Welcome to the thirteenth week of my sixteen-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
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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.
Anna Pasternak, Lara, William Collins, 2016, 124.
ibid., 131.
ibid., 67.
