Short Story 'The Devil Comes To Orekhovo'

In the short story “The Devil Comes To Orekhovo”, Benioff is making a point that to survive in the war you have to be strong minded. Benioff uses three different Russian soldiers to present his argument. Leksi who is eighteen and has recently joined the war. Then we have Nikolai and Surkhov who are both older and have experienced a war, once before. Leksi showed multiple times that he wasn’t ready for what the war had to offer, compared to Nikolai and Surkhov. The way Benioff makes this point is that in the story Leksi never paid attention his mind was always somewhere else, he did things without thinking twice and would feel sorry for the enemy. Which always fell onto Nikolai and Surkhov to show him that he needs to get stronger, so they can all survive. …show more content…
It wasn’t the first or last time Leksi thought about his hometown. Since his mind was busy “He never paid attention to where they were going; he just followed the older solider” (Benioff). He depended on the other solider to make it out, making it easy for him to get lost, risking his life. Home wasn’t the only thing that distracted Leksi. When Nikolai and Surkhov found a dead dog and took his eyes out, it had Leski think about how what his grandmother said about animals that “There were secret conferences in the wild where the affairs of each breast were discussed and argued” (Benioff) meaning to him that they shouldn’t have done that. By the time he snaps out of it he had fallen far behind from Nikolai, making Nikolai wonder who was watching his back. Now, risking Nikolai life since no one watching his back, when he is having to watch Surkhov back. They all depend on each other for