Welcome to the tenth week of my sixteen-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources
Print and read offline:
Video
I’ve recorded this as audio and video, so you have multiple options. I do post other bookish videos on YouTube, and I really enjoy doing that, so I’d love it if you would subscribe!
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!
