Welcome to the twelfth 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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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.
Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution - the definitive history. Random House. Kindle Edition. (Location 12916)
