Hi everybody! Welcome to the third week of my 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.
1.
The wardrobe escapade
“One winter…” — we’ve jumped from 1905 to 1911.
Yuri resides with the Gromekos, Alexander and Anna, and their daughter, Tonya.
Alexander buys Anna an ebony wardrobe. Markel, the handyman, puts it together, having brought his six-year-old daughter, Marinka (diminutive of Marina). Keep Marina in mind, as I have a feeling we’ll be seeing her much later. 🙉
The wardrobe collapses before it’s fully assembled when Anna leans against a panel. She comes away with bruises and, thereafter, does not like the wardrobe at all.
After this accident Anna developed a pulmonary weakness.
It sounds a bit like what my wife refers to as a ‘Homer present’, from the episode of The Simpsons where Homer buys Marge a bowling ball with the name ‘Homer’ engraved on it. (clip)
2.
Anna’s lungs are inflamed, though I don’t see a connection between the lungs and an ebony wardrobe, unless she’s been sanding it without wearing a mask. The kids are around 20 years old and will graduate that spring: Yury in medicine, Misha Gordon in philosophy, and Tonya in law. Why medicine for Yury? Good question. He is, after all, a poet.
Though he was greatly drawn to art and history, he scarcely hesitated over the choice of his career. He considered that art was no more a vocation than innate cheerfulness or melancholy were professions.
Interesting. I wonder why he thought that way. A few paragraphs later, we learn that he’s a poet and has aspirations of writing a book of impressions of life: “…he believed that originality and vigour alone could give reality to a work of art, and that without them art was utterly useless, superfluous and a waste of time.” It’s tempting to read this as Pasternak’s own view.
His uncle Kolya (Nikolay) has been a big influence on Yury. Nikolay has had several books published, both in Russian and in other languages (I wonder if that means translations, or if he wrote them himself). His books were on philosophy and metaphysics, based on the idea that time and memory can address the challenge of death through Christianity. Memory and immortality are big themes of Doctor Zhivago. And those same ideas push Misha Gordon towards philosophy and theology. Pasternak frames Misha as having ‘extremist’ tendencies tied to his ‘racial origin’—a reminder that Misha is Jewish, and that this language reflects the period.
3.
Yury comes home from university to find that Anna Gromeko has had a terrible health scare. She’s really ill. She asks Yury for comfort, to tell her about his views on death and resurrection. He explains what consciousness means to him:
‘You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life.—Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on it is called your memory? This will be you—the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.
‘And now one last point. There is nothing to worry about. There is no death. Death is not our department.’
It’s really quite something and gets to the heart of the novel. It’s what my wife always spoke of whenever I mentioned Doctor Zhivago, the idea that we never die, that we live on in the memories of those who love us. It’s got me tearing up, and that’s what got to her as well, thirty-odd years ago when she studied it. It’s the only Russian novel she’s ever really enjoyed. This is why. It’s a message we can take with us for comfort.
4.
Anna’s health improves. She reminisces with Yury and Tonya about her childhood in the Urals. Yury and Tonya take delivery of a new suit and dress to wear at the Sventitskys’ party on the 27th. Anna asks to speak to Yury in private, but he knows what it’s about—he’s seen the letter. Anna and Uncle Kolya both think that Yury should not have refused his inheritance. Yury explains that there’s really nothing to claim but a muddle of debts. There are other claimants, including one Yevgraf, the son of Princess Stolbunova-Enritsi. Yevgraf is, therefore, Yury’s younger half-brother, and it’s a name to keep in mind for later. Mind it—Yevgraf.
Anna tells of a man from the Urals named Bacchus. He was a blacksmith and was hurt in a fight so that his insides collapsed. He fixed himself by fashioning himself a set of ‘iron guts’. Keep this in mind!
Anna has a coughing fit and makes Yury and Tonya agree to marry if she should die.
‘Get married. There now, I’ve betrothed you,’ she added and began to cry.
5.
We’re whisked back to 1906. Lara’s still at school and is being driven to despair by her ‘insanely contradictory’ affair with Komarovsky. It was ‘as inexplicable as black magic.’ Komarovsky displays the classic manipulative, narcissistic behaviour of an abuser. The summer holidays are looming, during which time not even school will give Lara any respite from Komarovsky. She reaches a sudden decision that was to change her life. She asks her friend, Nadya Kologrivova, if she knows of any employment opportunities out of town. It turns out that Nadya’s parents are looking for a governess for their daughter, Lipa.
6.
Lara spends three years at the Kologrivovs’, safe from Komarovsky. Her brother, Rodya, comes to see her and tells her that he’s gambled away the money that was entrusted to him to buy a present for the head of the Academy. He’d gone to Komarovsky, who’d told him that he would help on the condition that Lara return to him. Lara’s angry at her brother, but promises him the money in exchange for his revolver. She gets the money not from Komarovsky, but from Kologrivov.
7.
During her time working as a governess for the Kologrivovs, Lara had managed to finish school and start university. She was to graduate in the spring of 1912. Lara has been sending part of her wages to Pasha Antipov’s father at the prison camp in Siberia, as well as paying part of Pasha’s rent in a new building on Kamerger Street. Pasha had taken Greek and Latin on Lara’s advice; she dreamed that they would marry after his graduation and move to the Urals.
In the summer of 1911, Lara goes with the Kologrivovs to the fictional town of Duplyanka in the Urals. It’s her habit to walk from the train station to the dacha by herself, taking in the air of the countryside.
For a moment she rediscovered the meaning of her life. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, then, out of love of life, to give birth to heirs who would do it in her place.
