Today, October 17, is Tolya’s birthday! So, as promised—a thread. Of his VERY OWN.

Through the first several drafts, Tolya was the only POV character in TRAITOR. It made sense that he would be the central character because he embodies the story’s central conflict. He’s half Ukrainian, half Polish, and a Soviet citizen.

All of those groups have been in conflict with each other his whole life, and Tolya feels those tensions both internally and externally. He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to belong, just that most everybody he encounters makes it clear he doesn’t belong with *them.*

He’s an emotionally shuttered character, and a bit terse and prickly, which makes him harder to connect with. But here’s a key thing about him: He doesn’t just do what it takes to survive. He clings to his moral center even when he knows it’ll cost him.

Which is why one of his acute moral crises is his fear that he failed, that he betrayed his murdered parents by joining the Red Army. Joining wasn’t even his choice—he was a conscript—but he did it, owes his survival to it, and is haunted by guilt about it.

He’s endured the horror of the Holodomor, his parents’ violent deaths, conscription at fifteen, two years of hell as a Red Army soldier, but he hasn’t lost his compassion or his humanity or his soft heart . . .

. . . despite having it flung into his face again and again that he doesn’t belong and isn’t wanted. And for me, the heart of the story is how—and with whom—he does finally start feeling that he belongs.

All of this to say—Aleksey may steal some of the narration time like the attention hog he is*, but TRAITOR has always, ultimately been Tolya’s story.

*I’m just kidding. I love Aleksey. Everybody loves Aleksey.

A fun fact! Tolya was a Korolenko with a Ukrainian Cossack father and a Polish mother long before I realized the similarities he shared with Vladimir Korolenko, a writer of late Imperial Russia with a Ukrainian Cossack father and a Polish mother.

But if anybody asks, Yes, of course that was an intentional homage, yes. Everything is intentional. Nothing is a coincidence.

To wrap up, here once again is @velanadesign’s beautiful imagining of him.

Anatoliy Anatoliyovych Korolenko, born October 17, 1926.