Dear bookish friends,

I’m extending my August break into September while I settle into my new role as primary carer for our autistic son. My wife has moved away to look after her mum following a stroke, leaving me at home in Scotland with our son and the two cats. I have a lot of plates spinning, and so, eager as I am to lead you through Yevgeny Onegin and launch the fourteen-month journey through Anna Karenina, I need just a bit more time to figure things out on a personal level. I know myself well enough that I’d only end up feeling stressed and that I’m failing, when it’s really supposed to be fun. I have a big event coming up on the weekend of 19 September, in which I am heavily involved, so I’m hoping to be in a position to start posting regularly again the following week.

Please do start reading if you feel so inclined, particularly Yevgeny Onegin. I hope to do just that myself, and it’s entirely possible that I’ll find myself drawn into posting anyway. I will be reading two translations—Anthony Briggs and Roger Clarke—and may well add the Nabokov one too, given how controversial it seems to be!

Thank you for your forbearance.

Cams

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 16

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1.

It’s 1943, 14 years after Yury’s death. Misha Gordon and Nicky Dudorov are now officers and have been fighting in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. They spend the night in a barn in the war-torn ruins of Cherny (Russian: Чернь). They have a quiet discussion while Misha washes his clothes in the river just after sunrise. Nicky tells him that Tanya, the laundry girl, will give him fresh linen, but Misha insists on washing his clothes himself.

2.

The two men discuss what the river is—is it the Zusha? It was on the Zusha River that it all happened. Nicky’s fiancée Christina had managed to sneak behind enemy lines and destroy a German stronghold, after which she was captured and hanged. The news is that the Orthodox Church has canonised her. Yevgraf—Yury’s half-brother and, we now learn, a general—has been collecting details about her. The two men go on to discuss their respective incarcerations in the labour camps. Misha ended up in a penal battalion, fighting the Germans on the front line. Their company was known as the death squad. The deal was that if they survived, they would earn their freedom. Misha talks about how collectivisation has been a failure, but that that failure had to be swept under the carpet, hence the Yezhov terror (Ezhovshchina in P&V). This was the period of the show trials and purges under Stalin, directed by Yezhov, head of the NKVD. According to historian Robert Conquest, the estimated death toll was 750,000.1 They reflect that, dreadful though it was, the war seemed almost a blessing compared with the camps.

Nicky tells Misha the story of how he and Christina met. Misha notes that Tanya bears a striking resemblance to Yury. Remember that Lara asked Yevgraf in the previous chapter whether he could find information about the child she had been forced to give up.

3.

Nicky Dudorov and Misha Gordon are in the ruined village of Karachev, between Oryol and Bryansk, where Tanya has been entrusted with the regimental laundry. She tells of how she met Yevgraf.

4.

Tanya tells her story. They discuss who Tanya really is. Misha explains how history rhymes:

“A thing which has been conceived in a lofty, ideal manner becomes coarse and material. Thus Rome came out of Greece and the Russian Revolution came out of the Russian enlightenment.”

Misha is remarkably candid in his criticism of the Revolution. Yet both men are survivors who have learned when to speak openly and when to keep their thoughts to themselves.

5.

In Moscow, five or ten years later, Nicky and Misha are flipping through a book of Yury’s writings which Yevgraf had compiled. The book ends on a hopeful note. The two men feel a peaceful joy, the silent music of happiness… “And it seemed that the book in their hands knew what they were feeling and gave them its support and confirmation.” If the scene takes place ten rather than five years later, then we are in 1953, the year Stalin died. Surviving through two wars and the Yezhovshchina would indeed be a reason for, if not joy and happiness, at least gratitude and quiet contemplation. Ironically, Pasternak himself encountered greater official persecution under Khrushchev than he had under Stalin. Khrushchev insisted in his memoirs that he agonised over Doctor Zhivago, came close to authorising its publication, and regretted not doing so.2

Although this is the epilogue, it is not quite the end of the novel. The very book that Nicky and Misha are holding in their hands becomes the novel's final chapter: Yury's poetry.

Poetry in translation

I initially had this poetry rant at the end of this week’s video, but I decided to spin it off into a separate video.

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 15

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1.

Yury is in Moscow at the beginning of the New Economic Policy period. Lenin announced the NEP in March 1921 and it ran until 1928. Pasternak calls it the ‘most false and ambiguous of all Soviet periods,’ and I can see his point. Under War Communism, all trade was forbidden. The NEP restored limited legal private trade.

Yury has gone to seed, no longer working as a doctor and writing only between bouts of depression. His congenital heart condition worsens during this period. He looks even worse than he did when he arrived in Yuryatin after escaping from the partisans. He inquires of those whom he still knows in Moscow about the circumstances of his family’s departure from Russia. Pasternak tells us that Yury did not arrive in Moscow alone; a boy in rags has followed him and they now avoid people together as much as they can.

2.

Yury made the last part of his journey to Moscow by train, but before that he had walked for most of it. The going was easier in summer, but many of the towns and villages he passed through were abandoned after the war.

3.

Yury comes to a deserted village on the bank of a river. As he sits on a millstone, a teenage boy comes up the cliff path carrying a bucket of water. You just know from Pasternak’s style that this is going to be another of those coincidences that season the plot. It is indeed Vassya Brykin, the young recruit we met in Chapter 7, who had been tricked into conscription by his aunt and uncle. He and Yury were on the same train to the Urals. The deserted village is Veretenniki, Vassya’s home village. He leaves the village with Yury and tells him the story of what happened between his escaping the conscripts’ train and now.

4.

Vassya had been asked to help out with a potato harvest, after which the widow asked him to come back and help her hide the surplus from the requisition detachments. This he does, but after a month, the house is robbed and the widow is found buried where the potato surplus was buried. It’s a bit of a shaggy dog story. Its purpose, I think, is to illustrate what War Communism did to the citizens, turning good people into criminals and inciting class warfare with the anti-kulak campaign. Stalin doubled down on that in a big way later on, when the kulaks were wiped out as a class.

5.

Yury encourages Vassya to continue drawing. It seems that mentoring this young man is doing wonders for Yury. He’s writing booklets on various subjects, and Vassya is illustrating and binding them as part of his work at the Institute, where he’s now studying bookbinding, design and printing. Under the NEP, Yury can now sell them through the second-hand bookshops.

In her essay published in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, Carol J. Avins discusses Yury’s access to the reading public. This moment marks what Avins calls the second reception, in other words, the second time Yury’s publications have reached a reading audience1. The first time was back in 1917, when his two friends, Misha Gordon and Nicky Dudorov, published a book of Yury’s poetry without his knowledge. What’s interesting here is that the Yury of 1917 had no interest in finding readers for his poetry, whereas the 1922 Yury most certainly does. I’ll return to this in Part 6.

Yury and Vassya’s friendship soon deteriorates as Vassya becomes more self-confident and embraces the revolution, while Yury continues in his usual way. The two men part company, and Yury takes up residence in the corner of a room in what had once been the Sventitskys’ flat, the one in which Lara shot Komarovsky.

6.

Yury fetches water while his landlord Markel and family are eating dinner. Markel was the yard-porter who helped build Anna Ivanovna’s ebony wardrobe in Chapter 3. He’d brought his daughter, Marina, with him at the time. That was in 1911; she was aged six. Markel has moved up in the world since the Revolution and is now the house manager. As Yury repeatedly interrupts their meal to fetch more water, Markel gets annoyed with him, but Marina sticks up for him. And within a few paragraphs, Yury and Marina are now living together as a couple and have children. Pasternak doesn’t waste any time! Within a few sentences, we learn that Marina is now helping Yury with odd jobs around town, including chopping firewood for a particular client who, Yury discovers, just happens to be reading one of Yury’s booklets.

Avins discusses this in the light of the ‘establishment reader’. Yury’s distaste for this man, who is reading Yury’s work and making pencil marks in the margin, arises from this emblem of the late 1920s, the establishment reader, a ‘would-be arbiter of literary and ideological standards.’ What could she mean by this? That the reader reads not to enliven his soul with art, self-improvement, or education, but merely to evaluate it against the background of accepted ideology. My mind goes back to reading about some of Pasternak’s sold-out poetry reading nights in theatres, or the invitation-only events he held, where he would read passages from Doctor Zhivago. The audience here was hungry for his art. But he was writing against the backdrop of the Union of Soviet Writers, a union from which Pasternak was eventually expelled in 1958 when Alexei Surkov was the union’s General Secretary; it’s fair to say that Surkov was reading to evaluate for ideological purposes. So what Avins has to say about this scene makes perfect sense to me.

Translation points

There are a few interesting points of translation in this section. The first translation in each example is from Hayward & Harari, and the second is from Pevear & Volokhonsky.

First of all, I’d never seen this Russian variant of "bon appétit." It translates literally as bread and salt.

This next one is interesting. Markel is using a pun here.

The word каменщик means ‘bricklayer’ or ‘mason,’ so P&V’s Freemason seems unusual. There is a trail to follow, though: the Russian for Freemason is вольный каменщик — literally ‘free mason’, borrowed from the English. Markel doesn’t quite say that; he says благородный каменщик, ‘noble mason’. So one reading is that he’s punning on the familiar expression, swapping one lofty adjective for another, and that a Russian ear catches the echo — in which case P&V have simply made the joke explicit. Although, note that Mason in English is often used as shorthand for Freemason, whether noble or otherwise!

But there’s a plainer reading too. Благородный also means well-born, of the gentry. Markel, a yard-porter who’s come up in the world since the Revolution, is needling a doctor who’s come down in it, reduced to hauling his own water. ‘What a gentleman-labourer you are’ — a class sneer, no lodge required. On that reading, P&V’s Freemason is a bit of a leap, and Hayward and Harari were wise to abandon the masonry altogether and reach for a home-grown idiom. To do something for two pins is an old British expression meaning you’re on the verge of doing it without needing much of an excuse — ‘I’d quit my job right now for two pins’. It loses the wordplay, but it nails Markel’s tone.

I genuinely can’t decide between the two; perhaps it’s both at once, a class jibe folded into an idiom-echo. Any native Russian speakers in the comments: does благородный каменщик wink at вольный каменщик for you, or is Freemason a bridge too far?

I’m curious about Hayward and Harari’s use of ‘poor fish’ in this next phrase. It’s not an English idiom I’m familiar with, and the Russian is not an idiom. P&V have used a non-idiomatic phrase, which seems the right choice.

This next phrase is somewhat colloquial and both translators have had fun with it.

The hen metaphor fits, as the Russian is a contemptuous phrase that literally translates as ‘spawn of a chicken’; however, it breaks down in its meaning. ‘Wet hen’ is typically used to describe someone who’s really angry, and that doesn’t quite fit the context here. P&V have got closer to the original, as it portrays someone who’s a bit pathetic and not worth bothering with.

7.

It’s 1929. Yury and Marina have two daughters. Misha Gordon lives nearby. Yury, Nicky Dudorov and Misha Gordon are in conversation. Pasternak is not kind in his description of Nicky and Misha. He describes them as average thinkers with poor vocabulary. I wonder who the models for these characters might have been. So Yury is enlightened, while his friends are, if not average, at least toeing the line. ‘Men who are not free, [Yury] thought, always idealise their bondage.’ Yury speaks out against his friends’ views. His heart, he claims, is in danger of bursting because of living a life of duplicity. ‘Your nervous system isn’t a fiction … You can’t keep violating it with impunity.’ Nicky and Misha admonish Yury for his ways and implore him to come round to their way of thinking. He refuses and goes on to describe how he’s been corresponding with Tonya and her father in Paris; their two children are doing well, and somehow or other they all seem to know about his relationship with Marina and the birth of their two daughters. He then leaves, saying that he feels suffocated and needs some air. The following morning, nobody knows where he is.

8.

Yury has disappeared and his friends are all out looking for him. Eventually each of them receives a letter from him imploring them not to worry about him. He’s seeking solitude and wants to get his life back in order before returning. He forwards some money so Marina can hire a nurse for the children and go back to work.

9.

It turns out that Yury was living with his half-brother, Yevgraf, in an apartment fewer than a hundred yards away from his home with Marina. They’d bumped into one another, whereupon Yevgraf had persuaded Yury to let him help him. He gets Yury a good post at the hospital and gives him money. He assures Yury that the situation with his family will be resolved one way or another, with Yury’s either going to them in Paris or their returning to Moscow. This gives Yury heart and he does not enquire about the source of Yevgraf’s power.

10.

Yury is busy working on his projects, a time of ‘devouring activity.’ His living room was ‘a banqueting room of the spirit, a lumber room of unreason, a store room of discoveries.’ You can almost feel Pasternak here in his study in Peredelkino. Yury is putting down the snippets of poetry from what he can remember, or expanding on the manuscripts that Yevgraf seems somehow to have archived. He’s in a fervour with his artistic ideas flowing through him onto the page, and he’s not able to write quickly enough to capture them all.

11.

Yury is inspired by Moscow. In his writing, he name-checks the poets of the modern city: Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916), and Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Yury is writing about Moscow in prose, which is interesting because Pasternak always considered his novel his magnum opus and his poetry was a means of practising until he reached the pinnacle of his creativity in prose. It’s ironic to me that the word I would use to describe the prose Yury writes here is poetic.

Fragmentary, personal poems are hardly suited to meditating on such obscure, new and solemn events. Only prose and philosophy can attempt to deal with them.2

12.

Yury takes a tram to start his new job at the hospital at the end of August. The tram keeps breaking down and getting stuck, causing a queue of more trams behind. It’s a hot and airless day. The tram car fills up with passengers who have vacated the trams behind it. An old, grey-haired lady passes the tram. It’s Mademoiselle Fleury. Remember her, from Chapter 5, the Swiss woman who had assisted at the hospital in Melyuzeyevo? The tram overtakes her, then stops again, whereupon Mademoiselle Fleury overtakes the tram. Yury does not recognise her from his past. Instead, he’s thinking of mathematical equations to work out distance, time and speed.

He thought of several people whose lives run parallel and close together but at different speeds, and wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others. Something like a theory of relativity applied to a human racecourse occurred to him.

It’s that old symphony idea that I’ve discussed before, about lives intersecting and moving at different speeds, starting and stopping at different times, polyphony and harmony, dissonance, changing rhythms, tempos and time signatures. We as readers get to ‘hear’ the symphony, knowing as we do that these two characters’ lives crossed paths at one point and that now they’re in the same scene again, only they don’t know. Something breaks inside Yury—his heart is failing him. The tram stops, he gets off and his heart gives out on him. He dies, stepping off a tram, just as his father died jumping off a train. Only Yury’s tram had stopped where his father’s train had not. And so Yury’s melody in the symphony stops, but the symphony itself does not. Mademoiselle Fleury continues on her way, not knowing that she knew the man who just died in front of her.

13.

Yury is lying in his coffin atop a table in his room in Kamerger Street. Many mourners come to pay their respects, both those who knew him personally and those who knew him only through his writing.

The symmetry here is no accident. The novel opened with a funeral — Yury’s mother’s — and now it closes with his own. In the language of symphony, her funeral is the overture; his is the coda. And it doesn’t stand alone: Yury’s father fell to his death from a train, while Yury fell dying from a tram. Pasternak has been closing circles all along. And one more is about to close in Part 14 in the very flat where Yury’s body lies.

14.

While mourners file past Yury’s body, two unknown mourners stand out. The first is his half-brother, Yevgraf. He has arranged everything. Yury is to be cremated that night. The other is Lara. She’s come from Irkutsk by coincidence — yes, another one! The flat where Yury had been staying turns out to be Lara and Pasha Antipov’s old flat, the one in which they had lit the candle on the windowsill that Yury saw on his way to the Sventitskys’ Christmas party. Yevgraf asks Lara for help sorting out Yury’s papers. He tells her that Pasha was not shot, as Lara believed, but that he had shot himself. Not only that, but it had happened at Varykino, the last place where she and Yury had lived together. It’s coincidence upon coincidence, and yet somehow it all works. Lara herself calls it a ‘preordained coincidence.’

15.

Never, never, not even in their moments of richest and wildest happiness, had they lost the sense of what is highest and most ravishing—joy in the whole universe, its form, its beauty, the feeling of their own belonging to it, being part of it.

I’ll take that, thank you very much. This paragraph sums up my belief, but I would take it one step further: it’s through art that this feeling is communicated. Are not all artists, in some way, trying to convey this idea of universality? In all times, art is the way.

16.

The paragraph that begins with ‘So here we are again, Yurochka’ is just sublime. Life and death; the joy of living—love. It’s when one’s emotions are at their most raw that one can truly feel the harmony of the universe. It’s always there, but we just don’t get to see it often. Day-to-day living dulls the connection. The goodbye scene from Lara to Yury is both heartbreaking and life-affirming. She talks with Yury about what she’s been through, but doesn’t go into detail. We’re left to read between the lines, based on what she says to Yury and what she’d asked of Yevgraf about finding children who had been given up for adoption.

And this is where the lines between the novel and real life become blurred. In Lara, Anna Pasternak describes Olga Ivinskaya’s being left alone for half an hour beside Boris Pasternak’s body, weeping — and thinking, even in that moment, how prophetic Doctor Zhivago had been. Everything had been marked out, stage by stage, in the novel. The words Pasternak gave Lara at Yury’s coffin became Olga’s as she said her own goodbye to him. He had written their love story through his characters and had even predicted its ending.

17.

The novel wasn’t quite finished with Olga just yet. Lara tells Yevgraf ‘an important fact’ and then leaves. The narrator tells us that she then disappeared, probably having been arrested and sent to the camps. There’s a retrospective resonance here. Olga Ivinskaya had already been incarcerated once during Pasternak’s lifetime. She was arrested again after his death. Isn’t it chilling? Coincidences in the novel and coincidences in real life.

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 14

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This is one of my favourite chapters. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s filled with art and poetry. And I’m a sucker for a winter dacha scene, too. Call me crazy, but it connects with me.

1.

It’s winter. Lara tells Yury that Komarovsky has arrived in Yuryatin and he wants to have a word with Yury. He’s planning a trip to the far east of Russia and is offering to take Yury, Lara and Pasha with him because they are all in grave danger. Yury agrees to stay in that night for Komarovsky’s visit. I’m glad to read that they got themselves a big, fluffy cat to help with the rat problem.

Komarovsky arrives and tells Yury about how Yury’s father had died in his arms. Yury is understandably very brusque with Komarovsky. Komarovsky informs them in no uncertain terms of the danger they face, particularly because Yury openly defies the communist regime. Yury’s name is apparently on a list; Komarovsky has seen it. Those with sympathies for the now-overthrown Provisional Government and rural zemstvos are gathering in the Far East, which is why Komarovsky is heading out there himself. They’re going to set up a Far Eastern Republic with a coalition government.

This Far Eastern Republic, in Russian Dalnevostochnaya Respublika, existed from April 1920 to November 1922. Lenin sanctioned it as a kind of buffer state between Soviet Siberia and the Japanese-occupied Pacific coast. After Japan’s withdrawal from Vladivostok in October 1922, the Far Eastern Republic had served its purpose and was absorbed into Soviet Russia.

2.

Komarovsky outstays his welcome and rants about the Far East and Mongolia as the ‘New America’. Lara finally has enough and asks him to leave.

3.

Yury and Lara decide to escape to Varykino. Pasternak treats us to a poetic love scene, as the two plan to ensconce themselves in the freezing old house at Varykino for one last time together.

4.

They leave for Varykino early in the morning. They gallop out of Yuryatin on a sleigh borrowed from Samdevyatov. They pass Samdevyatov himself, and Komarovsky too, as they fly to their refuge. Glasha Tuntseva shouts farewell as they pass; so too does Sima Tuntseva further on.

They arrive at Varykino at dusk. The Zhivagos’ house is intact, though in rough condition inside. Yury decides that they should check out the Mikulitsyns’ house.

5.

They break into the Mikulitsyns’ house and discover that someone has been living there until very recently, if indeed they are not there still. Yury waters the horse and the family all snuggle down in their warm coats and fall into a deep, sound, enjoyable sleep, like children who had been running and playing all day in the open air.

6.

Yury wakes up with an urge to write. He decides to put it off till the evening, so he can help to get at least two rooms into a habitable state. Little Katya is bored and cranky until Yury finds some old toys of Liberius’. Katya complains that the toys are for babies, and she is NOT a baby! However, she finds a game that involves using the toys to build a house for her doll, and Lara comments on the innocence of children:

Children are more honest, they aren’t frightened of the truth, but we are so afraid of seeming to be behind the times that we are ready to betray what is most dear to us, and praise what repels us, and say yes to what we don’t understand.

7.

Lara cooks a big meal, after which she talks about how they are just pretending at living. Yury reminds Lara that Komarovsky’s offer still stands; they could go back to Yuryatin tomorrow and avail themselves of it. Lara explains that their love is heaven-sent, but that there are destructive forces in the world that they must distrust. She says that Yury was given wings to fly above the clouds, while she, a woman, has to stay close to the earth to shelter her young.

Yury replies that this pretending to live was not their fault; it was thrust upon them by the country's political upheaval. Yury wonders whether they can reach some arrangement with Samdevyatov. Yury will write a book for six months—a medical textbook or a collection of poems—while Samdevyatov supplies them through the winter. He mentions that he could make a living as a translator, which is interesting as that’s exactly what Pasternak did. In fact, Pasternak saw translation as a necessary means to an end, one which kept him from his work of passion, his novel Doctor Zhivago, which he knew could never be published in Russia under the current regime.

Lara agrees and asks that Yury set down the poems he has recited to her before they are lost in the mists of time.

8.

They all have a bath and get into freshly washed bedclothes. It sounds idyllic. Yury is beside himself with happiness as the moon lights the paper on the desk, and he settles in to write. You can imagine Pasternak’s enjoyment here as he describes this scene, from one poet to another. I don’t know if it’s just the aspiring writer in me, but I find this whole chapter idyllic, as if it were one of those writing retreats one can pay through the nose for. And with Lara’s describing their love as sent from heaven, the creator is alive in their household and all Yury need do is be open to that. Pasternak describes the process through Yury:

At such moments Yury felt that the main part of his work was not being done by him but by something which was above him and controlling him: the thought and poetry of the world as it was at that moment and as it would be in the future.

Yury is simply the conduit for these mysterious forces, as, indeed, is Pasternak.

A sound from outside breaks Yury’s reverie. He goes to investigate and discovers there are wolves nearby. He’s worried for the horse in the barn.

9.

Yury and Lara enjoy their day together, while Katya plays outside with a toboggan. Yury is looking forward to nighttime, when he can sit down and write his poetry. His weariness seems to cast the whole day in a fog, as a preparation for the poetry already forming in his head. He feels that their time together is limited—which undoubtedly it is—and he longs to express his anguish in poetry. Last night’s wolves have now become symbols in his mind, symbols of the destructive force that’s coming for them. It grows in his mind into a dragon.

When Yury sits down to write and goes over the previous night’s scribbles, he’s disappointed that what brought him to tears the night before now reads as mundane. As he revises his work, Yury loses himself in the process and Pasternak explains this with some technical poetic jargon. Yury (and Pasternak) know not only the art of poetry, but also the craft. Lara awakens and approaches Yury to say that she’d heard howling outside. The wolves are closing in.

10.

They’ve been at Varykino for thirteen days. Lara has started packing so they can leave. Yury harnesses the horse, but then Lara has a panic and they decide to stay another night. She insists they leave at first light, so they stay one final night. Since the horse is already harnessed, Yury heads out to collect firewood from his old house.

11.

There’s a melancholy scene here as Yury feels lonely. He sees the new moon as a symbol of separation and solitude. As he’s heading back to the Mikulitsyns’ house, his horse whinnies at the sound of another horse. He returns to the house to find Komarovsky in conversation with Lara. Komarovsky explains that he’d placed rumours of his departure around town but had stayed on only to give Lara and Yury another chance to avail themselves of his offer. Lara is keen to go with Komarovsky. He is leaving the following day by train for Vladivostok, and time is of the essence. Komarovsky asks Yury to go into the kitchen with him for a private talk.

12.

Komarovsky begins by telling Yury that Strelnikov has been captured and shot. This means that Lara is in imminent danger and must leave immediately. Komarovsky tells Yury that he’ll have to convince Lara to go and that he’ll follow on later. Otherwise she won’t agree to leave. Yury agrees to this, knowing that he and Lara are fated to be separated soon anyway. And so, the prophecy that Yury foresaw in the previous chapter comes to pass: Komarovsky, the man ‘of whom I shall always be incurably, insanely jealous’, is the one who takes Lara from him. Not only does it happen, but Yury consents to it.

13.

Lara has gone and we’re with Yury as he suffers from the mental anguish of his decision.

Goodbye, Lara, until we meet in the next world, goodbye, my love, my inexhaustible, everlasting joy.

Pasternak uses a lot of colours in this paragraph: blue snowdrifts, juicy pineapple light, bronze-red patches of sunset, lilac dusk turning to a deep mauve, pink sky. This explosion of colour perhaps reflects Yury’s heightened emotional state. It signals the transition and Yury has what Pasternak calls a double monologue. In one, he’s being practical: light the fire, complete the poems, go to Moscow; and, in the other, he’s lamenting his lost love and planning to immortalise it in writing. He weeps for his loss and drowns his sorrow in vodka that Komarovsky left behind. As I mentioned last time, this departure is drawn straight from Pasternak’s loss of Olga Ivinskaya, about which Yury’s poem ‘Parting’ is written.

14.

