Both the excerpt from the “Blockade Diary” and “The Cave” highlight winter’s great transformative power and ability to upset the status quo. In Ginzburg’s “Blockade Diary,” the characters are transformed from sensible to senseless beings through the brutality of the cold and paucity of available food. The city dwellers, despite their acknowledgment of the danger, are not afraid of the relentless shelling of the city, and “instead of being frightened, [they are] annoyed; instead of being afraid of death, [they are] afraid of being stopped on the way and herded into shelter” (35). Additionally, “the man of winter,” as the city dwellers are described, no longer fears the military danger of the siege and instead is fixated on “starving [and] freezing” (34-35). While the people would normally take immediate shelter from the shelling, the winter transforms their senses to the point that they no longer think completely rationally and focus only on staying warm and finding food. The winter and scarcity of food renders the people just shadows of themselves, as they no longer feel any emotion and accept that death is upon them. One girl is described as “grown numb,” and “not a person at all” as a result of the sordid conditions, which causes her to “[not] care because [she knew she] could die at any minute” (53). As the winter has brought with it a sense of the inevitability of death, the city dwellers accept death and completely lose care for anything in their lives. As the girl claims, there is no use in caring when you could die at any moment.

Zamyatin focuses heavily on winter’s transformative power in “The Cave.” Not only do the characters’ behaviors change as a result of winter’s approach, but the humans are frequently portrayed using non-human descriptions. When Martin Martinych contemplates stealing Obertyshev’s wood, one transformation occurs as “The caveman, gnashing his teeth, knocked the other Martin Martinych down and… plunged his hand into the stack of wood” (95). While his old persona, “the Scriabin one” would not have committed the crime, the cold has transformed him into a criminal “caveman,” seen as he steals the wood to provide himself with warmth (95). Not only does the cold lead to Martin to commit crime that he normally would not, but it also causes him to be described as both “Mammothlike” and as having “mechanical contrivances” as limbs (98-99). There are many more examples in both works about the transformation of people and the world, which stresses winter’s unrelenting power to upset the status quo.