Hi everybody! Welcome to the first week of my new guided slow-read on the channel, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
Reading Schedule | Character List | Poetry Titles | Resources
It’s a privilege to be writing for no fewer than forty-eight readers! We may see more join over the first couple of weeks, but having so many of you sign up at the beginning warms my heart. It’s wonderful that there’s such an appetite for classic literature out there and I’ll do my best to make it as informative as I can. That’s not to say I have all the answers—far from it! I hope to learn as much from the conversations that spring up each week as I do from reading supplementary works.
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1901
On they went, singing ‘Eternal Memory’.
We begin in 1901. Immediately, the words eternal memory are laid before us. This is not accidental. Memory and time are two of the novel’s main themes. In this case, the translation is literal. The Russian vechnaya pamyat’ (вечная память) is the idiom used where the English would be rest in peace. I think eternal memory is a bit nicer. If you have the Hayward/Harari translation, you’ll see ‘May she rest in peace’ later in the paragraph. Pevear and Volokhonsky (P&V) have it as ‘God rest her soul’. These are translated from Tsarstviye nebesnoye (Царствие небесное), a literal translation of which would be The Kingdom of Heaven.
Who has died? Zhivago’s wife—that’s all we’re told. Is the surviving husband the titular Doctor Zhivago? We don’t know yet!
Names
Russian names can be challenging for non-Russian readers. The format goes:
First name - Patronymic - Surname.
The patronymic is derived from the father’s first name and will end in an -a for women. So, the deceased in this case is Marya Nikolayevna (daughter of Nikolai) Zhivago. Typically a woman’s surname will also end in -a, but not always, and in the case of Zhivago, it doesn’t.
Further down we meet Nikolai Nikolayevich Vedenyapin, Marya’s brother. They have the same father, but Nikolai’s patronymic is in the masculine form. Marya’s maiden name would have been Vedenyapina.
In English we might address someone we don’t know as Mr or Mrs; in Russian one would use first name / patronymic. That’s what the narrator does here with Marya Nikolayevna.
On nicknames and diminutives I could write a whole thesis. I’ll just try to keep you caught up as we encounter them. Uncle Kolya is Nikolai.
Right, back to the story.
A ten-year-old boy climbs onto his mother’s grave. We get his name a few paragraphs later—Yura. He didn’t know that his father had abandoned him and had spent the family’s money. It seems they had rather a lot of it, as half the businesses in town are Zhivago businesses. There’s even a cake named after them.
Suddenly it all vanished. They became poor.
Was that as a result of Mr Zhivago’s womanising and carousing? We don’t know.
1903
Yura is twelve. He’s going with his Uncle Kolya to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboynikov, a teacher and writer at the Kologrivov estate in Duplyanka. Or as P&V would have him, ‘a pedagogue and populariser of knowledge.’ 🙄
The half-reaped fields scorched in the sun like the half-shorn heads of convicts.
This simile refers to convicts’ having half their heads shaved to mark them as convicts and dissuade them from escape.
We learn that Uncle Kolya later becomes a celebrated writer and that he does not share the views of the revolutionary writers and philosophers to come. Bear in mind that the first revolution would take place in Russia only two years later, in 1905. The country was ripe for change. We’re told that Uncle Nikolai, a defrocked priest, had been ‘both a Tolstoyan and a revolutionary idealist…’ Where my P&V edition becomes useful is in its footnotes:
‘Tolstoyism’, an anti-state, anti-church, egalitarian social doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth, to be achieved by means of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, was developed in the polemical writings of Leo Tolstoy and his disciples in the last decades of the nineteenth century. A number of revolutionary movements appeared during the same period in Russia, some more or less Marxist, others populist.1
We’re then given a lovely description of Yura’s character, that he’s like his mother in his ‘aristocratic sense of equality with all living things and the same gift of taking in everything at a glance and of expressing his thoughts as they first came to him and before they had lost their meaning and vitality.’ It sounds like he has the makings of a writer or a poet to me!
Yura is excited to play with his friend Nicky Dudorov, a schoolboy who is two years Yura’s senior and lives at the Kologrivov estate.
Uncle Nikolai engages in a discussion with Ivan.
Nikolai: ‘I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it. One must be true to immortality—true to Christ!’
Immortality. Eternal memory. Time.
Nikolai gets into an explanation of history, which he claims began with Christ in the gospels. One can be an atheist, and yet believe that man lives in a state of history. This is touched upon by Boris Kasparov in his essay on temporal counterpoint2 and I found it utterly fascinating. Think of a symphony, with melodic lines that enter and exit, merge and diverge. Now expand that metaphor to include all of humanity: a universal symphony that never ends—immortality. We’ll discuss this idea more as we read further.
There’s a notion about history that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. Edith W. Clowes posits that Pasternak adheres to a three-part, “neo-Christian” view of history and this is what Uncle Kolya is talking about.
pre-Christian, Old Testament “law”. God is vengeful and man is subjugated.
Christian period of redemption; living by the premise of ‘love thy neighbour’.
Free selfhood or lichnost’ (личность).3
It’s a progressive journey and one which Yura Zhivago takes through the novel. We’ll touch upon this idea more as we read the novel.
There was no history in this sense in the classical world … It was not until the coming of Christ that time and man could breathe freely.
Trains
On the theme of temporal counterpoint, keep a note of how often trains feature in the novel. In this chapter, Nikolai and Ivan’s conversation ends as the express from Syzran stops out of schedule. Think of the movement of a train as a melodic line in a symphony.