Yury feels like he’s going out of his mind. The real Lara is changing in his poetry into someone else. He’s holding back from a full freedom of expression lest he give away too much of himself; it’s a means of protecting Lara. I imagine Pasternak would have such thoughts himself, reducing real people in his life into metaphor and references rather than direct attribution.

As he writes, Yury reflects on his view of history. It comes in the form of images taken from the vegetable kingdom. This seems like a weird translation choice to me, as it conjures images of carrots and cabbages in my mind. Pevear and Volokhonsky have it as vegetables, too. The original reads жизнь растительного царства, and is closer to ‘the plant kingdom’, or even ‘the world of flora’. It’s certainly not vegetables.

This description of history is central to the novel; again and again, the characters are living through big moments: revolutions, wars; but one sees this historical significance only with hindsight. While we live through events, we still have to take care of ourselves: gathering wood, eating and sleeping, having conversations. And back then, there wouldn’t have been media outlets to keep us tuned into the news cycle. Anyway, Pasternak concludes this train of thought with this bombshell:

But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point of genius. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days; the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but for decades thereafter, for centuries, the spirit of narrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped as holy.

Brave words!

Samdevyatov stops by and takes the horse away; Yury has not been looking after it. Yury misses Lara and hears her voice calling in his head. He sleeps and dreams of a dragon underneath the house. Samdevyatov promises to come by in a week and take Yury away to safety.

15.

Yury hears footsteps approaching the house. It’s Strelnikov. So much for Komarovsky’s claim that Strelnikov had been captured and shot. Had he really heard that, or was he just making it up?

16.

The two men talk for hours. Pasha explains that he’d come to see Lara and Katya, but he’d received the news of their whereabouts too late. Pasha has been in hiding since he’d learned that he was to be court-martialled on a trumped-up charge. He explains that he’d met a young boy who had escaped the firing squad of the partisans — it is, of course, Terenty Galuzin. It was Galuzin who had betrayed Strelnikov to the Cheka, so he’d gone on the run across Siberia, all the way back to Varykino. He knows that they are closing in.

17.

Pasha tells Yury that he must leave. Pasha’s going to stay for only one night. It’s not safe. He rants about the revolution and his ‘life’s work’, making out that it was all for Lara’s sake; his love for her had driven him to clear the way for a new way of life. All the while, loving her from afar. Yury stops him to ask whether Pasha had ever considered the love that Lara bore for him.

I asked you, had you any idea how much she loved you?—more than anyone in the world.

From his response, it seems that Pasha had not considered that. The two men discuss the circumstances under which Lara had declared her love for Pasha.

18.

Yury sleeps well that night. He dreams of his childhood. When he awakes, he goes to find Pasha. He’s not in the house. Yury goes out for water and there is Pasha’s dead body. He’s shot himself. His blood has frozen into droplets that resemble rowan berries.

Phew! I can’t believe I pulled that off, a forty-page chapter in a migraine week during a heatwave. I can rest now. Or, I could if I weren’t facing the weekly Big Shop as soon as I hit publish.

Oh well, here goes…

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 13

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There are chapters in Doctor Zhivago that move the plot along, and there are chapters where the novel’s beating heart finally becomes visible. This is one of the latter.

We rejoin Yury half-dead — ragged, starved and presumed lost — as he makes his way back to Yuryatin and up the stairs to the flat opposite the house of the caryatids. What waits for him there will reshape the rest of the book: Lara, a letter, a fever that nearly kills him, and a love that neither of them seems able to reason their way out of.

Let’s get into it.

1.

We’re in Yuryatin. The month and year aren’t clear. We know it’s spring. The Whites have been defeated. There’s a proclamation on the wall with instructions on Labour books. Another claims that anyone hoarding food will be shot on sight, and a third that those who do not belong to the exploiting class are admitted to the membership of Consumer Communes. Carrying arms without a permit is illegal.

2.

Yury Zhivago arrives in Yuryatin, emaciated, wild-looking, black with dirt, with a birch-bark satchel on a stick over his shoulder. He’s made his way all the way from the partisans’ camp by following the railway line and sleeping in abandoned train carriages. On his way, he sees a young man from the partisans’ camp jumping out of an abandoned railway carriage and relieving himself in the snow — it’s Terenty Galuzin. The gunshot had only wounded him and he’d managed to crawl away and was now making his way back to Holycross under a fake name.

Yury makes his way up the stairs to Lara’s old flat, opposite the house of caryatids. He reaches for the key hidden in the brickwork and finds not only the key, but a letter from Lara. She’s heard that Yury is alive and has written to let him know that she and her daughter are going to Varykino. Yury assumes that since Lara is going to Varykino, Tonya must no longer be there. He doesn’t notice that the letter continues on the reverse side, so he folds it up and puts it in his pocket. He then goes down to read the notices posted on the village noticeboard.

3.

The noticeboard contains regulations posted by the new regime on arriving in the village. It’s not clear to Yury when these notes were posted. Are they referring to the previous Revolution? Or after the Civil War? Pasternak lays it on pretty thick just how overwhelming and pointless Yury sees all these regulations to be. Pasternak presents the barrage of regulations as almost overwhelming, reflecting Yury's exhaustion and alienation.

4.

Upon coming to, he refuses aid from passers-by and makes his way up to Lara’s flat. It has become infested with rats while lying empty. He barricades himself in a single room and does what he can to keep the rats out. He feels like he’s coming down with an illness, alternating between weakness and uncontrollable restlessness. He feels an urge to shave and get a haircut but can’t find any scissors. Then he remembers the tailor’s on Spassky Street and heads out to borrow some scissors.

5.

The tailor’s workshop is full of women sewing army clothes. Yury gestures through the window to be let in, but the women think he’s mocking them and wave him on. So Yury goes round to the back door.

6.

A woman opens the door for him, and he asks for scissors to cut his hair. The woman offers to do it for him. Yury accepts and they have a conversation. He explains to the woman, who, it turns out, has worked as a hairdresser, that he’s an inspector for the former union of credit cooperatives and that his train had become stranded. She warns him not to tell anyone about it, but to say he’s a doctor or a teacher instead. The woman tells Yury about an ensign who the Whites ambushed. The ensign’s wife is freaking out and goes to General Galiullin, with some help from the exceptionally kind woman across the road — ‘Lara,’ thinks Yury. She says things have changed since the Bolsheviks took power. She and her three sisters all favoured the Bolsheviks as they were for the common people; only one of her sisters died. Could these be the Tuntseva sisters? It must be Glasha who’s cutting Yury’s hair. She explains that her nephew—who is Liberius, though she doesn’t name him—is the head of the peasant forces. Once Yury realises who she is, he keeps it to himself but goes on to ask about Varykino—who lived there? Was it safe during the upheavals? He learns from Glasha that the family that was there had got away to Moscow and that that doctor—Yury Zhivago—was missing, presumed dead.

7.

Returning to Lara’s flat, Yury is elated to learn that Tonya, the children and Tonya’s father had escaped to Moscow. He has to deal with the rats before he can settle down for the night and it’s already getting dark. He fills the cracks with broken glass and sets to work lighting the Dutch stove. He sees initials stamped into the firewood, which leads him to suppose that Lara must have got them from Samdevyatov, and he begins to feel jealous. Yury's imagination quickly jumps to how she may have repaid Samdevyatov, and he doesn't like where those thoughts lead.

His thoughts turn to Tonya, and he reproaches himself for having forgotten that she was expecting their child. And why did Lara not mention them as having passed through Yuryatin on their way back to Moscow? Why didn’t she mention Samdevyatov? And, of course, we’re now wondering what was on the reverse side of her letter that Yury hasn’t read. There’s some lyrical waxing about Mother Russia and Lara, something too big and expansive to reproach. He feels the joy of living so that his eyes fill with tears, tears of admiration and repentance. He stokes the stove and enjoys the play of the firelight as he pulls the crumpled letter from his pocket. He notices the writing on the reverse: Tonya had a baby daughter and Lara’s going to look for a horse.

8.

Sleep finally overtakes him, but it brings two disturbing dreams. In the first, his son is behind a glass door, while Yury’s on the other side holding the door shut. He wakes up in a sweat and realises that he’s ill. He falls back asleep and dreams of a dark winter morning in Moscow before the Revolution. He’s in a room that reminds him of a railway carriage, with people sleeping and food scraps left lying around on newspaper. Lara is there acting as the hostess.

9.

In Lara, Anna Pasternak cites this opening paragraph as a mirror image of Boris Pasternak’s longing for Olga Ivinskaya, the lover with whom he was having an affair in the full knowledge of his wife, Zinaida (who, at one stage, was also a lover).1

Yury is delirious and sleeps through his fever. When his fever breaks after many weeks, he awakens in a clean bed. Lara is there and has been looking after him. Yury faints with joy.

10.

Yury and Lara’s bliss is absolute. Their love is beautifully described in this chapter, and, again, it is cited in Lara as an example of Pasternak and Olga’s love after they are reunited when Olga is released from prison camp after three-and-a-half years of servitude.2

11.

Lara tells Yury that he’s not well enough to travel to Moscow to be with his family. She mentions the ‘Gayda rising’. This refers to the Czechoslovak Legion under the command of Radola Gajda. I touched upon the Legion in an earlier chapter analysis. Gajda fell out with Kolchak’s Whites in July 1919 and was summarily dismissed. He then led an uprising of SRs, known as the Gajda rising, which failed. He then escaped back to Czechoslovakia and turned to fascism.

Lara tells Yury to go back to work as a doctor while he’s recovering. His background as the son of a Siberian millionaire and his desertion from the partisans make it dangerous for him. It’s dangerous for Lara’s husband too, Pasha/Strelnikov. He’s being hunted because he got too near the top and knows too much. An interesting concept, given how much killing he’s alleged to have done for the Reds. She tells Yury that she was with Tonya when she had her baby. She says they got on splendidly.

Lara tells Yury about the new currency that has been issued, notes with values of five and ten million. I tried to find examples matching Pasternak’s description, but have come up short. All I could find at those denominations for that period were these, but they’re not the colours of Pasternak’s description or of the right shape.

12.

Lara explains that she was at Varykino to prepare the house for Yury's return. How she knew he was still alive isn’t explained. Perhaps it was simply wishful thinking. She tells Yury that his daughter was named Masha, after his mother. Yury asks about Samdevyatov and Lara understands that he’s really asking if she’d had a relationship with him. She hadn’t. She explains that Samdevyatov reminds her of someone else, alluding, of course, to Komarovsky.

There’s something broken in me, there’s something broken in my whole life.

It's difficult not to sympathise with her. By modern standards, what Komarovsky did amounts to child sexual abuse. Okay, Lara was sixteen, possibly seventeen at the time, but she was seduced and taken advantage of. She lives under Komarovsky’s shadow. She tries to explain this to Yury. An interesting conversation ensues. Yury tells her that he could only really be jealous of a man he despises and with whom he has nothing in common. Is he saying that he doesn’t despise Komarovsky? He explains that if he were to find an artist who does what Yury does, but better, he would feel compelled to defer to his rival and quit. He says to Lara:

I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.

Most of us carry regrets of one kind or another, which perhaps explains why this passage resonates so strongly. They discuss the first time that Yury saw Komarovsky, when he was with Misha Gordon. He tells Lara that Misha had witnessed Yury’s father’s suicide on the train while he was in the company of his lawyer, Komarovsky. The fact that Komarovsky had such a detrimental influence on both Lara and Yury’s lives is probably the biggest coincidence in the book. If I’m honest, it feels contrived, but not impossible. Yury says that Komarovsky is the man ‘of whom I shall always be incurably, insanely jealous.’ Well, good. At least we’ve established that much. He’s jealous of the man that he knows will one day take Lara from him, just as death will some day separate them.

13.

Yury asks Lara to tell him about her husband and quotes Shakespeare at her. Pasternak is actually quoting from his own translation of Romeo and Juliet. Lara thinks she saw Pasha from a distance one time, surrounded by guards and getting into a car. She saw his face and saw in it the living embodiment of an ideal. He’d handed himself over to ‘something lofty but deadening and pitiless, which wouldn’t spare him in the end.’ It’s really rather frightening language for the time and I admire Pasternak’s boldness here.

Lara tells Yury about her life with Pasha before the Revolution. She explains that she’d grown up almost in the same house as Yury—along with Pasha and Galiullin. She knew that Pasha was obsessed with her as a boy.

He and I were as different as you and I are alike.

An interesting line. I’m not sure that being alike is a recipe for a good relationship.

I love how she goes on to describe how everything has been swept away in the Revolution. All that’s left is the human spirit, reaching out for other humans. ‘We live and love and weep and cling to one another.’

14.

Lara explains that if Strelnikov were to become Pasha again, she would go straight back to him.

There is nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice, even you.

Then she takes it back and talks of duty over love. She believes that the war is at the root of everything. Lara argues that, before the Revolution, murder had seemed exceptional, almost something that belonged in plays rather than everyday life. We listened to reason and did what our conscience told us. She goes on to talk more and more seditiously, the kind of talk that could get one sent to the camps.

This social evil became an epidemic. It was catching. And it affected everything, nothing was left untouched by it.

Pasha left because the social change made him feel like he was of secondary importance. I’m not sure I understand this, or at least from the way that Lara explains it to Yury. As I see it, he had an inferiority complex, despite his intellect and education. Pasha seems unable to reconcile such sweeping social change with what he believes to be fundamental human nature. We know that he felt insecure in his marriage. Pasternak explained that when Pasha left for the front after hearing the troop train passing by Yuryatin. But defending one’s homeland is one thing; bowing to an ideology is quite another.

15.

As the summer passes, Yury gradually recovers. He’s now working as a doctor and gives general pathology lectures at the Rosa Luxemburg Institute. Yury and Lara live together with Katya, while Yury continues to feel split.

…the division in him was a sorrow and a torment and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.

It doesn’t sound idyllic, and, according to Anna Pasternak, it reflects Pasternak’s own inner turmoil as he lived a double life between his wife and Olga Ivinskaya.3

16.

Increasingly, Yury feels that he’ll have to quit his job. While they may say, ‘get on with your work and your ideas’, what they really mean is ‘make sure your ideas are aligned with the ideology’. Yury can’t play that game.

He asks Lara whether she’s heard of Vedenyapin, his uncle. People say that Yury has been corrupted by Vedenyapin’s ideas. He also mentions that he’s been accused of mimicry, or mimesis. It sounds rather like the exhausting effort of suppressing one's genuine thoughts in order to conform. Yury can’t help but talk about philosophy in his lectures, and he fears that the authorities might be keeping an eye on him and that he might be arrested. Lara agrees that they should be more careful. She tells Yury that Tiverzin and Antipov, her father-in-law, have been transferred to the local revolutionary tribunal. Antipov and Pasha did not see eye to eye politically, and Lara fears for herself and Katya.

A house next to the hospital is searched and a cache of weapons is found and an anti-revolutionary plot uncovered. Lara feels that the pressure is building and that she should get away. Lara suggests going to Varykino for the winter. Lara tells Yury that she’s been talking with Sima Tuntseva and asked her to look after Katya if anything were to happen to Lara.

17.

Sima Tuntseva pays Lara a visit. She gives a long lecture about God and man. She likens the Revolution to stories from the Old and New Testaments. Moses led the Israelites to safety through the parting of the Red Sea. ‘Everything is visible, audible, deafening, tremendous.’ Compare that with the birth of the Emmanuel, something quiet, ordinary, and yet inspiring. ‘Leaders and nations belonged to the past. They were replaced by the doctrine of personality and freedom.’ She goes on to talk about Christ and Mary Magdalene, an important figure for Pasternak. Two of ‘Yury’s’ poems are about Mary Magdalene.

18.

Unable to ignore the conversation next door, Yury tries to sleep while Sima and Lara continue talking. He’s taken by how Sima’s arguments match those of his uncle Vedenyapin.

Glasha Tuntseva rings the bell and delivers a letter from Moscow addressed to Yury. She remembered him from when she cut his hair. The letter has taken five months to arrive. It’s from Tonya. She tells him of their daughter, Masha, and that she and her family are being deported from Russia, along with some other right-wing socialists and former Kadet party members. She writes that she loves Yury, but knows that he does not love her. It sounds similar to what Pasha said to Lara before he left for the front. She believes they are going to Paris and she hopes that Yury will be able to join them. She believes in her heart that he is still alive. She tells him about her time at Varykino with Lara, how Lara was such a help to her during her confinement. She writes goodbye, finally understanding that they will never see each other again.

After finishing the letter, Yury cries out with grief and then collapses into unconsciousness.

And here, once more, the life bleeds into the fiction. According to Anna Pasternak, Boris conceived the whole latter half of the novel as a monument to Olga Ivinskaya — his Lara — and the partings that run through these closing chapters carry the charge of his own heartbreak. Most strikingly of all, the poem 'Parting', which surfaces at the very end of the book as one of Yury's own, was written immediately after Olga was arrested and taken from him. So when Tonya sits down to write her goodbye, knowing she will never see Yury again, we are not far from Pasternak himself at his desk in Peredelkino, turning loss into verse. We'll come to those poems in the final recording — and 'Parting' is one I'm especially looking forward to reading with all of this sitting behind it.

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 12

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1

The partisans’ families arrive, including one Kubarikha, a cattle-healer and a self-proclaimed witch. She’s wearing a Royal Scots Fusiliers greatcoat, part of the supplies sent by the British. The Allies provided some aid to the Whites, but it was not enough to make a difference. In his book A People’s Tragedy, historian Orlando Figes notes that Denikin received “a few hundred khaki uniforms and some tins of jam during the first months of Western aid”.1 Hardly enough to turn the tide.

The partisans have moved to a new camp on the edge of the taiga, a region of deep Siberian forestry. Yury finds a couple of places that remain in his memory. The first is a hummock on which a rowan tree is growing. The other is a ravine. Along the ravine’s edge are giant boulders, clearly placed by man. It was at this place that the sentence was carried out on the ringleaders of the conspiracy. One of them, Rzhanitsky, has a gun and fires three shots at guards. He misses, then hurls his pistol against a rock. The impact causes it to discharge again, wounding one of the prisoners. Terenty Galuzin begs for his life. Others scream at Sivobluy, the double-agent who revealed the conspirators. Vdovichenko addresses Rzhanitsky as one communard to another:

Don’t humble yourself! Your protest will not reach them. These new oprichniki… Posterity will nail the Bourbons of commissarocracy to a pillar of shame.

This is where some knowledge of French history would be helpful! For me, The Communards was Jimmy Somerville’s band in the eighties, and Bourbons are biscuits. The oprichniki were the private security police of Ivan the Terrible, responsible for breaking the power of the Boyars, the landed nobility under the feudal system, who often opposed the Tsar. What Vdovichenko is really doing is collapsing four centuries of Russian repression into a single curse: the oprichniki, then the Tsars' Okhrana waging its secret war outside the law, then the CheKa—one unbroken line of extra-legal terror serving whoever happens to hold power.

The conspirators are shot. It’s quite brutal. Terenty Galuzin is the last to die.

2.

The partisans are surrounded by the Whites, but are kept from being wiped out by the thickness of the winter forest. They’re basically besieged in the taiga and have to ration their supplies. They have an abundance of cattle, so they have enough milk and meat. Clothing is in short supply, so they resort to making coats from dogskin. Yury has only iodine crystals, which must be dissolved in alcohol to be effective in treating wounds. Those distillers who weren’t sentenced to death are commissioned to rebuild a still for medical use only, but of course drunkenness breaks out in the camp as soon as the still is operational.

3.

Yury goes to see Pamphil and his family. His mental health has improved now that he’s with his family, but news comes down the line that civilians are bad for discipline, and so the families are to be moved to winter quarters some distance away. Pamphil’s ‘creeps’ return on hearing this news.

4.

The partisans launch a sortie against the Whites and breach their defences. This brings about a new influx of refugees from the peasant villages. The partisans can’t support so many people, so they send envoys to the villages to divert the refugees to a settlement where the partisans can support them. Meanwhile, the Whites plug the breach, leaving the envoys outside the taiga and unable to return. The women refugees invade the forest and start chopping down trees and building roads and bridges. Liberius’s plans are being turned upside-down.

5.

Liberius is talking with the trapper Svirid about whether to cut the telegraph line alongside the road. Svirid tells him what the women refugees are up to. Some have even turned back to surrender to the Whites rather than be torn to pieces by wild animals. The settlement at Dvory has been burned to cinders. Those who pressed on have covered more than twenty miles, building roads and bridges as they went. Liberius immediately sees the danger: the Whites now have a highway into the taiga.

6.

Yury is making his way back to the taiga, past the rowan tree that marks the boundary. Kubarikha is there, singing. Yury stops to listen:

An old Russian folk-song is like water in a weir. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice-gates and its stillness is an illusion.

I just love that.

We get the lyrics to Kubarikha’s song, and it’s very folky. Most commentators believe Pasternak wrote the song himself.

I found a Russian singer on YouTube who has interpreted the song:

7.

Pamphil’s wife, Agatha, brings a sick cow to Kubarikha. It’s not giving milk. Kubarikha gives Agatha some cream to rub on the cow’s udders. Agatha explains her husband’s anxiety about being split up and the potential for Agatha’s being tortured by the Whites. Yury listens as Kubarikha sings a spell to cure the cow of its ills. It’s all very pagan, and Yury is bemused. It reminds him of the driver’s chat when Yury and his family were being driven to Varykino. Kubarikha shares some pagan folklore with Agatha while Yury continues to listen. For some reason, it makes him think of Lara, his love for her and how she’s surrounded by a divine outline that the Creator has drawn around her. He sees a huge, deified head in the mist. ‘It wept, and the rain kissed and watered it.’

8.

A mutilated man crawls into the forest with a message that the same fate awaits all partisans unless they surrender. The man tells of some of the horrors that the Whites are perpetrating on the prisoners, and then dies. It’s brutal and makes for some difficult reading. The paragraph that follows is even more horrific. Pamphil’s ‘creeps’ go into overdrive after hearing the dying man’s testimony, and he picks up an axe and kills his wife and children, before the enemy can kill them. At dawn, he flees from the camp, and that’s the last we see of him.

9.

High winter has settled in. Liberius invites Yury to his dug-out that evening. At the meeting, Liberius tells Yury that the Whites have been smashed; the Civil War is over. Yury enquires about his family. Varykino is empty, so the only conclusion is that Tonya and the children escaped. There’s a rumour that Yuryatin is still occupied by the Whites, but Liberius doesn’t believe it. Yury leaves the dug-out, where he sits on a log and starts to imagine Tonya’s escape with a child and a baby. He’s about to go back into Liberius’s dug-out when he changes his mind. He has long kept a pair of skis and some supplies buried nearby in case an opportunity to escape ever presented itself. This is that opportunity. After being challenged by a sentry and giving the proper password, he leaves the camp.

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 11

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Last week's chapter pays off here, as several of its seemingly incidental characters return and become important.

A reader's diary from Ukraine, written on the morning of 24 February 2022, has a line that could serve as an epigraph for this whole chapter: people only do that which they can't not do.1 The writer means it almost literally — he knows he should move his child's bed away from the window, away from the shattering glass, and finds he cannot quite do it. Pasternak's Yury, a captive medic with no rifle and no stake in either side, spends this chapter discovering the same truth: that there are situations the conscience doesn't choose its way out of, only through. The war he's dragged into is a century older than Ukraine's, but the grammar of compulsion is the same.

1.

Almost two years have passed since Yury was captured by the Forest Brotherhood, so we’ll be in 1920, give or take. Yury’s captivity feels illusory, yet it’s not. He has attempted to escape three times, and each time has been recaptured. Liberius favours him and has Yury sleep in his tent. The Brotherhood does not stay in one place but moves through the villages and countryside, integrating with the locals.

2.

The villages are White or Red, depending on the whims of the war. One can never tell by looking. The front moves around too, east and west. As the partisans are travelling along the road, now made almost impassable by the armies churning up the roads into rivers of mud, Yury catches sight of Pelagia Tyagunova. We first meet her in Chapter 7, Part 10. She’d been living in sin with Pritulyev in Petersburg and had chosen to accompany him on the train after he was conscripted. She and another woman, Ogryskova, become rivals over Pritulyev.

Yury doesn’t recognise her as being from the train at first, but she recognises him. When he eventually does recognise her, it brings back memories of his family; the pain of missing them is sharp. They speak, and she reminds him of the boy, Vassya, with whom she had run off when he escaped from the conscripts’ train. She’d lived with him and his mother for a while, before being herded from the village to live with her sister, Olga Galuzina. So now we have a connection to the previous chapter. She tells Yury that Vassya’s village had been raided and his house burned down, and that Vlas Galuzin had either been shot or jailed and his nephew had vanished. Pelagia now works at the chemist from which Yury is about to requisition supplies.

3.

Yury is busy looking after patients. The partisans’ unit grows tenfold in eighteen months, through picking up insurgents as they pass through villages and deserters from the other side. Yury now has two chief assistants, Kerenyi Lajos, a Hungarian, and Angelar, a Croat.

4.

Under the Red Cross International Convention, medics are not to participate in military operations, but Yury is forced to on one occasion. The Whites attack and he can see the faces of young men, first-year students and school leavers. They feel like his own kind, which of course they are. The partisans mow them down. Pasternak conveys the futility and arbitrary nature of the fighting well. Yury has no rifle and feels sympathy for the young soldiers being killed by the partisans. He almost feels like throwing himself into the field of fire and escaping amid the chaos, but it's too dangerous.

