Definitely Maybe Chapter 2 - Wine, Neighbors, and Warnings

This is Part 3 of my chapter-by-chapter retelling of Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (ISBN 978-1-61219-282-6). If you’re just joining, start with the introduction.

Tea Turns Into Wine

So Malianov has this beautiful stranger in his apartment. Lida Ponomareva. Supposedly his wife’s best friend from school, but he’s never heard of her.

They start with tea. Normal enough. But then the tea becomes wine. And the wine keeps flowing because, remember, someone delivered a whole box of expensive alcohol that Malianov never ordered.

See how this works? The mysterious delivery from Chapter 1 suddenly has a purpose. You can’t get drunk on tea. But you can absolutely lose track of your work with a bottle of good wine and an attractive woman sitting across from you.

Malianov forgets about his M cavities. Completely. The breakthrough that was within reach just an hour ago? Gone from his mind. They get tipsy and friendly. He becomes “Dimochka,” she becomes “Lidochka.” That’s the Russian way of making names intimate and warm. It means they’re comfortable with each other fast. Too fast, maybe.

Something Is Off About Lidochka

Here’s where it gets strange. Lidochka has these moments where she seems confused. Not drunk-confused. More like she doesn’t quite know where she is or why she came here. She looks around the apartment with this weird familiarity, like she’s been here before, but when Malianov asks about it, she just says “déjà vu.”

Her tourist plans for Leningrad are vague. She can’t really explain what she wants to see or do. It’s like someone gave her a general script but didn’t fill in the details.

I’ve met people like this in real life. People who show up and you can’t figure out what they actually want. Most of the time it’s nothing sinister. But in a Strugatsky novel, you pay attention to these things. Because the brothers don’t waste pages on random characters. If Lidochka is here, she’s here for a reason. And it’s probably not tourism.

Enter Snegovoi

Then Malianov’s mysterious neighbor shows up. Snegovoi. The big, scarred man from across the hall.

He comes in and immediately gets awkward around Lidochka. They drink more wine together. And Snegovoi tells this story that I absolutely love. He says someone once predicted he would die at age 83 in Greenland. And once, a drunk friend pointed a loaded gun at his head and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired.

Think about that for a second. If you knew you were supposed to die at 83 in Greenland, would you be afraid of anything? Snegovoi isn’t. He walks through life like a man who’s already been told the ending. And there’s something both comforting and terrifying about that.

The Strugatskys are playing with fate here. Can your death be predicted? Can the future be known? These aren’t small questions. And they drop them into a casual drinking scene in a hot apartment like it’s nothing.

Behind Closed Doors

After the drinking, Snegovoi pulls Malianov aside. Says he wants to lend him a book. This is just a pretext. In Soviet apartments, you talked about real things behind closed doors, away from strangers.

This is the first time Malianov has ever been inside Snegovoi’s apartment. And what does he see? A military tunic with colonel’s epaulets and medals hanging in the open. So Snegovoi is military. Or was military. High-ranking, too.

Then comes the interrogation. And that’s exactly what it is. Snegovoi wants to know: Who is that woman? What are you working on? Do you know someone named Gubar?

Malianov doesn’t know any Gubar. But Snegovoi is dead serious. Intense. Worried, even. This is a man who laughed at a gun misfiring, and now he’s worried.

And then Malianov notices something. Snegovoi has a gun in his pocket. A big one.

Why does a retired colonel need a gun in a Leningrad apartment building in the middle of July?

My Take

Chapter 2 does something brilliant. It takes the distractions from Chapter 1 and turns them into a pattern you can feel but can’t name.

The alcohol delivery wasn’t random. It was bait. Lidochka wasn’t random. She’s some kind of distraction, even if she doesn’t fully know it herself. And Snegovoi, the one person who seems to understand that something is wrong, is leaving tomorrow.

The Strugatsky brothers grew up in a world where the knock on the door at night was real. Where people disappeared and neighbors stopped asking questions. You can feel that experience in how they write Snegovoi. He’s a man who has seen things. He knows when a situation smells wrong. And this situation reeks.

What gets me is how normal it all looks from the outside. Guy has a friend over, neighbor drops by, they share some wine. Nothing unusual. But underneath that surface, everyone is scared. Snegovoi is armed. Lidochka is confused. Malianov has stopped working. And nobody can say exactly what the threat is.

That’s the genius of this book. The enemy has no face. The danger has no name. But everyone feels it.

The chapter ends with Snegovoi saying he’s leaving again tomorrow. And you just know that’s going to matter.

Previous: Chapter 1 - Heat Waves and Wrong Numbers Next: Chapter 3 - The Investigation and the Disappearance

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