Welcome to the eleventh week of my sixteen-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources
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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!
Taras Prokhasko, War Begins Privately, in Ukraine 22: Ukrainian Writers Respond to War, ed./trans. Mark Andryczyk, (Penguin, 2023).
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