But to look on inactively while this mortal struggle raged all round was impossible, it was beyond human endurance. It was not a question of loyalty to the side which held him captive or of defending his own life, but of submitting to the order of events, to the laws governing what was happening before his eyes. … He had to shoot back.

When the man lying beside him is killed, Yury takes his rifle and ammunition and starts shooting, but at a tree, not at the ‘enemy’. He does, however, end up hitting a couple of soldiers and possibly even killing one. The partisans prevail and the Whites retreat.

Yury attends to the soldier whose rifle he’d taken. He’s dead, an amulet containing the 90th Psalm around his neck, worn for protection. Yury then approaches the soldier he’d killed and opens his coat. He removes a locket containing the very same Psalm, whereupon the soldier takes a breath. He was alive! The bullet had struck the locket. Partisan policy is to kill the wounded enemy and take no prisoners, so Yury dresses him in the dead soldier’s uniform and sneaks him in as one of their own. He nurses the soldier — Seryozha Rantsevich — back to health and then releases him, even though Rantsevich plans to return to the Whites.

The two psalms echo each other deliberately — the same text given to two men, doing opposite things: for one, useless; for the other, it turns the bullet. It’s the traditional soldier’s psalm, worn into battle for protection, its promise that a thousand may fall at your side and the danger won’t reach you. But notice where the chapter puts the real saving. The locket only halts the bullet; what carries Rantsevich off the field alive is Yury’s decision to dress him as a dead partisan and nurse him back — a mercy extended to a man who’ll return to the enemy. So the chapter’s frame held; Yury had to shoot back, the same way the man in Ukraine couldn’t move the bed. But here, for once, something is chosen. The psalm half-saves; a human being does the rest.

5.

The partisans dig in at Fox’s Thicket in the autumn. It had been a Whites hideout the previous winter, and they had left it intact. Yury shares a dugout with Liberius. Liberius asks him what he thinks of his father, Mikulitsin. Remember that Liberius and his father are at variance, politically speaking. In their conversation, Yury conveys his bewilderment at the fighting between two sides that are not so different. He doesn’t care for political theories.

Life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my theories about it.

There’s a rumour that a non-Russian force has raided and sacked Varykino, described as ‘some sort of mythical, slit-eyed warriors’. Liberius says it’s not true. He keeps on about how the Reds will win the war in a few months, but Yury’s tired of listening to him. Yury asks to be let go so he can look after Tonya and see his newborn baby for the first time, but Liberius refuses. It’ll only be for a few more months and then Yury will be free to go where he will. Yury’s beside himself in anger as Liberius continues with his cocaine-induced rant. Yury mutters to himself that one of these days Liberius will go too far and Yury will kill him.

6.

Yury has agreed to meet his assistant Lajos. Pasternak describes the autumn scene quite vividly: the smell of the earth, the shining leafy thickets, tight scrolls of dry willow leaves rolled up like shavings. Some men are being court-martialled for distilling vodka, the medical stores need reorganising, and there’s an epidemic of low morale and mental distress. There is dissension among the partisans’ ranks. Lajos talks about the anxiety some of the troops are experiencing; they’re worried about their families. One in particular, Pamphil Palykh, is concerned that his family will have to answer to the Whites for his being a partisan if he’s killed in action. Yury agrees to examine him, even though he knows him and disagrees with his warlike, aggressive demeanour.

7.

The partisans’ families are to be with them shortly, so they are packing up the camp ready to move on. The chief liaison officer, Kamennodvorsky, is burning papers. Pasternak describes the autumn scene once again:

Here and there the woods were brilliant with ripe berries—bright tassels of lady’s-smock, brick-red alderberries and clusters of viburnum which changed from white to purple.

Yury feels a sudden spiritual joy and thinks of Lara. But everyday life continues; he’s still a prisoner of the partisans. He approaches Kamennodvorsky, who gives Yury his marching orders for the medical unit. Yury has less transport than he had last time, and there are also more wounded. Kamennodvorsky replies that he has to ‘cut his coat according to his cloth,’ a nice English idiom. P&V translate it as ‘We’ve got to adjust to circumstances.’ The original reads, ‘Надо применяться к обстоятельствам.’ He then asks Yury to examine Pamphil Palykh, telling him that Palykh has ‘the creeps’.

8.

Yury goes to see Palykh, but he feels overwhelmed with fatigue. He lies down on some leaves and falls asleep. He’s awakened by his own thoughts whirling around in his head. He feels like killing Liberius for causing him so much stress and anxiety. A butterfly lands on a tree trunk, and its camouflage makes it disappear, just as Yury himself is camouflaged on his bed of leaves. He dozes off again and awakens to the sound of a conversation nearby. He recognises the voices of the scum of the partisans; it’s Goshka, Sanka and Terenty Galuzin, the three teenage boys we met in the previous chapter. Sanka was the one who had refused to undress for his medical exam. They all ran off to join the partisans at the end of the chapter, but only as a means of hiding from Kolchak. Their hearts are clearly not with the partisans, as they are now in conversation with envoys from the other side. They’re conspiring to capture Liberius and hand him over to the Whites. Yury goes to find Kamennodvorsky and warn him, but it turns out that the plot was already known. One of the conspirators, Sivobluy, had been an agent provocateur and the plotters had been seized.

9.

The partisans’ families are close. Yury goes to see Pamphil Palykh. He’s reinforcing the roof of his tent so that his family can stay with him in the camp. Palykh is the kind of man who needed no encouragement to hate intellectuals, bourgeois, officers and gentry with a savage hatred. He’s held in high esteem by the partisan leaders. He’s unable to sleep for fear of what the Whites will do to his wife and children. He explains to Yury that he’s killed many officers and gentry without batting an eyelid, but there was one kill that he can’t get out of his head. It was during the February Revolution, during Kerensky’s time. He explains the circumstances: a young officer stood on a water butt to rally the troops and fell in when the lid overturned, and Palykh shot him. Of course, it was Commissar Gintz from Chapter 5. That’s the death that has given Palykh ‘the creeps’. Palykh's conscience is selective: after countless killings, it is the death of Gintz that returns to torment him.

Catch you next week for Chapter 12!

Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 10

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In this chapter, Yury and Lara all but disappear. The lens zooms out to give us a picture of Siberia during the Civil War, with the Whites under Admiral Kolchak in the ascendancy, and pockets of Bolshevik resistance holding secret meetings and forming partisan groups in the forest. Yury is mentioned only in passing, a famous doctor from Moscow in a nearby village, heard of but never seen. The scene is set during Holy Week, a time of resurrection set against a war that is destroying the villagers’ way of life, ‘a country busy killing off the flower of its own manhood’.

1.

We’re travelling along the oldest highway in Siberia. The region is now governed by Admiral Kolchak, Supreme Commander of the Whites. Alexander Kolchak served in the Imperial Russian Navy and fought in the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, during which he was taken prisoner. In November 1918, he was appointed Supreme Ruler after the collapse of the Directory, a five-member executive body of the Constituent Assembly in Omsk, which had lasted only eight weeks. Interestingly, the Directory’s base was in a railway carriage near Omsk, which may perhaps have inspired Strelnikov’s location in Chapter 7. Kolchak led the counter-revolution for the next fourteen months, before handing over to General Anton Denikin in January 1920.

2.

It’s Holy Week. The thaw is coming. The road passes the Holycross Monastery, where a recruitment poster for the Whites is pinned by order of Kolchak.

3.

There’s a soft rain that soaks everything and washes away the remaining snow. Pasternak gives a vivid description of the approaching spring.

The grocer’s wife, Galuzina, leaves the Matins service in the church because she’s feeling faint. She’s worried that her son will be called up. ‘Another’s soul is a dark pool,’ as the saying goes. P&V render that as ‘There’s no looking into another’s heart’. The original reads, ‘чужая душа потёмки.’ Galuzina’s husband is out delivering a patriotic speech to the new recruits instead of looking after their son, and Galuzina is distraught:

What had caused all this misery? Was it the revolution? No, oh no! It was the war. The war had killed off the flower of Russia’s manhood, and now there was nothing but rotten, good-for-nothing rubbish left.

Pasternak’s opening the chapter at Matins, in Holy Week, is more than seasonal scene-setting. For provincial Russia the church calendar was the very frame of life; as Orlando Figes notes in A People’s Tragedy , the villager thought of himself first as Orthodox and only afterwards, if at all, as Russian — ‘We are Orthodox, and we are from here.’ Galuzina slipping faint from the service, sick with worry over her conscripted son, belongs wholly to that world: her faith and her dread of the war are cut from the same cloth.

4.

Galuzina thinks on the good old days, before the revolution and the war changed everything. She thinks about the Jewish families who have set up businesses in the old grey house. Her husband was wrong to hate the Jews so much. The passage is notable given Pasternak's own Jewish background.

She ponders education, the difference between town and village. It’s the country people that know how to live. She goes home and thinks about the men like Tiverzin and Antipov, out there lording it up, former political exiles from the capitals. I suppose Yury Zhivago and Lara would be included in these thoughts if she’d known them, although they were living quietly and were not lording it up.

5.

Galuzina has some old shoulder pain that flares up. Her ward, Ksyusha, offers some sympathy. Ksyusha suggests the Hungarian doctor. Seemingly everyone has left. There’s not a doctor to be had, although they’ve heard that there’s a famous doctor from Moscow in Yuryatin.

6.

Lidochka, the representative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, is making a speech about the militarist regime in Siberia. It’s at an illegal meeting being held in the middle of a shed in the photographers’ yard. Their goal is to ‘overthrow the hateful autocracy of admirals and hetmans and to establish the power of the peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets’. There are 12 to 15 people in the room, including four guests of honour, old workers and veterans of the 1905 revolution. Tiverzin is one. Antipov is another. Lidochka was touring Siberia on a military mission from the Central Committee. Also present is Liberius, Mikulitsin’s son and the leader of the Forest Brotherhood, the partisan group that has taken Yury. The speaker, Lidochka, is Kostoyed Amursky, a former social revolutionary, or SR. Lidochka is his codename. We first met him in Chapter 7, when he was arguing against the Bolsheviks with Yury on the train, while they enjoyed a roasted hare together. The SRs were now outlawed, and Kostoyed has come over to the Communist Party. He’s chosen for this mission because of his background in revolutionary activity and his knowledge of the peasantry in the region. Liberius finds Lidochka’s speech to be amateurish. The meeting ends after some unresolved arguments.

7.

In the village of Kuteiny Posad, a farewell dinner is being held for Kolchak’s conscripts. Vlas Galuzin is there, toasting the conscripts for victory against the Bolsheviks. His son, Terenty, is one of the conscripts. He and his friend Goshka have an interesting conversation. The original text includes some mild swearing, as a boys’ conversation probably would. H&H translate it as ‘I’ll join the anarchists, I’ll —— your mother if I don’t.’ P&V render it thus: ‘I’ll damn well sign up with the anarchists’. The original reads, ‘Я, мать твою, в анархисты запишусь.’

The sound of an explosion interrupts Galuzin’s toast. The village hall in the neighbouring village of Maly Yermolay is on fire. Medical checks of conscripts were being carried out in that village. A colonel rides over from Maly Yermolay and starts a house-to-house search in Kuteiny to look for the perpetrator. Terenty and Goshka sneak off to hide. Not that they’ve done anything wrong, but just to keep out of the way. They get the story of what had happened — Sanka Pafnutkin had caused a fray at the medical centre after refusing to undress for his medical. Colonel Strese is now looking for him and his accomplices and, it turns out, for Terenty Galuzin as well. The colonel suspects that his father has been involved in clandestine meetings of rebels, which, of course, he has. The chapter ends with Terenty and Goshka’s decision to run and join the Forest Brotherhood until things die down.

Catch you next week for Chapter 11!

Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 9

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The first ten parts of this chapter are taken from Yury’s diary. It’s a narrative technique that moves the story along while giving us Yury’s motivations and thoughts.

1.

It’s winter. Yury’s writing in his diary.

What happiness it is to work from dawn to dusk for your family and yourself, to build a roof over their heads, to till the soil to feed them, to create your own world, like Robinson Crusoe, in imitation of the Creator of the universe, and to bring forth your life, as if you were your own mother, again and again.

He writes about how their lives are now: stealing from the state, hidden away, undiscovered, safe from persecution. Their living is made possible by Samdevyatov; he supplies them with timber and whatever else they need besides what they can grow themselves.

2.

Yury continues to write, beginning with a quote from Tyutchev. Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873) was a poet Pasternak greatly admired. Yury quotes his poem The Summer of 1854. It’s kind of cool that he writes out quotes in his diary. Yury fills us in on how they’ve spent their time since arriving at Varykino. The harvest was successful; they have enough produce and firewood to see them through the winter. It sounds like hard but rewarding work.

They spend their winter nights by the stove, sewing and reading War and Peace and Eugene Onegin. Sounds idyllic to me!

3.

Yury believes that Tonya is pregnant. In fact, he’s sure she is, because he knows the signs even if she doesn’t.

4.

Yury writes about art.

I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm in which there are innumerable concepts and varied phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited.

It’s a fascinating monologue in which he goes on to define art as being a thread that runs through thousands of years. I think I agree, although I'm not entirely sure I understand what he's saying. It would be a good section to discuss. As someone who has read Crime and Punishment a few times, this section stood out to me:

A work of art can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. One is much more shaken by the presence of art in Crime and Punishment than by Raskolnikov’s crime.

Is one? I suppose it depends on how one defines art. I could go into a long explanation of my own ideas here, but that’s a topic for a separate essay. Maybe we could get into it in the comments.

5.

Yury feels signs of his weak heart, inherited from his mother’s side. Tonya is ironing. It reminds Yury of something, but he can’t think what. We can, though. Remember in Chapter 5 Lara was ironing sheets in the hospital near the front:

In the room the scent of lime blossom mixed, as in an old park, with the caraway-bitter smell of dry twigs; to it were added the charcoal fumes of the two flat-irons which Lara used alternately, putting them in turn in the flue to keep them hot.

Yury thinks about going to the library. He feels an urge to write. It will soon be spring and then he’ll be too busy to write. He’s been having headaches and vivid dreams. He’s awoken from a dream by the sound of a woman’s voice; that’s all he remembers. He can’t think whose voice it was.

6.

Earth, sky, moon and stars, all seem riveted together by the frost.

They continue to discuss poetry, particularly Pushkin’s.

'It's as if the air, the light, the noise of life, of real substantial things burst into his poetry from the street as through an open window. Concrete things—things in the outside world, things in current use, names of things, common nouns—burst in and take possession of his verse, driving out the vaguer parts of speech. Things and more things, lined up in rhymed columns on the page.

This reminds me of the discussion we had about Pasternak’s poetry in Chapter 3.

7.

Every man is born a Faust with a longing to embrace and experience and express everything in the world.

Pasternak translated Faust, so he knew it intimately.

Yury is pondering how to work as a doctor and as an artist. He returns to Pushkin—as indeed did Bulgakov, who wove Faust through The Master and Margarita. The pairing is apt: critics have long read the two novels side by side as post-Symbolist works, both holding fast to the Christian and ethical imagination in the teeth of an age built to extinguish it. Pasternak and Bulgakov, each writing in secret and barely published in his lifetime, were waging the same quiet war.1

The fabulous is never anything but the commonplace touched by the hand of genius.

That’s a tombstone line. God, I love this chapter! Pasternak’s words in Yury’s head. The difference between Pushkin and Chekhov on the one hand, and Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on the other. The former create beauty from the everyday.

'What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation. It isn't that they didn't think about these things, and to good effect, but they always felt that such important matters were not for them. While Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky worried and looked for the meaning of life and prepared for death and drew up balance-sheets, these two were distracted, right up to the end of their lives, by the current, individual tasks imposed on them by their vocation as writers, and in the course of fulfilling these tasks they lived their lives, quietly, treating both their lives and their work as private, individual matters, of no concern to anyone else. And these individual things have since become of concern to all, their work has ripened of itself, like apples picked green from the trees, and has increasingly matured in sense and sweetness.'

Is he talking about slice-of-life fiction? I don’t know Chekhov or Pushkin so well, but I did study Gogol in depth at university some thirty years ago. It’s an interesting passage to think about. I’m not entirely sure that I agree. Is it possible that these are only Yury’s thoughts and not Pasternak’s? It seems unlikely, but it’s possible.

8.

Spring arrives. Yury thinks of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin again; Pushkin describes the spring in Chapter 7. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin’s famous novel in verse, written between 1823 and 1831. It’s so well known that it’s almost part of Russia’s DNA. Ivan Turgenev is invoked here too. He wrote about birdsong in his piece "About Nightingales" in his collection Literary Reminiscences (1874).

9.

Spring is in full swing, so there’s no longer any time for writing. A patient calls in to see Yury. He tries to fob the patient off, but he insists. There’s another sledge in the yard—it belongs to Yury’s half-brother, Yevgraf. He has called in out of the blue. Yevgraf doesn’t give much away about where he’s been or what he’s been doing. His connections seem even more mysterious than Samdevyatov’s. He promises to make their lives easier, to give Tonya more time with Sasha and Yury more time to practice medicine.

For the second time he has burst into my life as my good genius, my rescuer, resolving all my difficulties.

10.

Yury becomes a frequent visitor to the library in Yuryatin. The local visitors are divided between intellectuals, who look puffy and unhealthy, and the poorer folk, looking hale and hearty. One of the library assistants brings to mind the woman who was working the points on the railway as they approached the station at Torfyanaya—it must be Avdotya. The narrator told us in the previous chapter that she worked at the library. Yury tries to remember what Samdevyatov had told him about Yuryatin on the train, but it’s fuzzy.

11.

Yury hits his borrowing limit at the library. I have to say, for a book lover, this chapter really resonates! We get a description of Yury’s morning in the library and then he catches a glimpse of someone he recognises: it’s Lara! She’s talking to the librarian, now confirmed as Avdotya Tunteseva, and her very presence has lifted Avdotya’s spirits, as well as those of the other library patrons. Lara is clearly well regarded in Yuryatin.

12.

Yury feels an unusual shyness about approaching Lara. Instead he seats himself in such a way so as to turn his face away from her. He now knows that the voice he’d heard in his dream at Varykino had been Lara’s. Yury can no longer concentrate on his reading. He finds himself thinking of Lara and how well she does everything. Lara’s presence affects him as it did the librarian and the other library patrons. Her calming influence enables him to focus on his reading again, and this he does with gusto. After he’s finished, he feels able to reward himself by approaching Lara, only she’s gone. Lying on the counter are the books that she was reading, books on Marxism. He discerns her address from the library card poking out of a book she’d been reading.

13.

On a cold, windy day at the beginning of May, Yury decides to pay a call on Lara at her home. He sees her fetching water from the well and retrieves her headscarf after it’s blown off by a gust of wind. She recognises him instantly and they go back to her building together. She’d seen him in the library and had also known that he’d been living in the area for the past year. Yury is taken by how effortlessly she carries the water, with the same kind of ease that she does everything.

There is the same ease and harmony in everything she does, as if, way back in her childhood, she had taken a flying start in life and everything had followed of itself, as naturally as a result flows from a cause.

14.

Lara takes Yury into her rooms. She and Katya got a room after the Town Housing Department took over their school. Yury sees the sign through the window: Moreau & Vetchinkin. Seed drills. Threshing machines. It reminds Yury of arriving on the train after his meeting with Strelnikov. He’s forgotten that Strelnikov is Pasha Antipov, Lara’s husband, and tells her about the encounter. Lara finds it extraordinary, ‘as if you were predestined to meet’. There’s no way she can’t know that it’s Pasha, right? She comments that Strelnikov seems to have made a good impression, and Yury replies that he has, but then goes on to say that he thinks he is a doomed man.

Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying, not as criminals, but as machines that have got out of control, like a run-away train.

This passage is quoted in Lara by Anna Pasternak as an example of Pasternak's being critical of the regime. In his speech at the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934, Alexei Surkov said:

‘The immense talent of B. L. Pasternak will never fully reveal itself until he has attached himself fully to the gigantic, rich and radiant subject matter [offered by] the Revolution; and he will become a great poet only when he has organically absorbed the Revolution into himself.’2

Surkov went on to become general secretary of the Writers’ Union and an enemy of Pasternak’s.

Yury’s speech here to Lara isn’t as much anti-revolutionary as it is life-affirming. He sees the regime as being willing to tear everything down, but without having thought about what might replace it.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself—the gift of life—is such a breath-takingly serious thing!

Lara tells him that there has been a lot of looting and shelling in the town, and that it was even worse under the Whites. She goes on to mention that Galiullin had turned up with the Czechs as a sort of governor-general.

The Czech Legion was formed by Czech nationalists who were working in Russia when the Great War broke out. It was enlarged by Czech and Slovak POWs and deserters from the Austrian army and, by 1917, had grown to some 35,000 soldiers. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they resolved to fight as part of the Czech army in France. To avoid risking crossing enemy lines, they decided to travel the long way round, along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok in Russia’s far east, and then across the USA. This journey took them through the Urals region, where they were drawn into the Civil War. You can read about it in depth in Orlando Figes’ excellent book, A People’s Tragedy.3

Lara explains how helpful Galiullin had been during that time, how he’d helped Lara to keep people safe. She explains that she’s known him since childhood and that she understands the Revolution better than Yury, as she’d grown up poor, right in the thick of it, while the rail workers’ strikes were going on.

Lara’s daughter Katya comes into the room and is introduced to Yury. She’s around eight years old. Lara invites Yury to have dinner with them, but he declines as it takes about four hours to get back to Varykino and so he has to leave. She persuades him to stay for another half hour…

15.

Lara does know that Strelnikov is her husband. Of course she does! Yury admits to having heard the rumours but doesn’t believe Lara. Lara explains that it was Strelnikov who had shelled Yuryatin, the very town where his wife and child are living. Horrible. ‘Of course it was his duty.’ Oh, Lara… She does, however, go on to call his resisting the temptation to come and see them ‘inconceivable.’ He’s in Siberia now fighting against Galiullin, two men who grew up together as best friends. She says that Galiullin knows only too well who Strelnikov is. She explains that the young cadets would kill their instructors at the Military Academy if they didn’t like them, claiming that the instructors were Bolshevik sympathisers. And they would beat up Jews. Lara said she would stand outside the building Strelnikov was using as his headquarters in the hope of seeing him. Pasha’s own father now lives close by in exile, as does Tiverzin—remember them from the railway strikes right at the beginning of the novel? Neither Pasha nor his father have made an effort to see one another.

They are made of stone, these people, they aren’t human, with all their rules and principles.

Despite everything, Lara believes that Pasha still loves them.

He wants to come back as a conqueror, full of honour and glory, and lay his laurels at our feet. Just like a child!

She might just be onto something.

16.

Two months have passed. Yury did end up staying at Lara’s that night, telling Tonya that he’d stayed at Samdevyatov’s inn. Yury’s been going back and forth over these two months, and he feels like a criminal. He’s feeling the weight of guilt, something about which Pasternak knew only too well. He’d had an affair with Zinaida Neuhaus, who later became his second wife, and then with Olga Ivinskaya, whom he never married but who was the love of his life—and, Anna Pasternak argues, the inspiration for Lara.

‘What next?’ He sometimes asked himself, and hoped wretchedly for some impossible, unexpected circumstance to solve his problem for him.

This brings to mind the morning Zinaida found Olga out. As Anna Pasternak tells it, Boris was outside at his ablutions, and Zinaida was tidying his desk for the day's work when she came upon a love letter from Olga. What makes it so strange is that Boris kept a famously bare, clutter-free desk and claimed never to hold on to letters at all, so how it came to be lying there is its own little mystery. However it surfaced, whether she moved a book to dust or it sat open in plain view, she stood and read it. (Remember we talked about how meticulous he was about keeping his workspace tidy?)

I must admit that in reading this passage alongside this biography, I find it difficult to separate Pasternak from Yury Zhivago. And knowing, as I do, how both stories end, it’s even more challenging to separate them.

Yury decides to go home and confess his affair to Tonya and never see Lara again. As he’s riding through the forest, he hears a nightingale begin to sing.

‘Wake up! Wake up!’ It called entreatingly. ‘Awake, O my soul, why dost thou slumber?’

This stirs Yury to change his mind. He doesn’t need to confess today. He would go back and finish his conversation with Lara, ‘more tenderly, in a manner more suitable to a last farewell.’ As he reaches the crossroads at the Moreau & Vetchinkin sign, he’s stopped by three horsemen. The chief among them informs Yury that he’s been recruited as the Comrade Doctor for the Forest Brotherhood. If he resists, he’ll be shot.

Catch you next week for Chapter 10!

I’ll review each book in the order in which I read them, then sum up at the end.

Black Earth: Russia After the Fall, Andrew Meier, Harper Perennial, 2003

“Tell me,” Viktor said, fixing his eyes on mine. “Because I can’t understand it. But you must know. Can a country survive without a conscience?”

Viktor is the father of Andrew Sazykin, a young soldier, aged just twenty, who was killed on what the Russians refer to as the Sixth of August, the day that Chechen rebels took back Grozny from the Russians in 1996. The prologue opens with the story of the parents’ journey through the courts, which the author had been following for over five years.

Meier lived in Russia throughout the 1990s and served as a staff correspondent for Time in Moscow for six years. His book is based on his reporting throughout those years and collates stories from different regions of the country as he travels its length and breadth.