Yura—also known by his nickname, Yury, which is what I’ll be calling him henceforth—looks for Nicky Dudorov, but he’s nowhere to be found. It’s an idyllic summer scene and Yury is reminded of his mother as he hears her voice in the ether, and of their trips to France and Italy (Antibes and Bordighera). He climbs down into a gully where he prays for his mother. He forgets to pray for his father, whom he doesn’t remember anyway.
Enter Misha Gordon, a boy of eleven. He’s on a train with his father. They’ve been travelling for three days.
All the movements in the world, taken separately, were sober and deliberate but, taken together, they were all happily drunk with the general flow of life which united and carried them.
You see? A symphony! It’s all happening, ‘not only on the earth which buried the dead but also on some other level known to some as the Kingdom of God, to others as history and yet to others by some other name.’
Misha Gordon is an anxious boy. He feels unloved, different, other. Misha Gordon is a Jew. He feels contempt for the grown-ups for making such a world and is quite convinced that, when he’s a grown-up, he’ll fix it.
Remember that the express from Syrzan had stopped out of schedule? Well, it was Misha Gordon’s father who had pulled the emergency stop cord. He pulled it because a man had leapt out of the moving train while being chased by another man. The jumper was a suicide, and none other than Zhivago, Yury’s father. His companion was his lawyer, Komarovsky.
Here we have an example of coincidence: Yury’s father jumps from a train a mere stone’s throw from where Yury was. Coincidences crop up a lot in the novel, and, for some, it’s taken as evidence that the novel fails as an epic and instead is lyric. Pasternak was a poet of some long-standing when he wrote Doctor Zhivago, although he saw it as his opus. He said in a letter in July, 1952:
“I need to build a house for which all this poorly written verse can be the window frames.”4
It’s interesting that the protagonist of Doctor Zhivago is himself a writer of verse and not a novelist!
Epic or lyric?
Did Pasternak intend to write an epic?
The author of the screenplay for the film of Doctor Zhivago, Robert Bolt, thought Pasternak’s work “less an ordinary novel than a disguised poem”.5
Earlier in her essay, Clowes writes:
In the early 1920s Pasternak formulated the goal of writing a long narrative in prose. In a poem written shortly after My Sister - Life, he bids farewell to poetry: “I will say so long to verse, my mania - I have an appointment with you in a novel” (E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 316). And here Pasternak once again makes clear that for him prose and poetry do not occupy opposite spheres. Abandoning the verse form, Pasternak kept his “appointment” with lyric discourse by experimenting in the new and, for him, difficult form of the novel.6
An epic novel would have the characters’ lives shaped by the grand, sweeping, historical events surrounding them. But in Doctor Zhivago, these events serve simply as a framework. The characters develop almost despite the events rather than because of them. We get feelings rather than actions. For me, that’s the strength of the novel.
Is Clowes saying that the novel fails because it’s lyric and not epic? You can watch me as I parse this in real time, haha. Only a week ago, I discussed in a video how I’m not an expert and didn’t know what these terms meant. It was this quotation here that got me all in a quandary:
…in terms of its discursive and genre structure, Doctor Zhivago is about the tension between the lyric and the epic in which the lyric impulse reasserts itself with a vengeance. Perhaps it is this tension between discourses and their strongly differing assumptions about human nature, society, time and fate that really makes Doctor Zhivago a novel.7
I’m beginning to get it now though. And, as I’m rereading War and Peace right now, it’s got me thinking that it too qualifies as a novel with tension between the lyric and the epic. It’s regarded as the quintessential epic, so maybe it’s a question of the ratio? Or are these terms in fact not all that useful? Yeah, probably that. Read it and enjoy it without worrying about what academic terms apply.
Nicky Dudorov hides under the bed and hears Yury’s looking for him. He waits until it’s safe to come out and then jumps out the window and heads to the park. We learn of his background. His father is a terrorist serving hard labour in a penal colony and his mother is a Georgian princess. She abandoned him, lying that she was going to Georgia, and instead went to St Petersburg to take part in the uprisings.
Nicky’s at a pond in the park with a fifteen-year-old girl, Nadya.
The pond had water-lilies growing all round the edge. The boat cut into them with a dry rustle, making a triangular rift; the dark water showed in it like the juice in a water-melon where a segment has been cut out.
Lyric or epic? Or just lovely language that stood out to me and inspired me to include it in this essay? Yeah, I’ll go with that.
Characters from chapter 1 to look out for through the novel:
Yury, obviously.
Nicky Dudorov
Misha Gordon
And that’s a wrap. I’m trying to be looser in my writing, to make it feel less like I’m submitting something to the great canon of academic thought and more like I’m just thinking out loud about a novel that I love. That’s why you’re here, right? And I urge you to join in the conversation.
I’ll be reading more essays and two more books about Doctor Zhivago, because I find it fascinating. I look forward to sharing more thoughts with you as we read this novel.
Now, over to you. Let me know your thoughts!
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, (London: Vintage Books, 2011), 497.
Boris Gasparov, ‘Temporal Counterpoint as a Principle of Formation in Doctor Zhivago’, in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. by Edith W. Clowes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), pp. 89–114.
Edith W. Clowes, ‘Doctor Zhivago in the Post-Soviet Era: A Reintroduction’, in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. by Edith W. Clowes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), p. 37.
“‘Razgovory o samom glavnom’: Perepiska B. L. Pasternaka i V T. Shalamova,” Iunost’ 10 (1988), 55.
Clowes, ‘Doctor Zhivago in the Post-Soviet Era’, p. 28.
Clowes, ‘Doctor Zhivago in the Post-Soviet Era’, p. 12.
Clowes, ‘Doctor Zhivago in the Post-Soviet Era’, p. 30.
