Hi everybody! Welcome to the fourth 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.
We left Lara after she’d fired her gun at Komarovsky and scratched Mr Kornakov, then collapsed in a faint. It was at the Sventitskys’ New Year party to welcome in 1912. Lara’s lying, half-conscious, on a bed at the Sventitskys’. Komarovsky is worried that his reputation will be ruined if news of his attempted murder gets out. He still feels incredibly attracted to this ‘wild, desperate girl.’
He had always known that she was different from everyone else. There had always been something unique about her.
He feels obliged to help her in some way, while staying out of her way. What could his motivation be? Love? Self-preservation? Pasternak does not reveal anything of Komarovsky’s background, so we have to take him as we find him: as a despicable man out for himself. He has already spoken to the police to ‘smooth things over’, and has decided that he will divert justice by claiming that Lara was not in her right mind when she fired the shot. He leaves the flat to visit a friend and rent a room from her for Lara.
2.
Komarovsky’s friend and now Lara’s landlady takes an instant dislike to Lara. She leaves windows open and makes a lot of noise around the flat. Lara recuperates and, as she does, she thinks of her childhood in the Urals and of her arrival in Moscow seven or eight years ago. That will make Lara twenty-three or twenty-four in this chapter. She remembers Komarovsky’s housewarming gift of a large watermelon when she and her mother arrived in Moscow. That would be back when he would stare at Lara until she blushed. (Chapter 1 of the novel).
Just as she was intimidated by expensive food and by the night life of the capital, so she was later intimidated by Komarovsky himself — this was the real explanation of everything.
Komarovsky is now making no demands on Lara, keeping his distance and doing what he can to help her. Lara is ‘delighted at his visit’. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that Pasternak is painting Komarovsky in rather a positive light in this passage. Is he not the loathsome man that we thought he was? This line seems a little odd:
As with the rest of his family, he had hardly ever exchanged with her more than a word or a glance in passing.
Does he not speak to his family? And who is his family? We haven’t learned that.
Kologrivov calls on Lara and is shocked at the state of her lodgings. He encourages her to get up and find alternative lodgings. He knows that ‘this Voit woman … is a pretty nasty piece of work.’ He suggests that she move into an apartment that belongs to an artist friend of his who’s going away for two years, and then gives her 10,000 roubles as a bonus for Lipa’s graduation. Lara tries unsuccessfully to refuse. She ends up taking rooms that Kologrivov recommended.
3.
Pasha is worried about Lara. He has not been permitted to see her while she’s recovering, and he’s more than a little curious that the man she’d tried to kill was now looking after her and, more than that, shielding her from the consequences of her actions. When she recovers and calls for Pasha, she tells him that she’s a ‘bad woman’ and that he should try to forget her. Pasha doesn’t go along with this and, instead, attempts to hurry along their marriage. Pasternak makes Pasha seem a little needy and insecure here. The wedding goes ahead on Whit Monday, after Lara postponed it more than once. The postponements had allowed them both time to take their exams and graduate. We’re not told in which subjects they graduate, but we know they both become teachers in Yuryatin before Lara retrains as a nurse.
Russian wedding tradition
At their wedding, Hayward/Harari write:
The guests shouted: ‘It’s bitter!’ And others responded unanimously from the end of the room: ‘Make it sweet!’ and the bride and bridegroom grinned shyly and kissed.
The Russian would be Gor’ko! (Горько!). The wedding couple would ‘make it sweet’ by kissing. I’ve never seen it at a wedding in real life, but it’s portrayed in lots of movies.
There’s another scene where a woman throws a handful of silver coins at Lara’s feet as an omen of prosperity. The same woman also instructs Lara not to make a cross with her bare fingers, but to cover them with her veil or a lace frill while the wedding crown is being held over her head, and to hold her candle higher than her husband’s in order to gain authority over the marriage. She tries to sacrifice herself and hold the candle lower, but Pasha lowers his candle further still.
On their wedding night, Pasha and Lara talk, and the more Pasha learns about Lara, the more his spirits sink.
‘His wounded imagination could not keep up with her revelations.’
It changes him so much that he’s astonished to wake up the next day and still be Pasha Antipov. You’d think they might have got to know each other before getting married, wouldn’t you? I wonder what Pasternak was modelling this on. His own first wedding, perhaps?
4.
Soon after their wedding, they head to the Urals, where both Pasha and Lara have been offered jobs. Their friends throw them a farewell party and Komarovsky attends. He asks for permission to write to them and visit, as he can’t bear to be parted, but Lara denies him.
The Antipovs catch their train and they’re away.
5.
Autumn 1916
Yury Zhivago is outside the maternity ward of a Moscow hospital. He’s now qualified as a doctor. Tonya, his wife, has just gone into labour. The Moscow hospitals are full following the battle of Lutsk, and Yury is overworked. The battle of Lutsk was on 4 June 1916 and marked the opening of the Brusilov Offensive. This was one of the largest offensives in world history, held from June to September 1916 on the Eastern Front in Galicia (present-day northwestern Ukraine), and was a huge success for the Allies over the Central Powers.
At the hospital, there’s a scene where the consultant gynaecologist quotes Hamlet: ‘whenever he was asked a question, replied by shrugging his shoulders and rolling up his eyes as much to say that, whatever the advances of science, there were “more things in heaven and earth, Horatio …”’. Pasternak translated Hamlet in 1939 and it left a big mark on him. Twelve versions of the translation were found among his papers.
It’s worth pointing out that the first of Yury’s poems at the end of the book is titled Hamlet. Edith W. Clowes says the following:1
So the gynaecologist’s quoting Hamlet isn't just a casual literary nod; it's part of a deeper pattern Pasternak is building throughout the novel, in which Yury is consciously cast in the Hamlet mould: the intellectual, paralysed by circumstance, watching the world collapse around him.