He begins in Moscow, where he captures the chaos and hedonism of the 90s perfectly. I learned that hailing a car is known as ‘voting’, and that the Mercedes 600 series were known as shestsoty (from the Russian for six hundred). We go from there to Chechnya in 2000, during the second war. It was unusual for a Western journalist to be granted access to the region. The story of the massacre at Aldi was very moving.

My favourite part of the book was Meier’s trip up the Yenisei River on a cruise ship to Dudinka and thence to Norilsk, a closed mining city above the Arctic Circle. Foreigners are allowed in only with permission from the FSB. The boat trip itself was interesting to read about because of the characters Meier had conversations with, including fellow American traveller Jim Conboy, a 73-year-old from Massachusetts. Norilsk itself, though — what a place! It inspired me to look up video footage and photos to get a better feel for the place and learn more about its history. Remarkable.

Meier then follows in Chekhov’s footsteps to Sakhalin, an island off the east coast of Russia.

I arrived on Sakhalin thinking Russia would be like Germany or Japan after the war. But it turned out to be more like Germany or Japan during the war.

Life on the island sounds challenging, though not as challenging as in Norilsk. There’s a big alcohol problem on Sakhalin, though probably not any worse than in remote towns and villages in Siberia.

From Sakhalin we’re back to St Petersburg, where Meier gets a sit-down with ‘alleged’ Mafia boss Kumarin, who claims that he’s a legit St Petersburg businessman. It’s an interesting conversation.

We also learn of Galina Starovoitova’s murder in 1998. She was a State Duma Deputy and human rights campaigner in Petersburg. Kumarin, who changed his name to Barsukov, was later named in court as the man who ordered the killing, but this was never proven. He did, however, receive a jail sentence in 2009 for racketeering.

Meier then takes us full circle, returning to Moscow, where he interviews Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Kabastky, commander of the Petersburg unit of the OMON, the Russian riot police. The OMON had been posted to Chechnya and were ‘alleged’ participants in the Aldi massacre. Again, it’s an insightful conversation.

The book is well written and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d be very interested in reading a follow-up from this author on recent events in Russia. My copy of the book closes with an interview with Meier, conducted by Travis Elborough in 2004, one year after the book’s initial publication, as well as Meier’s comments on the Beslan siege of September 2004.

Thanks to for putting this excellent book on my radar.

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The Essential Anna Politkovskaya, Vintage Classics, 2026

First of all, thank you to for bringing this book to my attention in a weekly post. The book was published to mark twenty years since Politkovskaya’s murder on 7 October 2006.

If you’ve been following my Substack for any length of time, you’ll know that Russia has my heart. Literature, poetry, music, history, politics. I’ve read a few biographies of Putin and I think all of them mentioned Anna Politkovskaya’s murder in the stairwell of her apartment block as she headed home with bags of groceries. The date is significant: 7 October is Putin’s birthday. Some reporters claim that she was killed by the Chechens as a birthday present for Putin. She was 48 years old.

Politkovskaya was an investigative journalist for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She wrote articles on human rights violations, state corruption and both Chechen wars. She’d become a thorn in the side of the Putin regime, doing what good reporters are supposed to do: writing the truth and holding politicians and state officials to account.

The book contains a series of Anna’s articles, translated into English by John Crowfoot and Arch Tait. Articles have been selected from three of Politkovskaya’s books, A Dirty War (2001), Putin’s Russia (Harvill Press, 2004) and Nothing But the Truth (Vintage, 2011), with an afterword by Svetlana Alexievich.

This was the first time that I had read any of Politkovskaya’s reporting, and I was riveted from start to finish. There are many articles about Chechnya. Politkovskaya writes very much from a humanitarian point of view. For example, in one of the first articles in the book, she writes about her efforts to have residents of an old people’s home in Grozny moved to safety. Her newspaper is raising funds to assist, but she faces obstacle after obstacle.

That line of Putin’s about wiping out the bandits after they’re cornered ‘in the shithouse’ was one of his populist moments. He was appointed Prime Minister in 1999 and, during a press briefing, used prison slang to gain popular support. It worked.2

Other articles include reporting on Beslan, where a siege of a school began on 1 September 2004 in the North Caucasus by a multi-national gang of thugs who were demanding an end to the war. Almost 1,500 people were held hostage: children, parents and teachers. 334 people were killed, including 186 children.

Attempts were made to prevent Politkovskaya from boarding the plane in Moscow, but the captain of another plane recognised her and personally welcomed her on board. She was poisoned on the plane and taken to hospital immediately upon landing at Rostov-on-Don. She didn’t make it to Beslan.

The siege was grossly mishandled, resulting in many more deaths. Officials were more concerned with keeping their jobs than rescuing hostages:

The deaths of hostages could always be blamed on the terrorists, whereas falling foul of Putin would be political suicide […] Let us state unambiguously that all the Russian government representatives in Beslan at that time were more concerned to work out what Putin wanted than to work out a way of resolving the monstrous situation in the school.3

In another chapter, Politkovskaya reports on the theatre siege at a performance of Nord-Ost at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in 2002. Chechens seized the theatre and held 952 hostages. Politkovskaya was permitted to enter and negotiate with the leader of the siege.

Politkovskaya’s reporting ultimately got her killed. If you have not read any of the other collections of translations listed above, this one should definitely be on your list.

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I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country, Elena Kostyuchenko, The Bodley Head, 2023

Elena Kostyuchenko is a Russian journalist who, like her idol Anna Politkovskaya, worked for Novaya Gazeta. The book is a series of Kostyuchenko’s articles, originally published in Novaya Gazeta and translated by Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse.

Kostyuchenko was born in 1987 and was just four when the USSR collapsed. She begins by writing of her childhood from that age, about how her mama would tell her that things had been better before, when she’d had a well-paid job as a chemist. Now she worked as a cleaner and washed nappies at pre-school.

Obviously her background is very different to Politkovskaya’s and that comes across in her articles. Her writing style feels younger, less journalistic and more bloggy. I was utterly spellbound by her article about the HZB, a derelict hospital where the Moscow kids hang out. It was full of slang that inspired me, as a Russian speaker, to buy the book in the original language just so I could read the Russian slang for myself. It was an excellent learning experience!

The generational rift between mother and daughter features throughout the text. It’s an interesting glimpse into what must still be going on in Russia: between those who lived before and those born after the Soviet Union's collapse. For example, Kostyuchenko shares a dialogue she had with her mother about Ukraine. The first line is her mother’s:

“Because your newspaper is anti-Russian. That must be why.”
“Do you really think that I’m anti-Russian?”
“They’ll start shouting that everybody has to jump up and down, and call anybody who doesn’t a moskal!* So people jump up and down!”
“So what? It’s cold there. They’re just keeping warm.”
“So what?! Doesn’t that hurt your feelings?”
“I don’t care what the people are shouting in Kyiv.”
“See? You don’t care. To you, it’s a foreign country. But I still remember when Kyiv was ours.”

*Moskal is a Ukrainian pejorative originally referring to Russian soldiers or officials and now to all Russians.4

In Rust, Kostyuchenko travels to the closed mining city of Norilsk above the Arctic Circle, where she reports on a cover-up of a chemical spill. She’s there in summer, when the sun doesn’t set for three months. It’s excellent investigative journalism and tied in nicely with the Norilsk chapter in Andrew Meier’s Black Earth.

In The Last Helicopters, Kostyuchenko writes about the Nganasan people at Ust-Avam in the Krasnoyarsk Krai. She reports that only around 700 remain and that they are the northernmost people on the continent. Alcoholism and suicide are big problems for the population.

In the final chapter, Novaya and I (We Were a Cult), she writes about the Putin regime’s revoking Novaya Gazeta’s publishing licence in 2022. Kostyuchenko had achieved her life’s goal of being made a staff writer in 2006.

The author fled to Germany, where she survived a suspected poisoning in 2022, and now lives in exile in the USA. She is an activist for gay rights, for which she was beaten and hospitalised at a Pride parade in Moscow in 2011.

Kostyuchenko was awarded the 2024 Pushkin House Book Prize and made the list of best books of the year 2023 by The New Yorker and Time.

The last chapter ends with these words, which I can’t help but choke up while reading:

The motto for Novaya Gazeta was “Same Letters, New Words.”
How much does the word weigh?
(sometimes, an entire living life)
Can the word stand up to armed tyranny?
(no)
Can the word stop a war?
(no)
Can the word save a country?
(no)
Can the word save the person who says it?
It saved me.
But just me.5

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Which book should I read?

Reading these three books in such a relatively short space of time, what struck me was how much the Chechnya story is enhanced by reading three authors’ reporting side by side. Meier goes in as a Westerner, which perhaps allowed him to ask questions that insiders couldn’t. Politkovskaya did ask the questions and was killed for it. She passed the baton to Kostyuchenko, of a younger generation, who has been beaten, allegedly poisoned, and forced to flee her country. Hers is the view of a post-Soviet journalist who has witnessed the slow shutdown of Russia's free press, which we’re still witnessing today. Reading the three books together feels like a long conversation over twenty years. In Meier’s prologue, a grieving father asks, ‘Can a country survive without a conscience?’ Politkovskaya was that conscience; Kostyuchenko inherited it and carried it into exile—Same letters, new words. She now writes for Meduza, a Riga-based independent outlet that publishes in Russian and English.

If I were going to read only one book, it would be Kostyuchenko’s, but read all three if you can. They’re all worthy of your time and attention.

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 8

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1.

Yury and his family have arrived at the Urals, and the contrast with Moscow couldn’t be more stark:

From now on they were in a different territory, in a new and different provincial world which had created a gravity of its own.

2.

Pasternak describes the earth, ‘black with oil’. The southern Urals is a fertile region. A passing sentry tells Yury that it’s time to plant the crops, which is precisely what he would be doing were it not for this ‘civil war and this plague of counter-revolution.’

3.

Yury gets back into the train carriage. Tonya tells him that the sentries have explained what’s happening and that the passengers are all congratulating Yury on having escaped from Strelnikov. There are some new passengers on the train, including one Samdevyatov, another name for you all to contend with! Yury comments on his name, too:

With a name like that he ought to have come straight out of an old Russian ballad, complete with a bushy beard, a smock and a studded belt.

In Russian, sam means ‘self’ and devyat is the number nine. Such names are given to characters in Russian folktales, so Pasternak is having fun by giving a Soviet-era lawyer and businessman a folk name. Samdevyatov is local to the region and knew Yury’s father. He also knows Lara. Tonya warns Yury to be careful: Samdevyatov is a Bolshevik. Samdevyatov told Tonya that the railway station at Yuryatin has been damaged in the fighting, so their train is being redirected right past the station nearest their destination, Varykino.

4.

Yury and Samdevyatov talk during the journey, with Samdevyatov pointing out local landmarks as they pass. At times, they have to shout over the noise of the train to be heard.

Gasparov argues that by layering narratives that move at different speeds, Pasternak allows the reader to ‘symbolically overcome time’, and, by association, ‘overcome death’.1 It’s the same symphony metaphor we discussed in Chapter 1, which I find fascinating. I see the novel’s main theme as being the overcoming of death.

5.

Samdevyatov explains that he’s a lawyer. He works on ‘peculiarities of the transitional period.’ He knows the region like his own backyard, within a 100-mile radius. He doesn’t believe that the estate manager, Mikulitsin, will receive them well at all, and that living off the land is a utopian dream.

Another problematic phrase from Yury:

‘There you are. You are a bolshevik, and yet even you admit that what’s going on isn’t life—it’s lunacy, it’s an absurd nightmare.

He was a brave man, old Boris Pasternak! — although he didn’t take too kindly to being called old at the age of 68, as we learn from Anna Pasternak’s excellent book, Lara:

Boris was incensed at being addressed as ‘old fellow’ in Olga’s presence. According to Olga, he still thought of himself as ‘young and healthy and the hero of the hour into the bargain.’2

Yury ponders turning back, especially after hearing that it was unlikely Mikulitsin would receive them. Samdevyatov goes back on what he’d said earlier, and says that Mikulitsin will huff and puff, but then he’ll melt and let them stay. Seemingly, he’s one of the kindest men you’ll find. Samdevyatov then tells the story of the Mikulitsins.

6.

Mikulitsin arrived in the Urals region from St Petersburg twenty-five years ago. He married one of the four Tuntseva sisters, Agripinna. They have a son, Liberius, who goes off to fight in the Great War. Agripinna dies just before the Revolution. Liberius returns a decorated, ‘fully bolshevised’ war hero. Samdevyatov asks Yury whether he’s heard of the ‘Forest Brotherhood’. He hasn’t. He then explains to Yury who the partisans are, and I’m glad for that as I wasn’t sure myself. Liberius is the commander of the partisans belonging to the Forest Brotherhood.

Mikulitsin remarried. His second wife, Helen, is an ingénue, ‘both by nature and intention.’

Mikulitsin was a Socialist Revolutionary and had been elected to the Constituent Assembly. This was formed under the Provisional Government after the February Revolution and was overthrown by the Bolsheviks after they failed to secure a majority. It met for just a single thirteen-hour session (from 4 p.m. on 18 January to 5 a.m. on 19 January 1918).

Yury realises that father and son must therefore be politically opposed, something that was common in those days. And indeed, it is still common today.

The three remaining Tuntseva sisters still live in Yuryatin. Avdotya works at the library, Glasha does a bit of everything—she’s the one that Samdevyatov thought he saw working the railway points—and Sima has become ‘a bit touched in the head, she’s got religious mania.’

The train reaches Samdevyatov’s station and he alights. Tonya says to Yury:

I don’t know about you, but I feel he’s been sent to us by fate. I think he’ll play some helpful part in our lives.’

Yury agrees, but he’s worried that they will be more conspicuous at Varykino than they were in Moscow, given that Tonya’s Krueger relations are so well known in the region.

7.

Yury, Tonya and family alight at Torfyanaya. It sounds idyllic.

They were struck by the silence, the emptiness and tidiness of the station. It seemed strange not to be surrounded by a milling, cursing mob. History had not caught up with this remote provincial life which had yet to become as savage as in the capitals.

I wonder if that’s how Pasternak felt at his dacha in Peredelkino. Although it was only 50 km from Moscow, it must have felt like a different world in many ways. Tonya has a visceral reaction to the feeling of the place and, instead of coming out with what she had planned to say, about how Strelnikov might have planned to have them arrested as soon as they alighted, she instead bursts into tears of joy.

In The Zhivago Affair, authors Finn and Couvée describe Sergio D’Angelo’s trip from Moscow to Peredelkino, a journey Pasternak would have been intimately familiar with. Perhaps he was drawing on this when describing Tonya’s elation upon arriving at Torfyanaya station:

The stationmaster asks after Tonya and then goes on to ask about Moscow. Alexander Gromeko introduces the family and the stationmaster informs him that Samdevyatov had called ahead to ask that he look out for them. He recognises Tonya as being a Krueger as soon as they mention Varykino. It turns out the stationmaster and Ivan Krueger had built the road together. He warns Tonya to be wary of mentioning the family connection in times like these. The stationmaster calls Bacchus to get a horse and cart ready to take them to Varykino. At the mention of Bacchus, the travellers are reminded of the local legend they’d heard of the man with an ‘indestructible set of steel bowels.’

8.

We’re treated to a wonderful description of the scenery as the family is taken by cart to Varykino. Tonya wonders out loud whether this Bacchus could be the same Bacchus that they were told about. It can’t be—that legend is over one hundred years old.

The driver is a hoot, coming out with old songs and addressing his mare by a masculine name and patronymic and speaking to himself in a rural dialect. He tells Tonya that he recognises her as a Krueger. He’d overheard their talking about Bacchus and tells them that the Bacchus of legend died some forty years ago. He’s surprised to learn that news of the Forest Brotherhood has not reached Moscow.

9.

The family’s first meeting with the Mikulitsins is painful. It begins in silence and ends in noisy confusion and absurdity. The Zhivagos are embarrassed and the Mikulitsins are dumbfounded. Why did the Zhivagos think it was okay to impose like this? But all the Zhivagos want is a corner of any old tumbledown hut and a kitchen garden. Tonya points out the family connection to the Kruegers, and Mikulitsin asks how she could even mention that name. Mikulitsin had grown up a revolutionary and had served in the Constituent Assembly. He’s worried about how it will look, but how does he know the Zhivagos’ politics?

Mikulitsin relents and brings the family into the house. It seems that Samdevyatov was right.

‘Well, there isn’t any point in squabbling in the yard. We can go inside. Not, of course, that I can see any good coming of it, but we see as in a glass darkly.

This last phrase is translated in P&V as ‘but these be the dark waters in the clouds, the shadow-scripted murk of secrecy.’ While I’m not a big fan of P&V’s translations, what I do like is that they provide rich footnotes. They tell us here that the ‘phrases and rhythms are loosely based on Psalm 18:11: “He made darkness his covering around him, his canopy thick clouds dark with water.”’3 They certainly knew their bible. Even Bacchus made an allusion to the bible when shouting at his horse.

10.

Yury and Alexander make plans. They need to repair their lodgings and then get planting as soon as possible. They share a meal with their hosts, and Yury is taken with Mikulitsin’s study.

‘What a splendid study, it must be a perfect place to work in, a real inspiration!’

I can imagine Pasternak here. He was quite fussy about where he wrote and meticulous in keeping his study tidy and free from distraction.

Pasternak is methodical in his writing habits. He first puts a watch on his desk, draws a pencil from the box he keeps there, and writes in longhand, reusing every sheet of paper (once on each side for separate works): “It’s not only economical, but it’s more cozy. The paper is not so fresh. It belongs to me, you might say.”4

They look at some photos taken by Liberius with a stereoscope that he made himself. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s as I did, you might have had a stereoscope called the View-Master like this:

The Mikulitsins’ might have looked more like this one:

Liberius still hasn't settled down, but he's now out capturing district after district for the Soviets from Komuch, an anti-Bolshevik provisional government that had established its own military force in the Volga region and was fighting to restore the Constituent Assembly, which the Bolsheviks had dissolved.

Tonya is surprised that they have real sugar, biscuits and tea. Helen Mikulitsina asks Tonya a series of science questions, then says they’d had a wonderful science teacher at the school in Yuryatin. His name was Antipov.

Some people say that this scourge of ours, Commissar Strelnikov, is Antipov risen from the dead. But it’s only a silly rumour, of course.

Or is it? His reputation precedes him!

Catch you next week for Chapter 9!

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 7

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It’s a long chapter this week and it covers a lot of ground, both in terms of plot and distance travelled by Yury and his family.

1.

The Zhivagos are getting ready to leave for Varykino. Yury doesn’t want to go. He talks of the old Mikulitsin, the estate manager, whose name he remembers only because the family struggled to pronounce it.

2.

Yury goes to the station to see how one travels these days. It’s chaos, with sick people lying on floors for refuge. A porter tells Yury to come every day to check for trains and that he’ll need to pay a bribe to ‘grease the wheels’. He taps his Adam’s apple and mentions bringing vodka. This is still something that Russians do to indicate drinking alcohol. One folk explanation traces the history back to Peter the Great, though I take it with a pinch of salt.

How did this strange gesture come about? A legend has it that after a carpenter was able to fix a cross on the tallest spire of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St Petersburg, Peter the Great wanted to thank him for his service. When the carpenter was asked what he would like as a reward, he said he wanted a piece of paper which would entitle him to a free drink in any tavern across the land. Unfortunately, he ended up losing the paper after getting blind drunk one day. So the tsar authorised a tattoo on his neck and all the carpenter would need to do then was tap on the side of his neck to show the stamp.1

(See number 2 in this short video.)

3.

Yury is called in to treat a member of the government and is paid in vouchers for the ‘newly introduced closed-consumer shops.’ These were early examples of the privileged distribution networks that would later become a permanent feature of Soviet life. Yury and Alexander Gromeko, who has also received vouchers, go to the shop and fill pillowcases with products unavailable to the masses: flour, sugar, etc.

4.

Tonya’s at home taking care of the packing. It sounds complicated. Their money should be in kerenkas, paper bills introduced by the Kerensky Government in 1917. They were short-lived due to the period's massive inflation.

5.

There’s a snowstorm the day before they are due to leave. Tonya leaves the flat in the care of an elderly couple who live in the building. Both Yury and Tonya feel emotional at having to leave the flat; it reminds them of those they’ve lost.

6.

Yury and Tonya leave at dawn. It’s snowing. Tonya and her father take a cab to the station and Yury, at his own request, walks.

7.

Tonya and her father are queuing for tickets. My translation says that ‘Nyusha and Sasha were walking about outside,’ and I was like, ‘Nyusha?’. She’s first mentioned at the start of Chapter 6 as a nanny for Yury and Tonya’s son, Sasha. The P&V translation lists them as Nyusha and Shurochka, and Tonya is named as Antonina Alexandrovna. That’s how the original text lists the characters, too, so it’s wild how different the translations are.

It’s still snowing:

The falling snow could be seen only beyond the far end of the roofs; seen so far away, it looked almost still, sinking to the ground as slowly as bread-crumbs, thrown to the fishes, sink through water.

Chaos erupts when people waiting to board the train see queue-jumpers. They’d calm down if they only knew that these ‘queue-jumpers’ were in fact convicts bound for the front.

8.

The Zhivagos managed to get a corner to themselves on the top tier of bunks. It reminds me of Pasternak’s lover Olga’s being taken to a labour camp in 1950.

From Butyrki, Olga and the other prisoners were crammed into a passenger coach. The stench was suffocating. Olga was fortunate enough to get a ‘berth’ on the luggage rack at the top of the compartment, from where she could see the sky.2

There are hundreds of passengers from all walks of life and the journey is long and uncomfortable.

9.

Tonya wakes as they approach a large station. Napkins of snow are hung on trees as a sign of hospitality, mirroring the tradition of offering salt on napkins. Locals have come to meet the train to trade their wares. Tonya trades her embroidered towel for half a roasted hare. A swindler eats a trader’s food and goes off without paying.

10.

The conscripts’ wagons are not big enough to hold them all, so some have been distributed among the passengers. There are a few in car fourteen, the car the Zhivagos are travelling in. It turns out that the train will be travelling through the Vyatka province, the home province of two conscripts in the railcar. We learn that one of the conscripts, Pritulyev, was picked up during a militia round-up in Petersburg. Note that Pasternak does not use the more recent moniker of Petrograd, a deliberate decision on his part. Recall that we discussed the -burg suffix as sounding too German in our previous chapter essay. Pasternak is quietly resisting the renaming of cities for ideological reasons, patriotic though this one may have been.

11.

The younger conscript, Vassya, is there simply because his uncle went through the wrong door and was rounded up with the other conscripts. His uncle then tricked the guards into letting him say goodbye to his wife, and they took Vassya as security. The uncle and aunt disappeared and thus Vassya was ‘recruited’.

12.

One of the conscripts, Kostoyed, discusses the peasants' plight following the Revolution with Yury. Yury believes that the peasants outside the main cities are living as before, without any hardship imposed on them by those above. Kostoyed disagrees.

‘When the revolution came and woke him [the peasant] up, he decided that this was the fulfilment of his dream … Instead of that, he found he had only exchanged the old oppression of the tsarist state for the new, much harsher yoke of the revolutionary super-state.’

Yury replies that history hasn’t consulted him and so why should he bother.

‘It’s true that I want to believe that the peasants are better off and the villages are prosperous.— If I can’t believe that, then what am I to do. … I’ve got to go on living, I’ve got a family.’

Vassya and Pritulyev talk of their home villages as the train passes through their province.

13.

The train passes through regions where armed bands were patrolling. The train is often stopped and papers are checked by security patrols. It stops one night and Yury gets off to see what’s going on. The sailors on the train go and see, and it looks to Yury like they’re chasing the driver. Yury follows, finding the driver half-buried in deep snow and arguing with the sailors. The driver had stopped for safety’s sake and the sailors are angry about it.

14.

The train moves at a snail’s pace the next day. The snow has made the journey treacherous. The train stops at a burned-out village, and the driver quizzes the stationmaster about what happened. It’s the first time we hear the name Strelnikov. He’s some kind of renegade revolutionary in an armoured train and had taken out the village after mistaking it for another village of the same name in a different district. Their crime: anti-revolutionary activity. The stationmaster tells the driver that he’ll have to wait out the blizzard for a couple of days; the snow is too deep for the train to pass.

15.

The passengers are supplied with shovels and they dig out the snow for three days to allow the train to pass.

These were the best three days of the journey. … There was something about [the country] that reminded one of the rising of Pugachev as seen by Pushkin and the savage Asia of Aksakov’s sketches.

Pugachev—pronounced Pugachov, with the stress on the final syllable—led a peasant and Cossack rebellion in 1773–1774. He claimed to be the murdered Tsar Peter III, returned from the dead, and to have gathered up a peasant army. Pushkin is mentioned, as this is the theme of his story, The Captain’s Daughter.

Edith W. Clowes remarks on Pasternak’s Pushkin influence:

Neither is it by chance that Pushkin's lengthiest prose fiction, the historical romance The Captain's Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, 1833-36) finds frequent echo in the second half of Doctor Zhivago (Smirnov, 130-31). These two works form the major milestones in Pushkin's own effort to shift from long verse narrative to the prose novel.3

Aksakov was a nineteenth-century Russian writer known for his descriptions of life in the Volga-Ural region, which he depicted as the borderland between Europe and Asia. The Ural Mountains are regarded as the geographical border between these two continents and cultures. Aksakov’s Sketches are a series of autobiographical and nature pieces, including Notes on Fishing (1847) and Notes of a Provincial Wildfowler (1852). Pasternak suggests that the Revolution has scraped away the veneer of civilisation and revealed the old country beneath. Yury finds himself wondering whether the house he can see atop a hill is inhabited.