Now that her ward has come of age, Lara is effectively superfluous in the Kologrivov household, yet the family is happy to keep her on as they’ve become so fond of her. This makes Lara uncomfortable, and she feels she ought to run away to relieve them of the financial burden of supporting her. She also feels that she must repay the money they gave her to get her brother out of his predicament. This situation has a negative effect on her disposition and her outlook on life. She attempts to distract herself by taking part in the usual amusements she shares with the Kologrivovs: house parties, bathing and rowing, and shooting. It turns out she’s rather a good target shooter. These activities, however, do not distract her; she feels wretched.
On their return to town, Lara finds herself bickering with Pasha, and her state of mind deteriorates further still. It leads her to a decision: she will leave the Kologrivovs and return to Komarovsky for the money that would allow her to live independently. She leaves for Komarovsky’s with her brother’s revolver hidden in her muff. She intends to shoot Komarovsky if he refuses or humiliates her.
8.
Lara arrives at Komarovsky’s only to learn that he’s gone out to a party at the Sventitskys’. She heads off, but as she passes by Pasha’s building, she decides to go and unburden herself on Pasha.
9.
She calls in and finds Pasha’s dressing for a party, another example of the many coincidences in the novel. She asks Pasha to light a candle and turn off the lights. This he does, and as the candle burns on the windowsill, it melts the ice on the window, creating a peep-hole to the outside (or inside!). She tells Pasha that she’s in trouble and that they ought to marry right away. Pasha agrees—it’s what he’s always wanted. But the conversation moves on to other things.
The candle motif shows up in Pasternak’s poem, Winter Night, and connects Lara to Yury further on in the chapter.
Translating poetry is challenging in different ways. The first verse in my Hayward/Harari translation reads:
Winter Night
Snow swept over the earth,
Swept it from end to end.
The candle on the table burned,
The candle burned.
Like swarms of summer midges
Drawn to the flame
The snowflakes
Flocked to the window.Take a look at the various opening lines of these twelve English translations:
For every decision a literary translator of prose has to make, it increases tenfold when translating poetry.
10.
Yury has an almost specialist knowledge of ophthalmology, ‘almost in keeping with his creative gifts and his interest in the relation between imagery in art and the logical structure of ideas.’ Interesting.
Yury and Tonya are on their way to the party. Yury’s thinking about the essay he’s writing and about the article he'd promised Misha Gordon on the symbolist poet Alexander Blok. Pasternak was a huge admirer of Blok. After Anna Gromeko’s instruction to Yury and Tonya to marry, they now see each other differently; there’s a nascent passion that hadn’t been there before. As they drive through Kamerger Street, Yury looks up and sees a candle burning in a window. It fires up his creativity and he feels the beginnings of a poem coming on. It’s a nice moment of coincidence, creating a connection between Yury and Lara.
11.
Yury and Tonya arrive at the Sventitskys’. The party is in full swing.
12.
The Sventitskys are delighted to see Yury and Tonya and recruit them to help out with the preparations for dinner and presents.
13.
Lara’s in the ballroom at the party. Komarovsky doesn’t pay her any attention. Another young girl comes into Komarovsky’s eyeline, and he gives her the same look he would give Lara. The young girl blushes, and Lara is beside herself with shame. ‘A new victim,’ she almost screamed. Lara dances with Koka Kornakov and, upon learning his surname, she suddenly recalls that he was the assistant public prosecutor at the Moscow Central Court and had been at the trial of the railway workers involving Tiverzin. Is Lara feeling jealous? Or is she genuinely feeling empathy towards this young girl?
14.
It’s two a.m. Tonya is dancing and eating tangerines. As she dances past Yury, she presses her handkerchief into his hand; it smells of tangerines and of Tonya. Yury feels something he’s never felt before: romantic love.
This was something new in Yura’s life, something he had never felt before, something sharp and piercing that went through his whole being from top to toe.
A shot rings out. Kornakov comes out of the ballroom and tells everyone he’s fine, it’s just a scratch. Mrs Kornakova is enraged. Yury then catches a glimpse of Lara.
Yura was dumbfounded.—This girl again! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! … How proudly beautiful she was!
Lara is in a faint. Yury checks Kornakov’s wound, but it’s merely superficial. Yury then receives a message from home: they have to go back at once.
15.
They arrive home too late. Anna has died. Yury remembers how he felt when his mother died ten years earlier, in 1901. He compares that with how he feels now, after being educated and having studied the classics and Scripture. It hits different.
Now he was afraid of nothing, neither of life nor of death; everything in the world, each thing in it, was named in his dictionary.
I’m seeing here the outlook of a man of science rather than of a poet.
16.
Yury has fallen asleep in a corner. He’s awakened by Markel’s calling him; they’re taking out the coffin and get stuck behind the big, ebony wardrobe on the landing. Markel navigates around it, and they carry the coffin out to the street.
17.
Anna’s funeral. She’s buried in the same churchyard as Yury’s mother. Yury’s struck by expansive feelings of beauty and creativity:
He realised…that art has two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.
He plans to write a poem in Anna’s memory. The narrator tells us of the details Yury will include in his poem, everyday details of that day: street incidents on the way back from the funeral, and the washing hanging in the place where he had wept as a child, and the blizzard had raged. It sounds like Pasternak himself, who wrote for the love of language.
In the BBC Omnibus programme on Pasternak, Angela Livingstone, reader in Russian Literature at the University of Essex, states:
“In a sense, Pasternak wrote about just anything that came to hand. He wrote about everything around him. He wrote about what he could see from his window, what he could see below his house, what he felt, what he was feeling at the time. He wrote about the landscape. He wrote about the mountains. He wrote about the room he was in. He wrote about simply anything. It was writing as such, writing for the joy of writing, writing for the love of language.”1
Links
I mentioned this series of historical fiction in my podcast of this post:
Catch you next week for Chapter 4!
Omnibus: Boris Pasternak, BBC World Service,·29 Jan 1990,·28 mins
