An intriguing idea keeps surfacing in literary discussion: Ostap Bender is not simply a successor to the likes of Onegin, Pechorin, Chatsky or Bazarov, nor to Stavrogin in the long line of the classic “superfluous man.” Russian literature has long celebrated these figures, yet Bender is rarely named within that chain.
What if Bender, as the quintessential extra man in Russian fiction, stands as the predecessor of the European “lost generation” hero?
In the pantheon of modern writers—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Remarque, and even T. S. Eliot, who once wrote with striking audacity about rhythm and punctuation—one form of presence recurs: the third companion who walks beside us. The famous lines hint at this unseen presence: the third person who travels along the snowy road, veiled in a dark cloak, its gender unclear, always nearby but never named. The poet’s own shadow in literature’s mirror.
Yet Eliot’s own uncertainty about who this companion might be underscored a broader truth: the influential presence of a missing generation, a sense of strangers who shape a writer’s path. It is as if a generation lurks behind every line, even when its face remains unseen.
There is also a missing grandmother in this collage of roaming minds. A gentle traveler who inhabits a curious paradox: ordinary life, suddenly stirred by a fierce wanderlust.
Nearby, a friend recently mentioned a Varvarushka in their family. A fragile elder who, in her youth, bore and raised ten children through a largely routine existence.
The world would have little to say about this old woman, were it not for a spark of wanderlust that blossomed late in life. There, in the margins of a quiet life, Bender’s echo becomes visible again, alongside Chatsky with his car and Eliot with the “third person walking with you.” In this story, the second companion appears to be the grandmother herself, a figure who travels in defiance of predictability.
When grown grandchildren began addressing their grandmother by name, and some soon called her great-grandmother, a spring arrived with a plan. She set aside her worn apron and announced, to the astonished family, a desire to tour the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. And so she set off, first by car, then by train, toward Moscow’s glittering core.
Relatives shed tears and murmured worries, yet the seasoned traveler tucked away belongings and pressed onward. What she saw or thought along the way remains a mystery, but the grandmother returned from her pilgrimage with quiet grace, and the rhythm of life resumed—until spring returned a year later with a fresh request. Over tea, she declared a longing that would never die: a plan to glimpse the monkeys in Sukhum Reserve, a wish she pursued with the same stubborn joy she had carried all her days—even tea, devoured in great cups, became a symbol of that longing, a token of the urge to travel.
No poet can fully guide this tale here.
The brides who once called again found their voices dimmed by movement itself. In a car, then on a train, the grandmother journeyed toward Sukhum. And there, it seemed, she found the path to return—back to those familiar places, back to the people who waited, back to the world she loved.
So she lived, settling for quiet autumns while teaching her grandchildren through long winter evenings. Then spring would rise again, and she would awaken to take flight once more: the simple pleasures of bagels and tea accompanying a road that stretched toward places she had long imagined, a colorless life finally colored by the longing to wander.
A quick verse from a wandering bird of song enters the scene. The sparrow’s dawn chorus, the field’s quiet, the goldfinch at noon, the thrush and the quail—all whisper of motion and memory. In this frame, Eliot’s influence shows itself once more, not through direct imitation but through an inward compass: to follow what lies beyond the familiar, to let migratory paths and unseen cities guide the way, and to restrain one’s voice to preserve the journey’s integrity.
Thus the grandmother becomes a kind of archetype: a traveler who is both mother and traveler, an “extra person” who moves through the margins of the canonical tale. She is imagined as a grandmother who travels in a world that keeps time with her own restless heart.
She thus emerges as a living reminder that stories thrive on characters who drift along the edges, refusing to stay put. Perhaps later, someone will tell us—whether in annotations, marginal notes, or brief asides—about these edge-dwellers, these figures who refuse to vanish into the backdrop of history. That impulse to record the periphery remains essential, a thread that keeps memory vivid even as time passes.
It is worth noting how the tale touches on birth, recognition, and legacy. When the region’s leadership offered a formal honor for a heroic birth, the moment was both absurd and telling. In the wake of that spectacle, the grandmother, worn yet steadfast, chose to name her youngest son in memory of a martyr known for miraculous acts, even as the communal voice demanded a different tribute. The choice, and the reaction, reveal the constant tension between personal conviction and public ceremony—an echo of a nation wrestling with its own history.
In the end, the traveler is not a statue of fate but a living, breathing presence. Born in a hopeful May, she chased the road’s pull through car, train, and onward to distant dreams. The figure who walked with you, who walked beside Bender and Eliot, remains a symbol: a testament to the power of pursuing what lies just beyond the visible horizon, moving always forward, toward color and life and, perhaps, a distant tea that tastes of home and faraway lands.
And so the narrative closes where it began, with a question that keeps returning: who walks beside you? The answer lives not in certainty but in the courage to keep traveling, to keep listening to the sparrow, to keep seeking the next edge of time. This is the enduring image of the extra person: not a shadow to fear, but a companion that invites us to move on, together, into the unknown.