The house teased his curiosity but kept its sorrowful silence. Questions were not in order these days and no one ever answered them.

What a line!

In Lara, Anna Pasternak gives us an idea of where this scene came from in Boris’s mind. Boris’s sister, Josephine (1900–1993) says:

16.

Yury will forever recall the ruined station as a place of refuge. The snow has finally cleared enough for the train to move on.

17.

Yury and Tonya are out on the tracks before the train leaves. They overhear two voices arguing from the other side of the tracks; it’s the two women who are travelling with conscript Pritulyev. They’re fighting over him.

Hayward / Harari

Born in the gutter, married in a ditch, laid by a rat and a hedgehog for a brat!

Pevear and Volokhonsky

Born in a ditch, married in a gateway, made pregnant by a rat, gave birth to a hedgehog…

Original text

Из канавы рожденная, в подворотне венчанная, крысой забрюхатела, ежом разродилась...

18.

As they travel, the scenery changes from open steppe to the rugged terrain of the Urals.

19.

Pasternak gives us a poetic scene of the coming of spring, as the snows melt and the forests awaken.

20.

The villages become more frequent, and Yury overhears local passengers discussing the politics of the region: the Whites are gaining the upper hand over the Reds and, unless he’s misheard, are being led by Galiullin, whom he last saw at Meluzeyevo.

21.

Yury awakens in the middle of the night with an intense sense of happiness. The train has stopped near a waterfall and the sound is soothing. Two men are talking below his bunk about corn requisitioning. They hear another train: it’s Strelnikov’s armoured train. The two men discuss whom Strelnikov is hunting: Hetman Galileyev, Prince Galileyev or Ali Kurban? .

22.

Yury awakens again, still feeling a sense of happiness.

23.

The next morning, Tonya tells Yury that Pritulyev and Vassya have escaped, along with the two women who were fighting over Pritulyev. So too has their guard, Voronyuk. The labour unit commander is demanding that the train remain where it is until the prisoners are caught, while the train commandant is refusing because he has conscripts to transport to the front.

Pasternak gives us another poetic description of the landscape. The train appears to be gliding over the surface of the meltwater.

• The Ural Mountains

• Typical wooden buildings in a village in the Central Ural Mountains near Kungur, Russia

• A train passing through the central Ural Mountains in Russia

24.

We get a switch in the POV character; we’re now with Vassya, the young escapee. He’s mesmerised by the waterfall. He’s with one of the women who, it seems, had pushed the other one off the train. They’ve been on the run for two days. Vassya urges ‘Auntie Polya’ to go; they must get to a village.

25.

The train stops to refuel. The passengers disembark, and volunteers are called to cut wood for the tender. Yury and Alexander Gromeko share a saw.

26.

They discuss their convictions while they saw the wood. Gromeko says:

The regime is hostile to us, its philosophy is alien to me, I have not been asked if I consent to all these changes. But I have been trusted, and my own actions, even if they were not freely chosen, put me under a certain obligation.

He goes on to say that he’s on board with the new regime in a way. He’ll pitch in with the ‘collective squandering of thousands for the sake of earning a copeck’s worth of living’.

No, the age of property in Russia is over, and anyway, we Gromekos lost our acquisitive passion a generation ago.

27.

Yury awakens early. It’s too hot and stifling in the train car. The train is shrouded in mist. Yury hears distant artillery fire and remembers they are near the front. Which front, though? Good question. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918, pulling Russia out of the Great War. The Civil War following the October Revolution is now breaking out between the Reds (Bolsheviks) and the loosely allied anti-Bolshevik Whites, and the Urals region saw some of the fiercest fighting—as we shall see shortly.

Yury steps around the front of the train and is stopped by a sentry. They argue and Yury walks away before it gets serious. He hears sounds coming from the river and goes down the bank to investigate. He’s stopped by a second sentry, who also questions him. The first sentry had followed Yury through the mist, and now the two of them demand Yury’s papers and take him off to see ‘the boss’. The sounds on the river had been made by a fisherman, who tells Yury that the sentries are hunting someone and have simply mistaken him for their quarry. Yury should demand to see the boss and it will all be straightened out. Yury learns from the fisherman that Yuryatin has now been recaptured by the Reds and that the boss in question is Army Commissar Strelnikov. A third guard appears and leads Yury off to see Strelnikov, who is using a train car as his headquarters.

28.

Yury is taken to Strelnikov.

Yury had had a very different idea of the background of Strelnikov, the famous non-party military expert who was the pride and terror of the region.

I ask that you keep this scene in mind for reasons I don’t want to reveal just yet, since Pasternak isn’t revealing it now either. Yury’s taken by the way that Strelnikov’s staff are busy with trifles—fixing phone lines, getting the typewriter unjammed—while, outside, there’s a war going on. He figures that he can’t be in any trouble.

29.

Yury stares out the window and sees a scrapyard for old train engines and cars. As the mist begins to clear, he can just make out the town of Yuryatin on top of the hill. He recalls how Lara Antipova had talked of it when they were at the front. He sees some prisoners’ being led by Red Army guards, including a schoolboy with a head wound. Yury’s taken by the boy’s school cap, which keeps falling down over the boy’s eyes, and he then jams it back on his head.

This scene illustrates Pasternak’s view on life as perfectly summed up by Italo Calvino and quoted in The Zhivago Affair:

In a long essay entitled “Pasternak and the Revolution,” Italo Calvino wrote that “halfway through the twentieth century the great Russian nineteenth century novel has come back to haunt us, like King Hamlet’s ghost.” Calvino argued that Pasternak “is not interested in psychology, character, situations, but in something more general and direct: life. Pasternak’s prose is simply a continuation of his verse.” He wrote that Pasternak’s “objections to Soviet communism seem to move in two directions: against the barbarism, the ruthless cruelty unleashed by the civil war” and “against the theoretical and bureaucratic abstractions in which the revolutionary ideals become frozen.”4

Strelnikov enters. He makes an impressive entrance as a confident, powerful man.

How was it that they had never been thrown together, that their paths had never crossed?

Or had they? 😏

Strelnikov congratulates the men on having successfully driven back the enemy. The enemy commander had once been a friend of Strelnikov’s; they’d grown up together. He remembers that Yury is there and sees immediately that he’s not the man they’re looking for. All the same, he takes a look at his papers and the name Doctor Zhivago seems familiar to him somehow.

30.

Who, in reality, was Strelnikov?

Pasternak must have been having fun with this reveal. It’s not laid out as to be unequivocal, but he gives us just enough for the reader to figure out who Strelnikov is. Look at the clues: born in Moscow, university, school teacher in the provinces, MIA from the front believed killed, lived with Tiverzin as a child. His father was jailed after the 1905 revolution. Are you getting it?

There is an argument to be made about Strelnikov’s being at least partly inspired by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky famously led the Red Army from an armoured train, having come not from a military background but from a bookish, intellectual one.

He also became a semi-mythical military commander known for his ferocity in destroying the enemy, with no apparent compassion. It’s hard to say whether Trotsky was a conscious inspiration for Pasternak, but the resemblance is striking enough that it’s difficult to read the Strelnikov scenes without thinking of him.

31.

Strelnikov asks Yury why he’s leaving Moscow for Varykino. He calls Yury a deserter and tells him that it’s the time for ‘angels with flaming swords and winged beasts from the abyss, not for sympathisers and loyal doctors.’ He had, however, promised to let Yury go, and this he does, but ‘just this once’.

We leave the chapter with the reveal nailed home. Strelnikov looks out the window towards where he’d lived with his wife and daughter, where he’d been a schoolteacher. It is, of course, Pasha Antipov!

Catch you next week for Chapter 8!

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 6

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Yury’s been away at the front for around two years. The February Revolution has happened, and possibly the upheaval of the July Days, too—Pasternak doesn’t give us dates. The July Days were a series of anti-war demonstrations by soldiers, sailors and workers in Petrograd (renamed from St Petersburg in 1914 because -burg sounded too German), demanding that power pass from the Provisional Government to the Soviets.

1.

Yury travels through Moscow. People are hanging around the marketplace out of habit: there’s nothing to buy. And people are hawking their possessions, from ball gowns to dirty chunks of sugar. Yury arrives at his house and rings the bell. Tonya answers. They embrace and Tonya immediately apologises for the letter she sent:

‘I wrote you a lot of silly nonsense, forgive me. But we’ll talk about that later.’

Yury asks after ‘father’, Tonya’s father, Alexander Gromeko.

‘Didn’t anyone write to you?—He’s at the borough council from morning till night, he’s the chairman.

It’s one of those Pasternak ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moments.

What exactly was the borough council? (district duma in P&V). Alexander II set up local councils known as zemstvos in the countryside (1864) and dumas in the cities (1870). The dumas became centres for the middle classes, the bourgeois liberal intelligentsia: doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc., people just like the Gromekos. After February, the local dumas were basically extensions of the Provisional Government, itself a liberal institution.

The 1905 Revolutions gave rise to the creation of soviets, as I discussed in my chapter two analysis. By 1917, these had grown as political bodies for the revolutionary workers. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (the ‘Petrograd Soviet’) was formed during the February Revolution of 1917 and was dominated by moderate socialists, mainly the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (the SRs). The Bolsheviks only gained control of it shortly before the October Revolution. So the dual-power situation in the country was between the Provisional Government (liberal) and the Soviets (socialist).

Alexander Gromeko was chairman of the Moscow Duma, which was trying to maintain order while the Provisional Government’s authority was collapsing. In the two years that Yury has been at the front, the country has vastly changed, but Yury, it seems, has not—at least politically anyway.

The Gromekos’ servant, Markel, greets Yury and, in his welcoming speech, quips about Moscow:

Such a mess-up, such a bedlam, the devil couldn’t sort it out—streets dirty, roofs leaking, bellies empty as in Lent—and all this “without annexations or contributions”.

“Annexations and contributions”, or “annexations and indemnities”, as I’ve seen elsewhere, was a slogan that Lenin included in the ‘Decree of Peace’, adopted at the Second Congress of Soviets immediately following the October Revolution. It meant that the Bolsheviks sought to withdraw from the war immediately, without annexing any territory or paying any indemnities (Russian: контрибуции) for war reparations. It was a popular idea and helped the Bolsheviks consolidate power. The Decree of Peace led to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 1918, which brought Russia out of the war, but it was certainly not on the lines of ‘without annexations or contributions’—it ended up costing Russia dearly.

2.

Tonya explains to Yury that Markel is brighter than he looks and he’s ‘sharpening his knife—only he hasn’t quite decided yet who it’s for’. She tells Yury that they’ve let out the bottom floor of their apartment to the Agricultural Academy, and that ‘we don’t say rooms anymore, it’s called living space nowadays.’ She might be saying that tongue-in-cheek, but it shows how society is changing, including the language. Private property is gone to be replaced by allocated living space.

Yury expresses his approval, stating that the hospital he’d been working in was too large for one family:

there really was something unhealthy in the way rich people used to live. Masses of superfluous things. Too much furniture, too much room, too much refinement, too much self-expression. I’m very glad we’re using fewer rooms. We should give up still more.

I must admit that I’m surprised to read that coming out of Yury’s mouth. This next line sounds much more like Yury:

Just now, I was looking out of the train window—I thought, what is there in the whole world worth more than a peaceful family life and work? The rest isn’t in our hands.

And then there’s this autobiographical line that reminds us that Pasternak stayed in Russia while his family got out:

A grown-up man is supposed to grit his teeth and share in whatever’s coming to his country.

That Pasternak did, and not without cost. He did manage six hours in Berlin on his way to the Paris congress in June 1935, where he saw his sister Josephine for the last time — but his parents were in Munich, and he never saw them again after 1923.1

Tonya tells Yury that his uncle Kolya is back from Switzerland. Apparently, he’s ‘gone Bolshevik’. He and Alexander Gromeko have been having arguments.

Tonya and Yury agree on which rooms they’re going to use to get through the winter and to have a housewarming to share the duck that Yury got from Pogorevshikh on the train.

3.

Yury is reunited with his son, Sasha. Yury was called up just after Sasha was born, so it’s a delight for him to see Sasha again. It’s not reciprocated. Sasha doesn’t know his father and is frightened of him.

4.

The duck party is not a success. It ends up being rather dull.

His friends had become strangely dim and colourless. Not one of them had kept his own outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid in his memory. He must have over-estimated them in the past.

Misha Gordon tries to be happy and fun, when his previous character was somewhat more melancholic and serious. Nicky Dudorov has gone the other way, from unstable and erratic to earnest. There’s an interesting tidbit about Nicky, that, despite being one of Yury’s closest friends at school, he had never used the informal ty form when addressing him. I find that rather strange. He asks Yury about a couple of Mayakovsky poems. Mayakovsky was fully on board with the Revolution and threw himself into it. In A People’s Tragedy, Orlando Figes tells us ‘The Futurist poets, for example, such as Mayakovsky, practically threw themselves at the feet of the Bolsheviks, seeing them as an ally of their own struggle against ‘bourgeois art’.’2 Mayakovsky’s revolutionary fervour was not to last; it ate him up from the inside, and he committed suicide in 1930.

The biggest attraction of the evening is Uncle Kolya. He’s living in a hotel, having secured a room through his local connections. Yury remembers him fondly as ‘the idol of his childhood, the teacher who had dominated his mind as a boy.’

They meet, not as uncle and nephew, but as two artists.

Uncle Kolya, however, is quite different when in others’ company. He is indeed pro-Bolshevik, and he speaks often of two Socialist Revolutionaries who shared his views. Remember that the Soviets in 1917 were initially dominated not by the Bolsheviks but by moderate socialists — chiefly the Mensheviks and SRs.

The Socialist Revolutionary Party was arguably more popular than the Bolsheviks, certainly among the peasantry. Less rigidly Marxist than Lenin’s party, the SRs emerged from the older populist tradition and believed that the peasantry, rather than the industrial proletariat, would be the driving force of revolution in Russia. By late 1917, divisions were already emerging within the party between moderates who supported cooperation with the Provisional Government and more radical elements who would later align themselves with the Bolsheviks after October.

Uncle Kolya and Alexander Gromeko have a political debate.

Shura Schlesinger arrives and tells Yury that she’s ‘read it, it’s wonderful, I didn’t understand a word but it’s full of talent, you can tell at once.’ She must be referring to the book of Yury’s poetry that Nicky and Misha had published without asking. If you’d forgotten who this minor character was (I had!), she was Anna Gromeko’s bosom friend and confidante and first appeared in 2:20. Yury gives a rousing, revolutionary speech:

The sea of blood will rise until it reaches every one of us and submerges all who stayed out of the war. The revolution is this flood […] in these five or ten years, we have experienced more than other people do in a century […] The new order of things will be all round us and as familiar to us as the woods on the skyline or the clouds over our heads. There will be nothing else left.

The party ends, and the guests depart. Yury tells Tonya that she and her father are the only people he loves.

5.

September is nearly over. So we haven’t had the October Revolution yet. That got me wondering how Markel would have known the phrase, ‘without annexations or contributions.’ He can’t have got it from the Peace Decree, as that was enacted the day after the October Revolution. It was actually a popular slogan at least as early as February and had currency at the time, so Markel’s using it is in keeping with the anti-war factions.3

Winter is the main theme in this part. Everything is in short supply, including fuel for keeping warm.

This line sums up how Pasternak thinks of these sweeping historical events:

What saved his reason were the everyday details of his life, his work, his worries. His wife, his child, the need to earn, the humble daily ritual of his practice, these were his salvation.

And that’s how it is, isn’t it? We live through wars, pandemics and revolutions, while our lives carry on in their own small ways. I find it comforting.

Yury’s back at work in the Hospital of the Holy Cross. The staff are divided into two camps: the moderates and the revolutionaries. Yury is neither. Alongside his normal duties, he’s been put in charge of statistics. He’s having to fill in endless forms, something that hadn’t changed by the time I was working in the former USSR in the 2000s.

Pasternak treats us to a wonderful description of late summer that belies the chaos that’s happening outside. The chemistry demonstrator comes in and disturbs Yury’s writing. He talks about Tarasyuk, how he’s gone off to join the revolution with his rifle.

“Turn your bayonets against your masters,” so Tarasyuk turned. … There’s Marxism for you.

They discuss how the city has changed and, more importantly, whom to go to for firewood. The rat catcher is the woman to go to for logs. And the crossroads at Silver Street (Serebryany / Серебряный) and Silent Street (Molchanovka / Молчановка) marks the entryway to the rabbit warren, a whole network of alleys leading to the old thieves’ den near Smolensky, where the street lamps are known as bruisers (синяки).

This is an old part of Moscow that had a marketplace on Smolensky Square. There is a Malaya Molchanovka Street not far from Smolensky Square, but I can’t find a Serebryany Street. In any case, the old marketplace would have been a hive of people hawking their possessions, making it a reasonable hangout for thieves as well.

6.

Yury finds a man lying unconscious at the crossroads. He’s been mugged. Yury takes him to the hospital and nurses him back to health. The man turned out to be a prominent politician who later served as a protector for Yury. I wonder if this has anything to do with Pasternak’s apparent protection from Stalin during the purges. Some accounts attribute this protection to Stalin’s love of Pasternak’s poetry, particularly his poems about Georgia, Stalin’s home region.

7.

Tonya’s plan of living on the top floor through winter has come to pass. They’re having trouble keeping the stove going. Uncle Kolya bursts in and tells them that there’s fighting on the streets, urging Yury to come and see it:

Come on, Yura, put your coat on and come out. You’ve got to see it. This is history. This happens once in a lifetime.

Misha comes in and says the same.

Sasha gets sick, but Yury can’t go out and get milk and soda to relieve Sasha’s symptoms while the fighting is going on in the streets. The proletariat has the upper hand over the bourgeoisie.

8.

The fighting eases off over the next few days, but it’s still not safe for Yury to go to work. There are rumours of negotiations between the two sides. In late October, Yury calls on a colleague. As he’s walking the nearly empty streets, a blizzard starts up.

There was something in common between events in the moral and the physical world, between disturbances near and far, on earth and in the sky.

A young boy selling newspapers overtakes Yury at the crossroads. Yury buys one and reads that the Provisional Government has been overthrown:

it gave the official announcement from Petersburg that a Soviet of People’s Commissars had been formed and that Soviet power and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were established in Russia.

Yury just happens to be reading the news at the previously mentioned crossroads. He goes into the entrance of a tenement building to get better light for reading when a boy of around 18, with narrow Kirghiz eyes, comes down the stairs and stops in front of him.

His face had something aristocratic about it, the fugitive spark and reticent delicacy which give an impression of remoteness and are sometimes found in people of a complex, mixed parentage.

It’s interesting that Yury should meet this boy on the very day of the October Revolution. I’m hesitant to give spoilers here, so I shall simply ask that you bear this scene in mind for later.

As Yury heads for home, he comes upon a pile of timber in the street that’s being guarded by a man with a rifle. Yury waits until the sentry’s back is turned and makes off with a beam from the bottom of the pile: a fortuitous discovery indeed, as the family’s wood supply had just run out. So, Revolution, the stranger on the stairs and then a lump of firewood. It’s been quite a day.

As Yury feeds the fire, he breaks out into a discourse on the Revolution, which could be one of the scenes that caused Pasternak some trouble with the censors. His discourse ends with the phrase:

That’s real genius. Only real greatness can be so misplaced and so untimely.

But just imagine the kinds of conversations that would have been going on in Moscow and in Petrograd. The oppression hasn’t begun yet, according to the plot, but at the time of the novel’s writing, it most certainly had.

9.

The next three winters are harsh, and the narrator tells us that they all merge into one memory. The two parts of life did not yet interlock, and civil war broke out in 1918. In Moscow, the Bolsheviks are on the ascendant. Yury’s hospital has changed. Previously well-paid doctors leave as a civic gesture of protest, but Yury stays.

10.

Yury and Tonya are living frugally, as is everyone in Moscow. Tonya learns to bake bread in the Dutch stove, enough to have some to sell in order to keep the stove burning, but it doesn’t work out. Tonya goes out looking for peasants’ selling vegetables. Commerce of any kind is now illegal, so she has to be careful. She trades an old wardrobe for some birch logs. Yury comes home to find a message. He’s to make a house call in exchange for a bottle of German cognac and a pair of stockings. They assume that these clients must be nouveaux riches. The narrator goes on to explain:

These operators were basically licensed speculators who operated in a grey area during the period of war communism. The New Economic Policy of 1921, which followed the civil war, loosened the trading restrictions somewhat and gave rise to the so-called NEP men. What’s happening here is an early version of the NEP men, but less overt. There were, of course, real speculators, too, such as the peasant trading the birch logs. There were harsh penalties for them.

11.

Yury makes his house call. A young man explains that he believes his wife is suffering from nervous shock after an unwound clock chimed the hour. Yury diagnoses typhus and recommends that she be sent to the hospital immediately for full-time care. Yury needs a stamp from the house committee to admit her. House committees were set up after the Revolution to manage the allocation of living space, among other things. They were tiny, official bodies for neighbourhood monitoring and surveillance. Note that the chair of this house committee is a local duma delegate.

12.

The house committee’s boardroom is in the basement. The chair makes a speech, informing the committee that the building has been allocated as a hostel for visiting delegates and is to be renamed the Tiverzin Hostel after Comrade Tiverzin, ‘who lived here before he was deported’. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same Tiverzin from Chapter 2, the one who was friends with Pasha Antipov and whose family looked after Pasha. The residents have a year to find alternative lodgings. An argument breaks out between Aunt Fatima, the caretaker, and the delegate, whom we shortly learn is called Comrade Demina. Yury enters and asks for a member of the house committee. Aunt Fatima is called; it turns out she’s Yusupka Galiullin’s mother. Here’s another of those coincidences that Pasternak loves. Yury asks her about the stamp he requires and then informs her that he served with her son at the front. She ushers him outside. She tells him that her son came home for a couple of days and told her about Yury and that he knows Lara. And finally, she tells him that Comrade Demina is Olya, a seamstress and friend of Madame Guishar’s and another coincidence.

13.

Olya Demina and Yury leave together, and Olya tells him about Lara’s wedding and her leaving for the Urals with Pasha.

She married Pasha with her head, not with her heart.

She tells Yury that she thinks Lara’s brother was shot in the war and that she’ll see that Lara’s mother is all right.

When Yury arrives home, Tonya tells him about a clock that her father broke, and that came back to life all on its own. Another coincidence.

‘My typhus hour has struck,’ laughed Yury.

14.

Life in Moscow is precarious. Yury falls ill with typhus.

15.

Yury has fever dreams about writing poetry and the boy with the Kirghiz eyes.

16.

Yury recovers and gets stronger with the help of bread, butter and sugared tea. As he improves, he begins to wonder where these supplies might have come from. He asks, and Tonya replies that they came from Yury’s half-brother, Yevgraf, from Tomsk. He’s the boy with the Kirghiz eyes. So it wasn’t just a fever dream; he really had been there. They believe that Yevgraf must have connections, as he’s been able to supply them with all sorts of foodstuffs: rice, sugar, currants. He’s advised them to get out of the city. Tonya thinks of the Krueger place in the Urals, so in April, they leave for the former Varykino estate near Yuryatin.

Catch you next week for Chapter 7!

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 5

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1.

We ended the previous chapter with the outbreak of the Revolution. This is the February Revolution that led to Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication in March and the formation of a Provisional Government. Headed by Prince George Lvov, the Provisional Government was a coalition of non-Communist liberal and socialist parties. Prince Lvov was a member of the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets (from the party’s initials, pronounced in Russian as KaDe). Lvov was succeeded as head of the Provisional Government in July 1917 by the Socialist Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky. It was this Provisional Government that was overthrown by the Bolshevik coup of October 1917.

True to form, Pasternak now leaves this moment of history alone and we’re straight back into the narrative at the front.

The hospital is evacuated to the fictional town of Melyuzeyevo, close to the front. Yury, Lara and Galiullin get involved in local admin, but they are all itching to get back to their jobs.

2.

The town was very small. At the end of almost every street you could see the bleak steppe and the dark sky, the vast countryside glowering with revolution and war.

Yury writes to Tonya and mentions Lara in passing, given that they both knew her from the old days. He writes that he has made several attempts to go home, but that the trains are either not running or they are full. All three of the main characters here have decided to make the journey home.

Tonya replies by return of post, writing that Yury should forget about going home and instead follow Lara to the Urals. Tonya seems to have a bit of an inferiority complex, much the same way Pasha does with Lara. Yury replies with an apology if he has made Tonya feel that way and declares his love for her:

How is it that you don’t know—or don’t feel deeply enough—that if it were not for you, if it were not for my constant, faithful thoughts of you and of our home, I would never have survived these two terrible, devastating years of war?

3.

The village of Zabushino, to the east of Melyuzeyevo, was declared an independent republic by a local miller named Blazheiko and a group of deserters from the front. They reject the Provisional Government that was in place in Russia between the February and October 1917 revolutions. Pasternak is illustrating the chaos that followed the collapse of the monarchy—the Tsar abdicated in March 1917. Zabushino is a stand-in for some actual self-governing regions that arose during this time, for example, the Kronstadt Commune (1917-21) and the Makhnovist Territory (Ukraine, 1918-21). Those of you who read The White Guard with me earlier this year will have seen the city of Kiev (now Kyiv) change hands several times during this tumultuous period. The ‘republic’ is overthrown by loyalist troops after two weeks, and the deserters retreat into the forests.

