Welcome to the fourteenth 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. The video/audio have extra analysis (or banter, lol) at the beginning and end.
I post other bookish videos on YouTube, and I really enjoy doing that, so I’d love it if you would subscribe!
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…
