babanchik, of the caressing name, product of that strange country whose people grow more incomprehensible as the Great War progresses, interesting as he is, directing the summer play in the Caucasian Mountains, is a thousand times more wonderful when swayed by the unnamed power that returns him dead to Russia.
Suggested Points for Study and Comment