My favourite book so far on the Revolutions of 1917 is A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes. In this passage, he quotes a contemporary Russian source that illustrates the chaos of the time:

The revolution of 1917 should really be conceived of as a general crisis of authority. There was a rejection of not just the state but of all figures of authority: judges, policemen, Civil Servants, army and navy officers, priests, teachers, employers, foremen, landowners, village elders, patriarchal fathers and husbands. It was often said at the time — and historians have emphasized this — that only the Soviet had any real authority. Guchkov wrote to Alexeev on 9 March:

The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The latter controls the most essential levers of power, insofar as the troops, the railways, and the postal and telegraph services are in its hands. One can assert bluntly that the Provisional Government exists only as long as it is allowed to do so by the Soviet.1

4.

The hospital where Yury works was a large house donated by a local countess. The owner is now under arrest in Petersburg. Only two of the owner’s housemaids are still working in the building: Ustinya, the head cook, and Mademoiselle Fleury, the governess. Keep Mme Fleury in mind here, as she pops up again later. She gives Lara and Yury sly winks whenever she sees them together, intimating that they ‘were bound to be attracted to each other.’

Mademoiselle clung to her illusions and would not be parted from them at any price.

The revolutionary council of Melyuzeyevo is concerned about the influence of the anarchists in Zabushino and embarks on an enlightenment campaign to counteract it. This takes the form of evening activities in the main square, at which Ustinya would often be heard speaking about local superstitions.

5.

Yury is seeking the stamps and permissions that he needs to travel home. He needs a signature from the town major, or, according to P&V’s translation, the commandant (Russian: комендант), known by the nickname, ‘the district’ (Russian: уездный). The Hayward/Harari translation misses this bit out for whatever reason. There’s a brief mention here of the restoration of the recently abolished death penalty as a means of maintaining order and discipline. One of the first acts of the Provisional Government was to abolish the death penalty. It was reinstated in July 1917 owing to mass desertions during the war with Germany. It’s to this that Pasternak is referring here. The new commissar is in the room with the town major, a young boy, ‘just out of the schoolroom and burning like a candle with the flame of his ideals.’ Everyone is concerned about the deserters in the forests at Biryuchi. The town major states that there’s a Cossack regiment near the Biryuchi railway station who are loyal to the Reds and could be used to put down the rebels, but Commissar Gintz (or Gents—the narrator isn’t sure) vehemently disagrees. He seems idealistic and suggests getting to know the rebels instead:

They may be rebels, gentlemen, they may even be deserters, but remember, they are the people. And the people are like children, you have to know them, know their psychology. […] I’ll go and have a heart-to-heart talk with them and you’ll see, they’ll go back to the positions they have deserted as good as gold.

I fear the worst for the young commissar.

Yury sneaks off to go and have a talk with Lara and apologise to her if she feels that he’s been leading her on.

6.

Lara has returned from the country, where she was helping to set up local councils in the villages. Yury goes to knock on Lara’s door, but then thinks that he ought not to after all; she’ll be tired after her trip. Instead, he leans out the window, and we’re treated to a wonderful description of the sights, sounds and smells of the summer’s night. The moon rises crimson, ‘the colour of the new brick mill in Zabushino, then it turned yellow like the water-tower at Biryuchi.’ Yury goes out to listen to the speeches in the square.

7.

Instead of listening to the speeches, Yury is so ‘overcome by the splendour of what he saw that he sat down on the bench outside the fire station and looked instead of listening.’ He soon overhears a familiar voice: it’s Commissar Gintz making the same speech as he’d made in the town major’s office. He’s assuring the crowd that the uprising in Zabushino was caused by Bolshevik agitation. Remember that the Bolshevik coup of October has yet to happen. Ustinya approaches the speakers’ crate and counters Gintz’s speech as if at the despatch box. She talks of humanity, rather than Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, then goes on to talk of pillars of salt and cries of ‘Balaam, Balaam!’ The Bolsheviks (‘Majority’) and Mensheviks (‘Minority’) were political groups that emerged after the schism in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903. The Mensheviks were more moderate.

Yury goes to bed.

8.

Yury sees Lara the following evening. She’s doing the laundry. Lara wonders why Yury didn’t knock last night. Mme Fleury told her about Yury’s asking for her room. They have a long conversation about Lara’s trip to the villages and Yury relates the story of the commissar’s idealism. Yury then finally gets to what he wanted to talk about the night before, only he’s feeling frustrated about the whole thing.

Why the hell can’t a grown-up man talk to a grown-up woman without being suspected of some ulterior motive! Damn all motives—ulterior or otherwise.

Yury feels overwhelmed by the enormity of what’s happening around them. He opens up to Lara and tells her how he really feels. It’s a moving scene, at the height of which Lara burns the blouse she’s ironing. She asks Yury to calm down before continuing his monologue. It proves to be their last conversation before Lara leaves the following day.

What are we to make of this discourse? Edith W. Clowes has an interesting idea that Yury and Lara’s dialogue here illustrates how the novel is more like an ocean than a river in terms of its themes.

Many Russian novels are structured like rivers: their plots flow in one direction — toward victory, say, as in War and Peace, or toward suicide, as in Anna Karenina. But Doctor Zhivago is more like an ocean. The very evident climaxes that do occur are not linear. Rather, they are really moments of revelation that happen when out of this “mess and chaos” one finds a pattern, a series of images, and an “immediate perception” that leads to the effect of transcendence, of self-overcoming (Danow, “Epiphany,” 895). All these observations lead us to view the “story” of Doctor Zhivago as a cognitive process, open only to separate lichnosti in dialogue with one another, of arriving at insight about one’s existence.2

Yury and Lara believe they are about to part forever, which may explain why Yury felt able to open up to Lara. Is Yury feeling that the historical events going on around them eclipse the banality of the lives of two individuals? I don’t think so, because of the description Pasternak gives us of how the lives of individuals are the tributaries of the bigger events:

The revolution broke out willy-nilly, like a breath that's been held too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions—his own personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions are flowing into it—the sea of life, of life in its own right.

In his essay on temporal counterpoint, Boris Gasparov presents this scene as the third of seven episodes that serve as examples of contrapuntal interweaving:

Episode 3 (5:8-9). It is the eve of Lara's return home from the front. Her final conversation with Zhivago is marked by a contrast between surface simplicity, indeed, triviality, and hidden tension. A pedestrian detail serves as the background for the conversation: Lara is ironing laundry, steam is rising from the iron, and at the most dramatic point in the conversation the smell of something burning reaches them - she has forgotten about the iron and “burned a hole in a blouse.” This detail stands out in all its unpleasant and possibly excessive banality. Annoyed, Lara sets the iron down on the stand “with a thump,” thus marking with this gesture her resolution to break off the conversation and part as they believe, forever.3

9.

The night before Yury leaves for home, there’s a terrible storm. Mademoiselle Fleury is awakened by a knocking at the door. She’s annoyed that no one is answering. She thinks of Galiullin and then remembers that they’d sent him off disguised as a civilian after ‘that horrible lynching at Biryuchi station when they killed Commissar Gintz’ — Spoilers!

Mme Fleury meets Yury on the landing. He’s been awakened by the knocking too and is going to see who it might be. It turns out to be a broken shutter blowing in the wind.

In his essay on temporal counterpoint, Boris Gasparov points out that this knocking mirrors the knocking that Yury heard in the opening scene of the novel and that, on both occasions, it’s a portent of death.

Clearly the knock is a mystical gesture signaling death. It should also be noted that the knock of an unseen traveler typically represents a visit by the angel of death. The answer to the question as whom [sic] of the two residents of this house the angel of death was visiting will be given, to protagonist and reader alike, at the end of the novel when Zhivago and Fleury again meet at the “Hippodrome of Life.”4

The earlier scene is when Yury is awakened by a knocking at the window during a snowstorm after his mother’s funeral. (1:2).

10.

We return to the aforementioned incident at Biryuchi station. Blame may be apportioned to the telegraphist, Kolya Frolenko. Galiullin telephones Kolya at the station and asks him to pass on a message to Commissar Gintz, to ask Gintz to wait for him. Kolya is too busy dealing with an approaching train filled with Cossacks and does not pass on the message. He also deliberately delays the train for reasons that are not made clear. The train arrives anyway, and Kolya makes his displeasure plain by shaking his fist at the train driver.

The driver not only understood him but managed to convey by a shrug of the shoulders and a nod in the direction of the train: ‘What am I to do? I’d like to see what you’d have done in my place. He’s the boss.’—‘You’re a filthy brute, all the same,’ Kolya replied by gestures.

Are we to assume, then, that Kolya sympathises with the rebels?

The Cossacks alight from the train, ride off into the woods and surround the rebels. Commissar Gintz leaps onto a pile of timber in the middle of the ring of Cossacks and addresses the rebels with patriotic fervour. The rebels are not impressed—they’ve heard it all before. Gintz, however, with the hubris of youth and his rank, carries on with his speech, ‘disregarding their rising murmurs.’ Gintz believes that he’s under the protection of the Cossacks; however, his speech also begins to rankle with them, and they slowly sheath their swords, dismount from their horses, and join the deserters. A concerned Cossack officer advises Gintz to leave quickly while he still can, but Gintz feels that running would be beneath his dignity, so he walks away calmly. He then has another moment of patriotic fervour and, instead of taking shelter in the station, he climbs onto a water butt to deliver another speech. He gets no further than a few words when the lid of the water butt overturns and he falls in. The men burst out laughing and one of them shoots Gintz dead. The others then plunge their bayonets into the dead man and it’s over. A gruesome scene indeed, and one that I’m curious about. It shows the breakdown of order and the ensuing chaos between the February and October revolutions.

Gintz was a commissar, but who was in charge? He would have been appointed by the Provisional Government and, politically, he’d have been a liberal. He believed he could appeal to the deserters' hearts and have them rejoin the fight against the Germans. He believed in the February Revolution and saw the way forward for Russia as a liberal democracy, united against the enemy. But he was young and naive; the fighting men had seen horrors and didn’t take well to these young upstarts telling them how things were going to be. In a sense, Gintz represents the failure of the February Revolution, especially since, as we know from the previous chapter, this scene takes place in summer, and it was in July that the February Revolution really began to fall apart, in the so-called July Days.

In a manner underestimated by all historians, the events of 4 July were characterized by almost total confusion. The Bolshevik leaders made everything up as they went along.5

11.

Mademoiselle Fleury calls Kolya to arrange a seat for Yury on the train to Moscow. Kolya’s busy dealing with the situation we’ve just discussed.

12.

Yury heads to the station. People have been camped outside for months, trying to get on a train without any luck. The station master expresses some sympathy for the commissar's pointless death. He promises Yury a seat on the local train, but warns him to keep quiet about it, or there’ll be chaos.

13.

Even so, there is chaos as soon as the train appears. Yury somehow manages to board. The train is packed as they head to Sukhinichi, where Yury is to disembark for the Moscow train.

14.

The train for Moscow is a ‘mysterious train under special orders.’ Yury gets a seat in a second-class compartment. There’s another passenger in his compartment, which is lit by a guttering candle. The passenger has a dog with him and a rifle in a leather case: he’s been shooting somewhere. They engage in conversation, and Yury notes that the passenger speaks in a strange manner, but can’t work out why. They blow out the candle and bed down for the night. After the candle has been extinguished, Yury asks the passenger a question and gets no response.

The journey from Sukhinichi to Moscow by train today would take just under three hours. I guess trains were slower in 1917!

(Google maps)

15.

Yury can’t sleep. His thoughts are swirling around in his head. He thinks of his life with Tonya: safe, comfortable. He has been away for two years and he’s longing for the comfort of home.

Here too were his loyalty to the revolution and his admiration for it, the revolution in the sense in which it was accepted by the middle classes and in which it had been understood by the students, followers of Blok, in 1905.

This familiar circle also contained the foretaste of new things. In it were those omens and promises which before the war, between 1912 and 1914, had appeared in Russian thought, art and life, in the destiny of Russia as a whole and in his own, Zhivago’s.

So Yury is sympathetic to the revolution. It’s nice to see Blok’s being mentioned here. I mentioned that Pasternak was a fan of Blok’s poetry in 3:10. Yury’s thoughts of returning to the comfortable old life are mixed with thoughts of the new, springing from his experiences in the war and the Revolution as it really is, not as the idealised revolution of 1905. It reminds me of the hero’s journey, in a sense, of Bilbo Baggins’ returning to the Shire after defeating Smaug, expecting to return to his old ways but unable to because he himself has been changed by his adventures. And there’s Lara, of course. He’s trying not to love her, but the heart goes where it will. Besides which, we, the readers, know something Yury doesn’t: October is coming.

16.

Yury and his travelling companion have breakfast together in their compartment as they approach Moscow. We learn that his companion is the son of reactionary parents—so against the Revolution—and that he’s deaf. Having learned where the traveller had come from, Yury deduces that he had had something to do with the independent republic of Zabushino, and he was right. It turned out to have been his travelling companion’s idea. They discuss political ideologies and Yury feels quite agitated by his interlocutor’s idealism. As they pull into Moscow, his travelling companion gives Yury a duck from his shoot to take home to his wife.

Catch you next week for Chapter 6!

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 4

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1.

We left Lara after she’d fired her gun at Komarovsky and scratched Mr Kornakov, then collapsed in a faint. It was at the Sventitskys’ New Year party to welcome in 1912. Lara’s lying, half-conscious, on a bed at the Sventitskys’. Komarovsky is worried that his reputation will be ruined if news of his attempted murder gets out. He still feels incredibly attracted to this ‘wild, desperate girl.’

He had always known that she was different from everyone else. There had always been something unique about her.

He feels obliged to help her in some way, while staying out of her way. What could his motivation be? Love? Self-preservation? Pasternak does not reveal anything of Komarovsky’s background, so we have to take him as we find him: as a despicable man out for himself. He has already spoken to the police to ‘smooth things over’, and has decided that he will divert justice by claiming that Lara was not in her right mind when she fired the shot. He leaves the flat to visit a friend and rent a room from her for Lara.

2.

Komarovsky’s friend and now Lara’s landlady takes an instant dislike to Lara. She leaves windows open and makes a lot of noise around the flat. Lara recuperates and, as she does, she thinks of her childhood in the Urals and of her arrival in Moscow seven or eight years ago. That will make Lara twenty-three or twenty-four in this chapter. She remembers Komarovsky’s housewarming gift of a large watermelon when she and her mother arrived in Moscow. That would be back when he would stare at Lara until she blushed. (Chapter 1 of the novel).

Just as she was intimidated by expensive food and by the night life of the capital, so she was later intimidated by Komarovsky himself — this was the real explanation of everything.

Komarovsky is now making no demands on Lara, keeping his distance and doing what he can to help her. Lara is ‘delighted at his visit’. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that Pasternak is painting Komarovsky in rather a positive light in this passage. Is he not the loathsome man that we thought he was? This line seems a little odd:

As with the rest of his family, he had hardly ever exchanged with her more than a word or a glance in passing.

Does he not speak to his family? And who is his family? We haven’t learned that.

Kologrivov calls on Lara and is shocked at the state of her lodgings. He encourages her to get up and find alternative lodgings. He knows that ‘this Voit woman … is a pretty nasty piece of work.’ He suggests that she move into an apartment that belongs to an artist friend of his who’s going away for two years, and then gives her 10,000 roubles as a bonus for Lipa’s graduation. Lara tries unsuccessfully to refuse. She ends up taking rooms that Kologrivov recommended.

3.

Pasha is worried about Lara. He has not been permitted to see her while she’s recovering, and he’s more than a little curious that the man she’d tried to kill was now looking after her and, more than that, shielding her from the consequences of her actions. When she recovers and calls for Pasha, she tells him that she’s a ‘bad woman’ and that he should try to forget her. Pasha doesn’t go along with this and, instead, attempts to hurry along their marriage. Pasternak makes Pasha seem a little needy and insecure here. The wedding goes ahead on Whit Monday, after Lara postponed it more than once. The postponements had allowed them both time to take their exams and graduate. We’re not told in which subjects they graduate, but we know they both become teachers in Yuryatin before Lara retrains as a nurse.

Russian wedding tradition

At their wedding, Hayward/Harari write:

The guests shouted: ‘It’s bitter!’ And others responded unanimously from the end of the room: ‘Make it sweet!’ and the bride and bridegroom grinned shyly and kissed.

The Russian would be Gor’ko! (Горько!). The wedding couple would ‘make it sweet’ by kissing. I’ve never seen it at a wedding in real life, but it’s portrayed in lots of movies.

There’s another scene where a woman throws a handful of silver coins at Lara’s feet as an omen of prosperity. The same woman also instructs Lara not to make a cross with her bare fingers, but to cover them with her veil or a lace frill while the wedding crown is being held over her head, and to hold her candle higher than her husband’s in order to gain authority over the marriage. She tries to sacrifice herself and hold the candle lower, but Pasha lowers his candle further still.

On their wedding night, Pasha and Lara talk, and the more Pasha learns about Lara, the more his spirits sink.

‘His wounded imagination could not keep up with her revelations.’

It changes him so much that he’s astonished to wake up the next day and still be Pasha Antipov. You’d think they might have got to know each other before getting married, wouldn’t you? I wonder what Pasternak was modelling this on. His own first wedding, perhaps?

4.

Soon after their wedding, they head to the Urals, where both Pasha and Lara have been offered jobs. Their friends throw them a farewell party and Komarovsky attends. He asks for permission to write to them and visit, as he can’t bear to be parted, but Lara denies him.

The Antipovs catch their train and they’re away.

5.

Autumn 1916

Yury Zhivago is outside the maternity ward of a Moscow hospital. He’s now qualified as a doctor. Tonya, his wife, has just gone into labour. The Moscow hospitals are full following the battle of Lutsk, and Yury is overworked. The battle of Lutsk was on 4 June 1916 and marked the opening of the Brusilov Offensive. This was one of the largest offensives in world history, held from June to September 1916 on the Eastern Front in Galicia (present-day northwestern Ukraine), and was a huge success for the Allies over the Central Powers.

At the hospital, there’s a scene where the consultant gynaecologist quotes Hamlet: ‘whenever he was asked a question, replied by shrugging his shoulders and rolling up his eyes as much to say that, whatever the advances of science, there were “more things in heaven and earth, Horatio …”’. Pasternak translated Hamlet in 1939 and it left a big mark on him. Twelve versions of the translation were found among his papers.

It’s worth pointing out that the first of Yury’s poems at the end of the book is titled Hamlet. Edith W. Clowes says the following:1

So the gynaecologist’s quoting Hamlet isn't just a casual literary nod; it's part of a deeper pattern Pasternak is building throughout the novel, in which Yury is consciously cast in the Hamlet mould: the intellectual, paralysed by circumstance, watching the world collapse around him.

Tonya has a troublesome birth, but a nurse tells Yury that mother and son are fine. Both are out of danger. Yury visits a nearby patient while waiting to be allowed in to see his wife and child. On his return to the hospital, the gynaecologist greets him and denies him entry. He’d been given the wrong information. Tonya’s not doing well and the baby is still being delivered. Yury’s allowed to peep through the door:

To Yury she seemed like a barque lying at rest in the middle of a harbour after putting in and being unloaded, a barque which plied an unknown country and the continent of life across the waters of death with a cargo of new immigrant souls. One such soul had just been landed, and the ship now lay at anchor, resting in the lightness of her empty flanks.

In her essay Characterisation in Doctor Zhivago, Edith W. Clowes states that Yury is distant from Tonya and that we, as readers, are kept distant from her, too.

She [Tonya] is almost always kept out of sight, her actions, such as they are, rarely occupy center stage, and her feelings are generally reported indirectly. […] Yury always feels spiritually alone and apart from his wife.2

Clowes then goes on to quote the ‘barque’ scene cited above as evidence. It’s certainly not a scene that reminds me of how I felt when our first child was born!

Clowes notes that:

Doctor Zhivago is more than a simple love story: in the course of its many romances fundamental truths about the very nature of love are explored.

So Pasternak may not be showing Yury as feeling removed from the birth of his child so much as exploring how Yury loves in a more poetic, impersonal way.

6.

Lara and Pasha have arrived at Yuryatin in the Urals. We move forward four years, to 1916. They’ve had a daughter, Katya, who is now three. Lara is teaching at the girls’ high school and feels as happy as a clam to be back in her hometown. Pasha, on the other hand, is miserable. He dislikes this provincial backwater, considering the locals to be ‘ignorant savages’. Harsh. He spends his time reading and studying, and he feels stifled. Pasternak says here that Pasha’s relations with Lara were good, but he’s afraid of upsetting her and it’s clear that they’re not being open and honest with each other. Maybe that’s all coming from Pasha through a sense of inferiority:

He would not criticise her for fear that she might take some quite innocent word of his for a reproach—a hint, perhaps, that her blood was bluer than his, or that she had once belonged to someone else.

Surely he would have known if she’d had an ex? And bluer blood? She’s from a provincial town in the Urals. How can her blood be bluer?

They have a dinner party with some teachers from their school, after which Pasha can’t sleep. He gets up and goes out into the cold winter’s night, a scene which the same character will see again later in the novel. He thinks through his relationship with Lara and comes to the conclusion that it’s one-sided, and he needs to do something. A passing army train helps him to reach his decision: he’s going to the front.

7.

Lara begs Pasha to stay and can’t understand why he’s volunteering after he’d made fun of Lara’s brother, Rodya, for doing that very thing. She soon realises why he’s made his decision: ‘Pasha misunderstood her attitude to him.’ He’s got her all wrong, showing that, as my wife loves to tell me, ‘communication is key’. (There are all sorts of in-jokes there that I don’t need to go into, God bless her!) When Lara realises, she demurs and doesn’t try to fix it.

She had had the greatest defeat of her life. Her best and brightest hopes were in ruins.

He goes off to train and ends up at the front, taking part in the Brusilov Offensive. This is an example of how Pasternak allows history to pass by almost unnoticed. The Brusilov Offensive was a huge military victory for Russia, and it gets barely a mention here, other than as a reason why Pasha might not have managed to write home.

At this time, Lara is helping as an auxiliary nurse at the local hospital. She then studies to qualify as a nurse and, leaving Katya behind with the Kologrivov’s in Moscow, gets work on the hospital train that will be going through the village where she last heard from Pasha. Again with the trains.

8.

Misha Gordon has travelled on the Red Cross train to Divisional HQ to visit Yury, who is now working in a field hospital about fifty miles away. Misha travels in a cart, passing ruined villages and hearing distant artillery fire, across a war-torn landscape. He reaches the right location the next day and ends up staying for over a week.

9.

The Russians have made breakthroughs in the enemy lines, but Pasha has been taken prisoner. His friend, Galiullin, thought that Pasha had been killed by a shell while attacking enemy positions. Remember Galiullin, the young apprentice at the railway yard, whom old Khudoleyev was beating? He’s now the equivalent of a second lieutenant (podporuchik / подпоручик), and Pasha is an ensign (praporshchik / прапорщик). Ensign was the first of the junior officer ranks in the Imperial Russian Army, so Galiullin is one rank above Pasha. The Hayward/Harari translation has them the wrong way round, with Pasha one rank higher. P&V have them in the correct order, but each one rank higher than they actually are: second lieutenant and lieutenant.

Misha Gordon leaves, believing Pasha to have been killed. Galiullin is given Pasha’s belongings to return to the family when he can.

We learn that Khudoleyev had inadvertently played a part in Galiullin’s promotion. Khudoleyev had shown up as a recruit under Galiullin’s command, whereupon Galiullin was hellbent on revenge for how Khudoleyev had treated him as an apprentice. This was untenable, and so Galiullin requested a transfer to the front. He distinguished himself in his first engagement with the enemy and received a promotion. We learn that Galiullin had met Lara back in 1905, and, of course, he knew Pasha from then, too. On meeting at the front, Galiullin had noticed a big change in Pasha. He was no longer the ‘shy, mischievous and girlish child, but an arrogant and erudite hypochondriac.’ Galiullin soon learns that Lara is working as a nurse at the front, but doesn’t know where to write to her to inform her of Pasha’s death.

10.

Yury and Misha are enjoying a meal together in a Galician peasant’s cottage. They spend the next few days together, discussing the horrors of war. Wounded men are being carted to the hospital, including one with a particularly gruesome wound, which turns out to be fatal. Lara happens to be standing at the entrance as the wounded man dies, as are Yury and Misha. The soldier who died was Private Gimazetdin Galiullin. He died while his son, Lieutenant Galiullin, was also a witness to his father’s death. What a massive coincidence that all these people should be together in one place at such a time as this.

Once again, coincidence shows up as an example of the lyric vs the epic, much like in a play, when the plot is contrived in a way that brings the characters together on stage, or like melodies in a symphony, as Boris Gasparov discusses in his essay on temporal counterpoint:

Let us ask ourselves: in what way can writing "symphonies" be construed as a means to the ultimate end of overcoming death articulated by Vedenyapin? One of the salient features of music in general […] is its ability to deal simultaneously with several melodic lines whose development differs in time. Interrelations between different voices, that had started at different points of the composition and progressed with different speed, create infinite possibilities for variation, with different melodic lines sometimes diverging far from one another, and sometimes merging into one.3

I find this argument compelling and will no doubt come back to this idea. It goes against what Pasternak claimed he was doing: writing an epic. He claimed in a letter in 1952 that “I need to build a house for which all this poorly written verse can be the window frames”.

Intentions of writing a novel that would sum up his entire creative career, a novel that would show "all of life" are repeated throughout Pasternak's correspondence and documented oral conversations from the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. One example: on July 9, 1952, Pasternak wrote to V. T. Shalamov about his need to make the transition from what he dismissively called “writing verse” to a new, more significant and “real” job: “from all these innumerable failures and things said in the wrong words [nedomolvka] ... I must forge ahead and step across to a world that will give me a unifying idea for all these trivial attempts; I need to do something in life; I need to write a story about life that brings out something new about life, a discovery or a conquest; I need to build a house for which all this poorly written verse can be the window frames.”4

11.

Yury and Misha witness a Cossack’s toying with an old Jew for entertainment and they put a stop to it. Yury makes his sympathies towards the Jews known, but Misha remains silent.

12.

Yury tells Misha how he saw the Tsar during his first spring in the army. He’d come to inspect the unit of which he was an honorary Colonel. Yury was struck by how weak he’d seemed, how ordinary. He made no great speeches about ‘The people, my people.’ And now there are journalists writing bogus ‘linguistic graphomania’ or ‘sketches and scenes’, as well as scepticism and misanthropy. It’s a fascinating scene that shows Yury as a writer, a poet and an artist. Misha responds by finally commenting on the Jewish question, referring back to the Cossack’s toying with the old Jew, and to what he and Yury were both taught by Yury’s uncle Nikolay. It’s an interesting monologue about the Kingdom of God and how Misha sees the gospels.

It’s perhaps reiterating the notion of Tolstoyism here. In Chapter 1, we learned that “‘Tolstoyism’, an anti-state, anti-church, egalitarian social doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth, to be achieved by means of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance…” This was in reference to Uncle Nikolay’s being described as a ‘Tolstoyan and a revolutionary idealist.’ So when Misha talks here of the Kingdom of God, he’s drawing on this tradition: the idea that Christianity is something to be lived rather than institutionalised, a personal code of non-violence. Yury feels this too, which we see when he talks of how he finds it difficult to accept ‘the ruthless logic of mutual extermination.’

13.

It’s time for the unit to move on. Misha Gordon’s linen hasn’t been washed yet. Isn’t that always the way? That’s how it is in the army—you just get used to a place, and then it’s time to move on. The Germans break through, and the village is now under fire. They have to evacuate. Yury and Misha split up, and Yury is blown off his feet by an exploding shell.

14.

Yury recovers. It’s now the end of February 1917. Yury learns that a new nurse has joined the hospital staff. Any guesses as to who it might be? Yury is reading mail from Tonya when Lara steps into the ward. Galiullin is recovering opposite Yury. Both men recognise Lara, but neither knows that the other knows her. Lara takes Galiullin’s pulse, after which he tells her that he knew Pasha and has his belongings for her. She’s surprised and asks for confirmation of what she’s heard, that Pasha had been killed in action. Galiullin chooses to lie and tells her instead that Pasha was captured. Only we, the readers, know what actually happened. Lara doesn’t believe him.

Lara then approaches Yury. Remember that he’d seen her, but had never spoken to her, so it’s not surprising that she doesn’t recognise him. He wants to tell her they’ve met before, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he rather brusquely tells her that he’s a doctor and that he’ll look after himself. Lara wonders at his rudeness, thinking of him as ‘intelligent in the best sense of the word, alive and with an attractive mind’. However, she realises now that Pasha is dead, she has no reason to remain and should instead make plans to return to Moscow, collect Katya and go home to live her life in Yuryatin. She feels that, now that the war is lost, nothing is sacred.

Everything had changed suddenly—the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, who to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself.

Yury learns that Misha Gordon and Nicky Dudorov had published his book without permission. Is this the first time we’ve learned that Yury has written a book? I think it is.

There’s an intended connection here between the outbreak of the Revolution and the outbreak of this young poet’s first publication at the same time. Pasternak tells us that Yury’s work was ‘praised and regarded as showing great literary promise.’ Carol J. Avins writes:

Will revolutionary upheaval […] enrich his art? The connection has more than a single significance: after all, the impact of the 1917 revolutions on Zhivago’s life is in large measure the subject of the entire novel.5

Lara’s annoyed at herself for not having asked Galiullin who he was. She asks him the next day, whereupon he explains that he was at the Tiverzins at 38 Brest Street, and Lara’s beside herself in surprise.

The chapter ends with the outbreak of the Revolution. It gets a single sentence and, as with the Brusilov Offensive, passes almost unnoticed. This shows, once again, the lyric vs epic argument I set out above and in my Chapter 1 analysis. In epic novels, War and Peace being perhaps the clearest example, history shapes the characters. In this novel, the characters live their lives almost despite history. Pasha joins the war effort not out of a feeling of patriotism, but because he’s misunderstood his relationship with Lara. And Lara, for her part, becomes a nurse to find her husband. For them, the big moments of history pass like the weather.

Catch you next week for Chapter 5!

Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 3

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1.

The wardrobe escapade

“One winter…” — we’ve jumped from 1905 to 1911.

Yuri resides with the Gromekos, Alexander and Anna, and their daughter, Tonya.

Alexander buys Anna an ebony wardrobe. Markel, the handyman, puts it together, having brought his six-year-old daughter, Marinka (diminutive of Marina). Keep Marina in mind, as I have a feeling we’ll be seeing her much later. 🙉

The wardrobe collapses before it’s fully assembled when Anna leans against a panel. She comes away with bruises and, thereafter, does not like the wardrobe at all.

After this accident Anna developed a pulmonary weakness.

It sounds a bit like what my wife refers to as a ‘Homer present’, from the episode of The Simpsons where Homer buys Marge a bowling ball with the name ‘Homer’ engraved on it. (clip)

2.

Anna’s lungs are inflamed, though I don’t see a connection between the lungs and an ebony wardrobe, unless she’s been sanding it without wearing a mask. The kids are around 20 years old and will graduate that spring: Yury in medicine, Misha Gordon in philosophy, and Tonya in law. Why medicine for Yury? Good question. He is, after all, a poet.

Though he was greatly drawn to art and history, he scarcely hesitated over the choice of his career. He considered that art was no more a vocation than innate cheerfulness or melancholy were professions.

Interesting. I wonder why he thought that way. A few paragraphs later, we learn that he’s a poet and has aspirations of writing a book of impressions of life: “…he believed that originality and vigour alone could give reality to a work of art, and that without them art was utterly useless, superfluous and a waste of time.” It’s tempting to read this as Pasternak’s own view.

His uncle Kolya (Nikolay) has been a big influence on Yury. Nikolay has had several books published, both in Russian and in other languages (I wonder if that means translations, or if he wrote them himself). His books were on philosophy and metaphysics, based on the idea that time and memory can address the challenge of death through Christianity. Memory and immortality are big themes of Doctor Zhivago. And those same ideas push Misha Gordon towards philosophy and theology. Pasternak frames Misha as having ‘extremist’ tendencies tied to his ‘racial origin’—a reminder that Misha is Jewish, and that this language reflects the period.

3.

Yury comes home from university to find that Anna Gromeko has had a terrible health scare. She’s really ill. She asks Yury for comfort, to tell her about his views on death and resurrection. He explains what consciousness means to him:

‘You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life.—Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on it is called your memory? This will be you—the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.

‘And now one last point. There is nothing to worry about. There is no death. Death is not our department.’

It’s really quite something and gets to the heart of the novel. It’s what my wife always spoke of whenever I mentioned Doctor Zhivago, the idea that we never die, that we live on in the memories of those who love us. It’s got me tearing up, and that’s what got to her as well, thirty-odd years ago when she studied it. It’s the only Russian novel she’s ever really enjoyed. This is why. It’s a message we can take with us for comfort.

4.

Anna’s health improves. She reminisces with Yury and Tonya about her childhood in the Urals. Yury and Tonya take delivery of a new suit and dress to wear at the Sventitskys’ party on the 27th. Anna asks to speak to Yury in private, but he knows what it’s about—he’s seen the letter. Anna and Uncle Kolya both think that Yury should not have refused his inheritance. Yury explains that there’s really nothing to claim but a muddle of debts. There are other claimants, including one Yevgraf, the son of Princess Stolbunova-Enritsi. Yevgraf is, therefore, Yury’s younger half-brother, and it’s a name to keep in mind for later. Mind it—Yevgraf.

Anna tells of a man from the Urals named Bacchus. He was a blacksmith and was hurt in a fight so that his insides collapsed. He fixed himself by fashioning himself a set of ‘iron guts’. Keep this in mind!

Anna has a coughing fit and makes Yury and Tonya agree to marry if she should die.

5.

We’re whisked back to 1906. Lara’s still at school and is being driven to despair by her ‘insanely contradictory’ affair with Komarovsky. It was ‘as inexplicable as black magic.’ Komarovsky displays the classic manipulative, narcissistic behaviour of an abuser. The summer holidays are looming, during which time not even school will give Lara any respite from Komarovsky. She reaches a sudden decision that was to change her life. She asks her friend, Nadya Kologrivova, if she knows of any employment opportunities out of town. It turns out that Nadya’s parents are looking for a governess for their daughter, Lipa.

6.

Lara spends three years at the Kologrivovs’, safe from Komarovsky. Her brother, Rodya, comes to see her and tells her that he’s gambled away the money that was entrusted to him to buy a present for the head of the Academy. He’d gone to Komarovsky, who’d told him that he would help on the condition that Lara return to him. Lara’s angry at her brother, but promises him the money in exchange for his revolver. She gets the money not from Komarovsky, but from Kologrivov.

7.

During her time working as a governess for the Kologrivovs, Lara had managed to finish school and start university. She was to graduate in the spring of 1912. Lara has been sending part of her wages to Pasha Antipov’s father at the prison camp in Siberia, as well as paying part of Pasha’s rent in a new building on Kamerger Street. Pasha had taken Greek and Latin on Lara’s advice; she dreamed that they would marry after his graduation and move to the Urals.

In the summer of 1911, Lara goes with the Kologrivovs to the fictional town of Duplyanka in the Urals. It’s her habit to walk from the train station to the dacha by herself, taking in the air of the countryside.

For a moment she rediscovered the meaning of her life. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, then, out of love of life, to give birth to heirs who would do it in her place.

Now that her ward has come of age, Lara is effectively superfluous in the Kologrivov household, yet the family is happy to keep her on as they’ve become so fond of her. This makes Lara uncomfortable, and she feels she ought to run away to relieve them of the financial burden of supporting her. She also feels that she must repay the money they gave her to get her brother out of his predicament. This situation has a negative effect on her disposition and her outlook on life. She attempts to distract herself by taking part in the usual amusements she shares with the Kologrivovs: house parties, bathing and rowing, and shooting. It turns out she’s rather a good target shooter. These activities, however, do not distract her; she feels wretched.

On their return to town, Lara finds herself bickering with Pasha, and her state of mind deteriorates further still. It leads her to a decision: she will leave the Kologrivovs and return to Komarovsky for the money that would allow her to live independently. She leaves for Komarovsky’s with her brother’s revolver hidden in her muff. She intends to shoot Komarovsky if he refuses or humiliates her.

8.

Lara arrives at Komarovsky’s only to learn that he’s gone out to a party at the Sventitskys’. She heads off, but as she passes by Pasha’s building, she decides to go and unburden herself on Pasha.

9.

She calls in and finds Pasha’s dressing for a party, another example of the many coincidences in the novel. She asks Pasha to light a candle and turn off the lights. This he does, and as the candle burns on the windowsill, it melts the ice on the window, creating a peep-hole to the outside (or inside!). She tells Pasha that she’s in trouble and that they ought to marry right away. Pasha agrees—it’s what he’s always wanted. But the conversation moves on to other things.

The candle motif shows up in Pasternak’s poem, Winter Night, and connects Lara to Yury further on in the chapter.

Translating poetry is challenging in different ways. The first verse in my Hayward/Harari translation reads:

Winter Night

Snow swept over the earth,
Swept it from end to end.
The candle on the table burned,
The candle burned.

Like swarms of summer midges
Drawn to the flame
The snowflakes
Flocked to the window.

Take a look at the various opening lines of these twelve English translations:

For every decision a literary translator of prose has to make, it increases tenfold when translating poetry.

10.

Yury has an almost specialist knowledge of ophthalmology, ‘almost in keeping with his creative gifts and his interest in the relation between imagery in art and the logical structure of ideas.’ Interesting.

Yury and Tonya are on their way to the party. Yury’s thinking about the essay he’s writing and about the article he'd promised Misha Gordon on the symbolist poet Alexander Blok. Pasternak was a huge admirer of Blok. After Anna Gromeko’s instruction to Yury and Tonya to marry, they now see each other differently; there’s a nascent passion that hadn’t been there before. As they drive through Kamerger Street, Yury looks up and sees a candle burning in a window. It fires up his creativity and he feels the beginnings of a poem coming on. It’s a nice moment of coincidence, creating a connection between Yury and Lara.

11.

Yury and Tonya arrive at the Sventitskys’. The party is in full swing.

12.

The Sventitskys are delighted to see Yury and Tonya and recruit them to help out with the preparations for dinner and presents.

13.

Lara’s in the ballroom at the party. Komarovsky doesn’t pay her any attention. Another young girl comes into Komarovsky’s eyeline, and he gives her the same look he would give Lara. The young girl blushes, and Lara is beside herself with shame. ‘A new victim,’ she almost screamed. Lara dances with Koka Kornakov and, upon learning his surname, she suddenly recalls that he was the assistant public prosecutor at the Moscow Central Court and had been at the trial of the railway workers involving Tiverzin. Is Lara feeling jealous? Or is she genuinely feeling empathy towards this young girl?

14.

It’s two a.m. Tonya is dancing and eating tangerines. As she dances past Yury, she presses her handkerchief into his hand; it smells of tangerines and of Tonya. Yury feels something he’s never felt before: romantic love.

This was something new in Yura’s life, something he had never felt before, something sharp and piercing that went through his whole being from top to toe.

A shot rings out. Kornakov comes out of the ballroom and tells everyone he’s fine, it’s just a scratch. Mrs Kornakova is enraged. Yury then catches a glimpse of Lara.

Yura was dumbfounded.—This girl again! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! … How proudly beautiful she was!

Lara is in a faint. Yury checks Kornakov’s wound, but it’s merely superficial. Yury then receives a message from home: they have to go back at once.

15.

They arrive home too late. Anna has died. Yury remembers how he felt when his mother died ten years earlier, in 1901. He compares that with how he feels now, after being educated and having studied the classics and Scripture. It hits different.

Now he was afraid of nothing, neither of life nor of death; everything in the world, each thing in it, was named in his dictionary.

I’m seeing here the outlook of a man of science rather than of a poet.

16.

Yury has fallen asleep in a corner. He’s awakened by Markel’s calling him; they’re taking out the coffin and get stuck behind the big, ebony wardrobe on the landing. Markel navigates around it, and they carry the coffin out to the street.

17.

Anna’s funeral. She’s buried in the same churchyard as Yury’s mother. Yury’s struck by expansive feelings of beauty and creativity:

He realised…that art has two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

He plans to write a poem in Anna’s memory. The narrator tells us of the details Yury will include in his poem, everyday details of that day: street incidents on the way back from the funeral, and the washing hanging in the place where he had wept as a child, and the blizzard had raged. It sounds like Pasternak himself, who wrote for the love of language.

In the BBC Omnibus programme on Pasternak, Angela Livingstone, reader in Russian Literature at the University of Essex, states:

“In a sense, Pasternak wrote about just anything that came to hand. He wrote about everything around him. He wrote about what he could see from his window, what he could see below his house, what he felt, what he was feeling at the time. He wrote about the landscape. He wrote about the mountains. He wrote about the room he was in. He wrote about simply anything. It was writing as such, writing for the joy of writing, writing for the love of language.”1

Links

I mentioned this series of historical fiction in my podcast of this post:

• The Revolution of Marina M, Janet Fitch

• The Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, Janet Fitch

Catch you next week for Chapter 4!

Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 2

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1.

The Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905) is not yet over and ‘waves of revolution swept across Russia’. This is where Larisa Guishar, nicknamed Lara, enters our story. She’s the young daughter of a deceased Belgian engineer and a Russianised Frenchwoman. Her mother, Madame Amalia Guishar (Guichard, P&V; Гишар), is a widow of about thirty-five and has a weak heart. Lara attends the same girls’ school as Nadya Kologrivova, the young girl with whom Nicky Dudorov was at the pond at the end of the first chapter. Madame Guishar buys a seamstress business on the advice of Komarovsky, the now deceased Zhivago senior’s lawyer. Lara is sixteen when she’s introduced. We’re told that Komarovsky stares at her till she blushes; he’s a creepy man, make no mistake.

2.

The Guishars rent an apartment in a rough part of Moscow. Komarovsky also takes advantage of Madame Guishar’s reduced circumstances and fear of men, causing her at one time to seek help from her neighbour, the ‘cellist Tishkevich.

3.

Madame Guishar’s workshop is located on Tverskaya, near the headquarters of the Brest railway. This was the main line that ran from Moscow to Brest-Litovsk (now in Belarus) and into Poland. It’s now Belorussky Station. We’ve already had trains mentioned in Chapter 1, and now we have ‘engine depots, warehouses and lodgings for clerks’.

Komarovsky often passes through the workshop on his way to the Guishars’ flat. His dog, Jack, bites Lara’s leg.

‘Why is it,’ thought Lara, ‘that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?’ (p32)

Good question, Lara.

4.

Lara helps her mother with errands and works hard at school. As she has a long lie one Sunday in July, Pasternak mentions her left shoulder and the big toe of her right foot, and that ‘everything between her shoulder and her foot was vaguely herself—her soul or essence neatly fitting into the outline of her body and impatiently straining towards the future’. It’s quite lyrical, isn’t it? I read something about shoulders in an essay somewhere, probably in the Critical Companion, but I’ve forgotten what it said, and it’s a physical book, so I can’t search. I hope to come back to it later, as it features again.

I like the idea of one’s soul being contained in the body. In my own mind, I sometimes think of it as being trapped in the body. We strive to return to the whole and do that through art and religion, drugs and connection. If I find the shoulder thing again, I can come back and reference it, as now that I’ve mentioned it here, it’s searchable!

She moved with a silent grace, and everything about her—voice, figure, gestures, her grey eyes and shining hair—was fitting and harmonious. (p32)

I like that description of Lara. P&V render it thus:

She moved noiselessly and smoothly, and everything about her — the inconspicuous quickness of her movements, her height, her voice, her grey eyes and fair hair — went together perfectly. (p22)

Which do you prefer?

Name days

Russians celebrated name days more than birthdays. It’s Olga’s name day in this chapter, meaning it’s the feast day of Saint Olga of Kyiv (11 July). All the Olgas across the land would be celebrating on this day. Name days superseded birthdays in terms of importance. Feast days were based on the Orthodox Christian calendar. Your Christian name would tie you to your religion and form part of your identity. Birthdays were merely biological.

Komarovsky takes advantage of Lara at the name-day celebration and she’s mortified. It was the dancing that had led to it, ‘dancing … the root of the evil.’

5.

There’s unrest among the railway workers that autumn, 1905. There’s so much history packed into that opening line. I’ll unpack it as succinctly as I can.

Bloody Sunday took place in January of that year, when Tsar Nicholas II’s guards fired on peaceful protesters outside the Winter Palace. The protesters were petitioning the Tsar for better working conditions and liberal reform. Many were killed, and it changed the mood of the people; they no longer saw the Tsar as the benevolent father and now became more hostile towards the monarchy. Pressure built, with strikes happening first in St Petersburg, and later spreading to Moscow. The railway industry was huge at that time, as indeed it is now. This gave the railway workers enormous power to disrupt the country, and this they did. Strikes and protests took place right through 1905, so the ‘revolution’ wasn’t a single event, as with the October 1917 coup; rather, it was a prolonged period of unrest and activism sparked by Bloody Sunday. Workers united in small councils called soviets (советы).1 The most important Soviet in terms of history was the St Petersburg Soviet (later the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies); it was highly instrumental in the revolutions of 1917.

St Petersburg was the epicentre of unrest, but railway workers used the rail network to coordinate and communicate.

The unrest led to the Tsar’s concession in August 1905 to form a State Duma, or parliament, but its powers were limited and it had little effect.

In October 1905, Tsar Nicholas II issued his October Manifesto, promising liberal reforms and paving the way for a constitutional monarchy to replace the Romanov autocracy. This satisfied the Constitutional Democrats (KaDets), but didn’t go far enough. It’s often said that the 1905 revolution was a dress rehearsal for the February 1917 revolution that led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. This is what makes Doctor Zhivago such an interesting novel: it’s placed in history, but it’s not about history. Unfortunately, that makes the novel far less meaningful for those who don’t know anything about the historical setting. Where other historical fiction will describe historical events as part of the plot—Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example—Pasternak doesn’t do that. Instead, he places his characters in history, and we follow them through it.

Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov is the Track Overseer of the station district. He’s frustrated by his superiors’ corruption, which leads to low-quality steel.

6.

Tiverzin, a railway worker, and Antipov leave an underground meeting early. It’s payday for the railway workers. The old foreman, Pyotr Khudoleyev, is beating an apprentice, Yusupka. He’s the son of Gimazetdin Galliulin, a porter. There’s some bad blood between them as Tiverzin’s father, Saveliy Nikitich, married the woman who had rejected Khudoleyev. We get an argument between Tiverzin and Khudoleyev that includes some racial slurs against the Tartars. A fight ensues, which is broken up by the crowd. Tiverzin walks off.

He knew that all their strivings … were small separate stages on the great road lying ahead of them. (p38)

History.

Keep an eye out for Yusupka, the young apprentice. Save the name Galliulin in your brain.

Tiverzin missed the meeting where it was decided that a strike was to take place that very night. He only finds out later. His job is to blow the hooter to signal the start of the strike, and this he does.

7.

It’s two days after the strike. The porter, Gimazetdin Galliulin, thanks Tiverzin for rescuing Yusupka from Khudoleyev’s bullying. Tiverzin goes home, where he lives with his mother. She warns him that Pavel Antipov Sr has been arrested and that he should lie low for a while. She then tells him that the Tsar has issued a manifesto. It’s a very big part of Russia’s history, but in Doctor Zhivago, you could easily blink and miss it! This is the October Manifesto I mentioned above.

8.

Young Pavel (Pasha) Antipov moves in with the Tiverzins after his father is arrested. There’s a demonstration in November 1905 following the October Manifesto, marching from the Tver Gate, located near Belorussky Station at Tverskaya Zastava Square, to the Kaluga Gate, now Kaluzhskaya Square (route map). Tiverzin’s mother marches and Pasha goes with her.

The protesters receive a warning that Cossacks and dragoons are waiting to ambush them.

Half a platoon galloped through, turned, re-formed and cut into the tail of the procession. The killing began.

This event describes growing tension in the city as the reforms promised in the October Manifesto fail to materialise. It ultimately leads to the Moscow Uprising in December.

What’s important to note here is that young Pasha Antipov was there to witness this violence’s being perpetrated against the people by the state.

9.

Nikolay Vedenyapin arrives in Moscow from St Petersburg and stays with the Sventitskys. Yury Zhivago is now living with the Gromekos. Their daughter, Tonya, is the same age as Yury, and Yury’s friend, Misha Gordon, spends most of his time with them. We learn that the three youths ‘had soaked themselves in The Meaning of Love and The Kreutzer Sonata.’ There’s a whole essay on this in The Critical Companion, written by Jerome Spencer.2 The quote refers to two texts: the first by the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and the second by Leo Tolstoy.

In The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), Tolstoy, through his main character, claims that the love on which marriage is based is nothing more than a desire to copulate.

Such carnal desire prevents any kind of spiritual relationship from developing, which is ruinous, as spiritual love represents the ultimate aim of human existence. Spiritual love, when it exists, is expressed “in words, in conversations, in colloquies”. The only way to reach spiritual love is to eliminate carnal lust.3

Solovyov wrote The Meaning of Love (1894) in response to The Kreutzer Sonata. He claimed that spiritual love must come first, followed by social love and, only then, animal love. Women represent the ‘Divine Feminine’, and when a man achieves the perfect relationship with a woman, he is allowed to become one with the Divine Feminine, taking her characteristics into himself. If a woman is corrupted by carnal lust before spiritual love, then that corruption is irreversible. It’s kind of problematic, don’t you think? I can’t talk too much about how Pasternak deals with this, as we’re only in Chapter 2; suffice to say, he doesn’t agree with either author. It’s interesting to note that Pasternak places this reference in the text just before we read of Komarovsky’s seduction of Lara. He’s clearly thinking about these texts as he writes his novel.

10.

Nikolay Vedenyapin has a visitor. They have a discussion about schools and mysticism, which ends up making Nikolay angry, not so much at his visitor as at himself for revealing to this blockhead some of his most intimate thoughts, thoughts like this one:

But for me the most important thing is the fact that Christ speaks in parables taken from daily life, that he explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea which underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning. (p48)

He refers to the ancient world and ends with the change brought about by Christ, an idea that I wrote about in my essay on Chapter 1.

11.

Komarovsky lives in the Petrovka, a posh part of Moscow that’s reminiscent of St Petersburg. Pasternak clearly disapproves of this character.

12.

Lara walks home in a daze. The weather is unseasonably warm and there’s a thaw. She has been at least seduced, possibly raped. We’re not told by whom, but the juxtaposition of chapters 11 and 12 makes it clear that it was Komarovsky.

13.

Komarovsky is longing for Lara. He’s like a caged animal, an apt description. He’s infatuated with her. This is not spiritual love. We’re told that Jack the bulldog is jealous of Lara ‘as if it were afraid of her infecting its master with something human.’ Komarovsky takes out his frustration on the dog, kicking him and beating him with a stick.

14.

‘What a bewitched circle it was.’

Lara is in turmoil over her affair with Komarovksy. On the one hand, she’s flattered that such a powerful man should have a sexual relationship with her; and on the other, she’s disgusted by it.

15.

‘She hated him, he was the curse of her life.’

Lara feels like Komarovsky’s prisoner.

‘Even the strong are ruled by the weak and treacherous’.

16.

Komarovsky wants to marry Lara. She ignores his pleading. He takes her out to fancy restaurants, she wearing a veil. She has a dream that she’s buried under the ground and all that remains of her is her left side and her right foot. Body parts again. (Remember the left shoulder and big toe of her right foot above?)

17.

Lara’s not religious, but she goes to church for the music of God’s word. While she’s in church one day, she hears the Beatitudes’ being read and hears it as a message for her: happy are the downtrodden.

18.

It was the time of the Presnya rising, the Moscow Uprising I mentioned above—yet another of the briefest mentions of a significant historical event. Lara lives in that area, and she knows Nicky Dudorov and Pasha Antipov hang out with the insurgents. She’s noticed that Pasha has a crush on her and, unconsciously, begins to use it to her advantage. At this stage, she thinks of Nicky and Pasha as children, though she’s only three years older than they are. At that age, three years matter. She has also crossed the line from maidenhood.

‘Good, decent boys,’ she thought. ‘It’s because they are good that they are shooting.’ (p55)

19.

Those not involved with the uprising take shelter in the Montenegro Hotel. Amalia Guishar’s seamstress business had carried on operating all year, but they go out on strike in December, much to Amalia’s chagrin. Lara sees how the land lies and comforts her mother, explaining that it’s political, not personal.

Lara feels safe from Komarovsky now as she’s behind the barricades. She wishes that she could tell her mother, but is too ashamed. She remembers a painting that was hanging in the room where it all began: The Woman and the Vase.

As Lara and her mother are leaving their flat for the safety of the hotel, there’s this line:

‘Well, let’s sit down and then we must be off’.

The footnote in my Hayward Harari translations explains: A Russian custom: before a move or a journey people sit down for a few moments for luck (p57). I actually didn’t know this. My wife read Doctor Zhivago thirty years ago and spotted this when we were watching the 2016 Andrew Davies adaptation of War and Peace and commented on it. Count Rostov and his family sit down in silence for a moment before leaving their empty home in Moscow during Napoleon’s invasion.

20.

At the Gromekos’. The brothers, Alexander and Nikolay, are both professors of chemistry. Alexander’s wife, Anna Krueger, is from a town in the Urals called Yuryatin. This will come up later in the story. Yury is now living with them. The Gromekos love chamber music and there’s to be a concert at their home in January 1906. Their home and the food prepared for the concert stand in stark contrast to the workers on the streets, an image of bourgeois life.

During the concert, Alexander learns from his housemaid that something has happened at the Montenegro and, as a result, one of the musicians has to leave.

21.

After the suppression of the Moscow Uprising, the streets were now relatively quiet. Order was restored for the most part. Yury and Misha Gordon are accompanying Alexander and the musician to the Montenegro Hotel. The incident turns out to have been an attempted suicide by Amalia Guishar. Did Lara tell her about Komarovsky? Lara’s asleep in a chair. Alexander Gromeko waits outside for the musician to come out of the room so that they can leave, but another man comes out instead. It’s Komarovsky. He wakes Lara and they share some intimate glances, as if she were a puppet and he the puppeteer. When Yury sees Lara, it’s love at first sight. As they leave, Misha tells Yury that it was Komarovsky who was on the train with his father when he jumped.

Catch you next week for Chapter 3!

Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources

It’s a privilege to be writing for no fewer than forty-eight readers! We may see more join over the first couple of weeks, but having so many of you sign up at the beginning warms my heart. It’s wonderful that there’s such an appetite for classic literature out there and I’ll do my best to make it as informative as I can. That’s not to say I have all the answers—far from it! I hope to learn as much from the conversations that spring up each week as I do from reading supplementary works.

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Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 1

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1901

On they went, singing ‘Eternal Memory’.

We begin in 1901. Immediately, the words eternal memory are laid before us. This is not accidental. Memory and time are two of the novel’s main themes. In this case, the translation is literal. The Russian vechnaya pamyat’ (вечная память) is the idiom used where the English would be rest in peace. I think eternal memory is a bit nicer. If you have the Hayward/Harari translation, you’ll see ‘May she rest in peace’ later in the paragraph. Pevear and Volokhonsky (P&V) have it as ‘God rest her soul’. These are translated from Tsarstviye nebesnoye (Царствие небесное), a literal translation of which would be The Kingdom of Heaven.

Who has died? Zhivago’s wife—that’s all we’re told. Is the surviving husband the titular Doctor Zhivago? We don’t know yet!

Names

Russian names can be challenging for non-Russian readers. The format goes:

First name - Patronymic - Surname.

The patronymic is derived from the father’s first name and will end in an -a for women. So, the deceased in this case is Marya Nikolayevna (daughter of Nikolai) Zhivago. Typically a woman’s surname will also end in -a, but not always, and in the case of Zhivago, it doesn’t.

Further down we meet Nikolai Nikolayevich Vedenyapin, Marya’s brother. They have the same father, but Nikolai’s patronymic is in the masculine form. Marya’s maiden name would have been Vedenyapina.

In English we might address someone we don’t know as Mr or Mrs; in Russian one would use first name / patronymic. That’s what the narrator does here with Marya Nikolayevna.

On nicknames and diminutives I could write a whole thesis. I’ll just try to keep you caught up as we encounter them. Uncle Kolya is Nikolai.

Right, back to the story.

A ten-year-old boy climbs onto his mother’s grave. We get his name a few paragraphs later—Yura. He didn’t know that his father had abandoned him and had spent the family’s money. It seems they had rather a lot of it, as half the businesses in town are Zhivago businesses. There’s even a cake named after them.

Suddenly it all vanished. They became poor.

Was that as a result of Mr Zhivago’s womanising and carousing? We don’t know.

1903

Yura is twelve. He’s going with his Uncle Kolya to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboynikov, a teacher and writer at the Kologrivov estate in Duplyanka. Or as P&V would have him, ‘a pedagogue and populariser of knowledge.’ 🙄

The half-reaped fields scorched in the sun like the half-shorn heads of convicts.

This simile refers to convicts’ having half their heads shaved to mark them as convicts and dissuade them from escape.

We learn that Uncle Kolya later becomes a celebrated writer and that he does not share the views of the revolutionary writers and philosophers to come. Bear in mind that the first revolution would take place in Russia only two years later, in 1905. The country was ripe for change. We’re told that Uncle Nikolai, a defrocked priest, had been ‘both a Tolstoyan and a revolutionary idealist…’ Where my P&V edition becomes useful is in its footnotes:

‘Tolstoyism’, an anti-state, anti-church, egalitarian social doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth, to be achieved by means of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, was developed in the polemical writings of Leo Tolstoy and his disciples in the last decades of the nineteenth century. A number of revolutionary movements appeared during the same period in Russia, some more or less Marxist, others populist.1

We’re then given a lovely description of Yura’s character, that he’s like his mother in his ‘aristocratic sense of equality with all living things and the same gift of taking in everything at a glance and of expressing his thoughts as they first came to him and before they had lost their meaning and vitality.’ It sounds like he has the makings of a writer or a poet to me!

Yura is excited to play with his friend Nicky Dudorov, a schoolboy who is two years Yura’s senior and lives at the Kologrivov estate.

Uncle Nikolai engages in a discussion with Ivan.

Nikolai: ‘I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it. One must be true to immortality—true to Christ!’

Immortality. Eternal memory. Time.

Nikolai gets into an explanation of history, which he claims began with Christ in the gospels. One can be an atheist, and yet believe that man lives in a state of history. This is touched upon by Boris Kasparov in his essay on temporal counterpoint2 and I found it utterly fascinating. Think of a symphony, with melodic lines that enter and exit, merge and diverge. Now expand that metaphor to include all of humanity: a universal symphony that never ends—immortality. We’ll discuss this idea more as we read further.

There’s a notion about history that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. Edith W. Clowes posits that Pasternak adheres to a three-part, “neo-Christian” view of history and this is what Uncle Kolya is talking about.

1. pre-Christian, Old Testament “law”. God is vengeful and man is subjugated.

2. Christian period of redemption; living by the premise of ‘love thy neighbour’.

3. Free selfhood or lichnost’ (личность).3

It’s a progressive journey and one which Yura Zhivago takes through the novel. We’ll touch upon this idea more as we read the novel.

There was no history in this sense in the classical world … It was not until the coming of Christ that time and man could breathe freely.

Trains

On the theme of temporal counterpoint, keep a note of how often trains feature in the novel. In this chapter, Nikolai and Ivan’s conversation ends as the express from Syzran stops out of schedule. Think of the movement of a train as a melodic line in a symphony.

Yura—also known by his nickname, Yury, which is what I’ll be calling him henceforth—looks for Nicky Dudorov, but he’s nowhere to be found. It’s an idyllic summer scene and Yury is reminded of his mother as he hears her voice in the ether, and of their trips to France and Italy (Antibes and Bordighera). He climbs down into a gully where he prays for his mother. He forgets to pray for his father, whom he doesn’t remember anyway.

Enter Misha Gordon, a boy of eleven. He’s on a train with his father. They’ve been travelling for three days.

All the movements in the world, taken separately, were sober and deliberate but, taken together, they were all happily drunk with the general flow of life which united and carried them.

You see? A symphony! It’s all happening, ‘not only on the earth which buried the dead but also on some other level known to some as the Kingdom of God, to others as history and yet to others by some other name.’

Misha Gordon is an anxious boy. He feels unloved, different, other. Misha Gordon is a Jew. He feels contempt for the grown-ups for making such a world and is quite convinced that, when he’s a grown-up, he’ll fix it.

Remember that the express from Syrzan had stopped out of schedule? Well, it was Misha Gordon’s father who had pulled the emergency stop cord. He pulled it because a man had leapt out of the moving train while being chased by another man. The jumper was a suicide, and none other than Zhivago, Yury’s father. His companion was his lawyer, Komarovsky.

Here we have an example of coincidence: Yury’s father jumps from a train a mere stone’s throw from where Yury was. Coincidences crop up a lot in the novel, and, for some, it’s taken as evidence that the novel fails as an epic and instead is lyric. Pasternak was a poet of some long-standing when he wrote Doctor Zhivago, although he saw it as his opus. He said in a letter in July, 1952:

“I need to build a house for which all this poorly written verse can be the window frames.”4

It’s interesting that the protagonist of Doctor Zhivago is himself a writer of verse and not a novelist!

Epic or lyric?

Did Pasternak intend to write an epic?

The author of the screenplay for the film of Doctor Zhivago, Robert Bolt, thought Pasternak’s work “less an ordinary novel than a disguised poem”.5

Earlier in her essay, Clowes writes:

In the early 1920s Pasternak formulated the goal of writing a long narrative in prose. In a poem written shortly after My Sister - Life, he bids farewell to poetry: “I will say so long to verse, my mania - I have an appointment with you in a novel” (E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 316). And here Pasternak once again makes clear that for him prose and poetry do not occupy opposite spheres. Abandoning the verse form, Pasternak kept his “appointment” with lyric discourse by experimenting in the new and, for him, difficult form of the novel.6

An epic novel would have the characters’ lives shaped by the grand, sweeping, historical events surrounding them. But in Doctor Zhivago, these events serve simply as a framework. The characters develop almost despite the events rather than because of them. We get feelings rather than actions. For me, that’s the strength of the novel.

Is Clowes saying that the novel fails because it’s lyric and not epic? You can watch me as I parse this in real time, haha. Only a week ago, I discussed in a video how I’m not an expert and didn’t know what these terms meant. It was this quotation here that got me all in a quandary:

…in terms of its discursive and genre structure, Doctor Zhivago is about the tension between the lyric and the epic in which the lyric impulse reasserts itself with a vengeance. Perhaps it is this tension between discourses and their strongly differing assumptions about human nature, society, time and fate that really makes Doctor Zhivago a novel.7

I’m beginning to get it now though. And, as I’m rereading War and Peace right now, it’s got me thinking that it too qualifies as a novel with tension between the lyric and the epic. It’s regarded as the quintessential epic, so maybe it’s a question of the ratio? Or are these terms in fact not all that useful? Yeah, probably that. Read it and enjoy it without worrying about what academic terms apply.

Nicky Dudorov hides under the bed and hears Yury’s looking for him. He waits until it’s safe to come out and then jumps out the window and heads to the park. We learn of his background. His father is a terrorist serving hard labour in a penal colony and his mother is a Georgian princess. She abandoned him, lying that she was going to Georgia, and instead went to St Petersburg to take part in the uprisings.

Nicky’s at a pond in the park with a fifteen-year-old girl, Nadya.

The pond had water-lilies growing all round the edge. The boat cut into them with a dry rustle, making a triangular rift; the dark water showed in it like the juice in a water-melon where a segment has been cut out.

Lyric or epic? Or just lovely language that stood out to me and inspired me to include it in this essay? Yeah, I’ll go with that.

Characters from chapter 1 to look out for through the novel:

• Yury, obviously.

• Nicky Dudorov

• Misha Gordon

And that’s a wrap. I’m trying to be looser in my writing, to make it feel less like I’m submitting something to the great canon of academic thought and more like I’m just thinking out loud about a novel that I love. That’s why you’re here, right? And I urge you to join in the conversation.

I’ll be reading more essays and two more books about Doctor Zhivago, because I find it fascinating. I look forward to sharing more thoughts with you as we read this novel.

Now, over to you. Let me know your thoughts!

I’ve put some handy links here that I will include in every post (thank you, Substack for finally adding templates!) 👇🏻

Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources

The poetry titles are of the twenty-five poems at the back of the book in the original Russian and with two translations where they differ. Translating poetry is a whole different kettle of fish from prose and I’m looking forward to comparing and learning more myself.

I’ve recorded a video introduction and shared it as a podcast as well, so you will have a choice of input methods. It worked well doing it that way for The Master and Margarita and I enjoy the work, so read, listen or watch—it’s up to you! You can sign up for the audio podcast in any podcast app, including Spotify. There should be buttons in the sidebar of this post when it goes live. If you need the RSS, hit me up. I’m still figuring it out, haha.

I read the novel in March for the first time, my wife’s old copy of the Hayward/Harari translation from her student days in the 90s.

I’ll be supplementing the novel with further reading and sharing what I learn. The two books I have right now are Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, Edited by Edith W. Clowes and The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée.

I’ll share whatever resources I find useful on the Resources page, which will be linked at the top of every post.

If you haven’t yet bought a copy of the book, please consider using one of these affiliate links. If you buy through one of those links, I will receive a small commission, and it won’t cost you anything. Links to go to Amazon, Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Blackwells:

• Hayward/Harari English translation (Hardcover)

• Hayward/Harari English translation (Paperback)

• Pevear and Volokhonsky English translation

And so, over to you! I’m looking forward to discussing the book with you!

Extra: The conversation I mentioned in the video and audio is between and . They talk about the current landscape of being a creator on Substack and it’s a wonderful conversation. Catch it here:

THE REFLECTIVE EYE

Slow Reading Meets Slow Looking

Listen now

5 months ago · 23 likes · 10 comments · Kristine Benoit de Bykhovetz and Simon Haisell

Yury Andreyevich Zhivago

Yury Zhivago is a physician and poet at the centre of the novel. Abandoned by his affluent father and orphaned shortly after his mother’s death, he is brought up by his uncle, Nikolai Vedenyapin, alongside the Gromeko household, where he eventually marries Tonya. Drawn more to spirituality and literature than to politics, Yury tends to observe rather than act as war and revolution unfold around him. His political outlook remains uncertain: early sympathy for the revolution gives way to disillusionment with the Bolsheviks, yet he never aligns himself with their opponents. He is intellectually curious—especially about those whose ideas intrigue him—but can be quietly dismissive of others. Though generous and humane, he is capable of a certain inner hauteur, particularly towards friends like Gordon and Dudorov. His passivity extends into his personal life, most notably in his relationship with Lara. Ultimately, his poetry becomes the truest expression of his character—reflective, sensitive, and slightly removed from events.

Larissa “Lara” Fyodorovna Antipova (née Guishar)

Lara Antipova is a nurse and teacher, married to Pasha Antipov and later involved with Yury. After her father’s death, she moved from the Urals to Moscow with her mother and brother. As a young woman, she becomes entangled in a damaging affair with Komarovsky, her mother’s lover. Lara possesses a deeply giving nature, yet she is also purposeful and determined in shaping her life. She breaks free from Komarovsky by working as a tutor, though her sense of guilt drives her to a desperate attempt on his life. Seeking stability, she marries Pasha and returns to the Urals, but their ideals diverge. She later joins the war effort to find him. Her relationship with Yury offers a different kind of refuge, though she recognises it cannot provide permanence.

Pavel (“Pasha”) Antipov / Strelnikov

Pasha Antipov, later known as Strelnikov, is Lara’s husband and the son of a revolutionary worker. Raised after his father’s arrest, he proves academically gifted and deeply devoted to Lara. Yet he is plagued by feelings of inadequacy and confinement. After going missing in the war, he re-emerges as Strelnikov, a formidable Red Army commander. His identity becomes subsumed by the revolutionary cause, as he seeks validation through uncompromising dedication. Despite his success, he becomes a target of suspicion. Only late in the novel does he recognise that his need for validation was self-imposed rather than demanded by Lara.

Antonina (“Tonya”) Alexandrovna Zhivago (née Gromeko)

Tonya, Yury’s wife, is the daughter of the Gromekos and the mother of his children. Their shared preference for quiet domestic life over social ambition draws them together. Practical and resilient, she manages the household during Yury’s long absences. It is her decision to move the family to Varykino, guided by both pragmatism and an idealised vision of the place. Though devoted to Yury, she struggles with jealousy over Lara and ultimately comes to believe that he never fully loved her.

Viktor Ippolitovich Komarovsky

A powerful and opportunistic lawyer, Komarovsky exerts influence over many characters, including Lara and her mother. He contributes to the ruin of Yury’s father and embodies a pragmatic, self-serving approach to life. Yet his feelings for Lara complicate his otherwise calculating nature. He alternates between manipulation and genuine care, ultimately helping her escape danger—even at the expense of others, including Yury and their child.

Misha Gordon

Gordon is Yury’s close friend from childhood and an intellectual inclined toward moral and religious debate. He witnesses the tragic death of Yury’s father and remains a steady presence in his life. Though he adapts outwardly to Soviet rule, his philosophical tendencies and background lead to his eventual arrest.

Nicky Dudorov

Dudorov, another of Yury’s friends, is shaped by revolutionary ideals from an early age. After imprisonment, he aligns himself with the Soviet regime and later serves in the Red Army during the Second World War. His life reflects the shifting allegiances of the period.

Yusupka Galiullin

Son of Gimazetdin Galiullin. Originally a mistreated railway apprentice, Yusupka grows into a disciplined and principled military officer. Despite opportunities for revenge, he demonstrates restraint and integrity. During the civil war, he sides with the Whites and becomes a rival to Strelnikov, while still showing compassion—particularly toward Lara.

Evgraf Zhivago

Yury’s half-brother, Evgraf, is a shadowy yet influential figure, closely connected to the Bolshevik authorities. He appears at key moments to assist Yury and his family, later ensuring Yury’s literary legacy is preserved. By the time of the Second World War, he holds a high-ranking military position.

Liberius (Libby) Mikulitsin

Liberius, a partisan leader, is charismatic but volatile. His early success fosters arrogance, and he indulges in excess even as he champions revolutionary ideals. He holds Yury captive as both prisoner and intellectual companion, eager to argue the merits of communism.

Avercius Mikulitsin

A former estate manager turned socialist, Mikulitsin lives in Varykino and offers refuge to the Zhivagos despite political risks. Married to Agrippina Tuntseva. His ideals place him at odds with his son Liberius, illustrating generational tensions within the revolutionary movement. He marries Helen after Agrippina dies.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin

Yury’s uncle and guardian, Vedenyapin is a former priest whose mystical Christianity coexists uneasily with his revolutionary sympathies. A writer and thinker, he embodies a spiritual approach to social change.

Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko

Tonya’s father is a respected academic and moderate socialist. Though wary of Bolshevik extremism, he participates in political life and ultimately suffers exile for his views.

Anna Ivanovna Gromeko

Tonya’s mother is cultured and artistic, hosting salons and nurturing Yury’s early life. Her declining health and eventual death cast a long emotional shadow, and she hopes above all for Yury and Tonya’s enduring marriage.

Vassya Brykin

A conscripted labourer, Vassya is a sympathetic figure shaped by hardship. His journey intersects with Yury’s, and he later illustrates Yury’s poetry before embracing Soviet life.

Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov

Pasha’s father is a committed revolutionary whose activities lead to arrest and later involvement in the Red Terror during the civil war.

Kuprian Savelich Tiverzin, Kuprinka

A railway worker and revolutionary organiser, Tiverzin acts as a mentor to both Pasha and Yusupka. He later plays a central role in enforcing Bolshevik authority in Yuryatin.

Anfim Efimovich Samdevyatov

A Bolshevik official in Yuryatin, Samdevyatov is both sincere and morally flexible. He supports friends through unofficial means while maintaining loyalty to the regime.

Madame Guishar

Lara’s mother, a dressmaker, is emotionally fragile and dependent on Komarovsky. Her distress over his betrayal leads to a suicide attempt and subsequent psychological denial.

Rodion (“Rodya”) Guishar

Lara’s brother is self-absorbed and preoccupied with honour. His relationship with Lara is distant, and his fate remains uncertain.

Markel

Once a servant, Markel gains power after the revolution and adopts a more resentful attitude toward former employers. His daughter Marina later becomes involved with Yury.

Katenka Antipova

The daughter of Lara and Pasha, Katenka grows up amid upheaval yet remains composed. She eventually pursues artistic ambitions.

Minor Characters

Marya Nikolaevna Zhivago

Yury’s mother, whose early death leaves him orphaned.

Gimazetdin Galiullin

A porter at the railway depot.

Ustinya

A cook turned enthusiastic supporter of the revolution.

Gintz

A commissar whose idealism leads to his death during an uprising.

Pogorevshikh

A deaf aristocrat posing as a revolutionary visionary.

Masha Zhivago

Yury and Tonya’s daughter, born during his absence.

Khudoleyev

A cruel railway master, later subjected to similar brutality.

Shura Schlesinger

A friend of the Gromekos who later embraces Bolshevism.

Pritulyev

A conscript travelling with two companions.

Kostoed-Amursky

An ageing revolutionary who eventually adopts Bolshevik doctrine.

Olya Demina

A seamstress who rises to a local political position.

Pelageya Tyagunova and Ogryzkova

Rival companions of Pritulyev.

Voroniuk

A sympathetic guard who deserts.

Elena Proklovna Mikulitsina

Mikulitsin’s second wife.

Agrippina, Avdotya, Glaphira (Glasha) and Seraphima (Sima) Tuntseva

Four sisters living in the Urals region of Varykino, at the Krueger estate. Agrippina marries Mikulitsin.

Avdotya

The eldest, Avdotya, is an assistant at the Public Library.—Dark, pretty, desperately shy, blushes scarlet at the slightest thing. She has a terrible time at the library.—It's dead silent, and the poor girl has chronic hay fever—gets sneezing fits and looks as if she'd like to drop through the floor.—All nerves.

Glasha

The next one, Glasha, is the family's blessing. Terrific drive, a Libby, a wonderful worker, doesn't mind what she does. One day she’s a seamstress or she's working in a stocking factory, then before you know where you are she's turned herself into a hairdresser.

Sima

And then there’s the youngest, Sima. She’s their cross. She gives them no end of trouble. She’s an educated girl, well read, used to go in for poetry and philosophy. But since the revolution—what with all the general uplift, speeches, demonstrations—she’s become a bit touched in the head, she’s got religious mania. The sisters lock her up when they go to work but she jumps out of the window and off she goes down the street, collecting crowds, preaching the Second Coming and the end of the world.

Helen Mikulitsina

Avercius Mikulitsin’s second wife.

After his wife's death he married again. His second wife, Helen, is an ingénue, both by nature and intention. She went straight from school to the altar and is still quite young, but she already pretends to be younger stillprattles, twitters, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. The moment she sees you, she puts you through an exam: "When was Suvorov born? When are the two sides of a triangle equal to the third ?" And if she can trip you up, she's overjoyed. (8/6, p239)

Galuzina and the Galuzin Family

A family divided by war and shifting loyalties.

Vdovichenko

An anarchist, eliminated as a political threat.

Pamphil Palykh

A deeply troubled partisan driven to extreme actions.

Marina

Markel’s daughter and Yury’s later companion.

Tanya

The daughter of Yury and Lara, raised without knowledge of her origins.

Kubarikha

A peasant healer associated with the partisans.

All images taken from mubi.com