Tonya has a troublesome birth, but a nurse tells Yury that mother and son are fine. Both are out of danger. Yury visits a nearby patient while waiting to be allowed in to see his wife and child. On his return to the hospital, the gynaecologist greets him and denies him entry. He’d been given the wrong information. Tonya’s not doing well and the baby is still being delivered. Yury’s allowed to peep through the door:
To Yury she seemed like a barque lying at rest in the middle of a harbour after putting in and being unloaded, a barque which plied an unknown country and the continent of life across the waters of death with a cargo of new immigrant souls. One such soul had just been landed, and the ship now lay at anchor, resting in the lightness of her empty flanks.
In her essay Characterisation in Doctor Zhivago, Edith W. Clowes states that Yury is distant from Tonya and that we, as readers, are kept distant from her, too.
She [Tonya] is almost always kept out of sight, her actions, such as they are, rarely occupy center stage, and her feelings are generally reported indirectly. […] Yury always feels spiritually alone and apart from his wife.2
Clowes then goes on to quote the ‘barque’ scene cited above as evidence. It’s certainly not a scene that reminds me of how I felt when our first child was born!
Clowes notes that:
Doctor Zhivago is more than a simple love story: in the course of its many romances fundamental truths about the very nature of love are explored.
So Pasternak may not be showing Yury as feeling removed from the birth of his child so much as exploring how Yury loves in a more poetic, impersonal way.
6.
Lara and Pasha have arrived at Yuryatin in the Urals. We move forward four years, to 1916. They’ve had a daughter, Katya, who is now three. Lara is teaching at the girls’ high school and feels as happy as a clam to be back in her hometown. Pasha, on the other hand, is miserable. He dislikes this provincial backwater, considering the locals to be ‘ignorant savages’. Harsh. He spends his time reading and studying, and he feels stifled. Pasternak says here that Pasha’s relations with Lara were good, but he’s afraid of upsetting her and it’s clear that they’re not being open and honest with each other. Maybe that’s all coming from Pasha through a sense of inferiority:
He would not criticise her for fear that she might take some quite innocent word of his for a reproach—a hint, perhaps, that her blood was bluer than his, or that she had once belonged to someone else.
Surely he would have known if she’d had an ex? And bluer blood? She’s from a provincial town in the Urals. How can her blood be bluer?
They have a dinner party with some teachers from their school, after which Pasha can’t sleep. He gets up and goes out into the cold winter’s night, a scene which the same character will see again later in the novel. He thinks through his relationship with Lara and comes to the conclusion that it’s one-sided, and he needs to do something. A passing army train helps him to reach his decision: he’s going to the front.
7.
Lara begs Pasha to stay and can’t understand why he’s volunteering after he’d made fun of Lara’s brother, Rodya, for doing that very thing. She soon realises why he’s made his decision: ‘Pasha misunderstood her attitude to him.’ He’s got her all wrong, showing that, as my wife loves to tell me, ‘communication is key’. (There are all sorts of in-jokes there that I don’t need to go into, God bless her!) When Lara realises, she demurs and doesn’t try to fix it.
She had had the greatest defeat of her life. Her best and brightest hopes were in ruins.
He goes off to train and ends up at the front, taking part in the Brusilov Offensive. This is an example of how Pasternak allows history to pass by almost unnoticed. The Brusilov Offensive was a huge military victory for Russia, and it gets barely a mention here, other than as a reason why Pasha might not have managed to write home.
At this time, Lara is helping as an auxiliary nurse at the local hospital. She then studies to qualify as a nurse and, leaving Katya behind with the Kologrivov’s in Moscow, gets work on the hospital train that will be going through the village where she last heard from Pasha. Again with the trains.
8.
Misha Gordon has travelled on the Red Cross train to Divisional HQ to visit Yury, who is now working in a field hospital about fifty miles away. Misha travels in a cart, passing ruined villages and hearing distant artillery fire, across a war-torn landscape. He reaches the right location the next day and ends up staying for over a week.
9.
The Russians have made breakthroughs in the enemy lines, but Pasha has been taken prisoner. His friend, Galiullin, thought that Pasha had been killed by a shell while attacking enemy positions. Remember Galiullin, the young apprentice at the railway yard, whom old Khudoleyev was beating? He’s now the equivalent of a second lieutenant (podporuchik / подпоручик), and Pasha is an ensign (praporshchik / прапорщик). Ensign was the first of the junior officer ranks in the Imperial Russian Army, so Galiullin is one rank above Pasha. The Hayward/Harari translation has them the wrong way round, with Pasha one rank higher. P&V have them in the correct order, but each one rank higher than they actually are: second lieutenant and lieutenant.
Misha Gordon leaves, believing Pasha to have been killed. Galiullin is given Pasha’s belongings to return to the family when he can.
We learn that Khudoleyev had inadvertently played a part in Galiullin’s promotion. Khudoleyev had shown up as a recruit under Galiullin’s command, whereupon Galiullin was hellbent on revenge for how Khudoleyev had treated him as an apprentice. This was untenable, and so Galiullin requested a transfer to the front. He distinguished himself in his first engagement with the enemy and received a promotion. We learn that Galiullin had met Lara back in 1905, and, of course, he knew Pasha from then, too. On meeting at the front, Galiullin had noticed a big change in Pasha. He was no longer the ‘shy, mischievous and girlish child, but an arrogant and erudite hypochondriac.’ Galiullin soon learns that Lara is working as a nurse at the front, but doesn’t know where to write to her to inform her of Pasha’s death.
10.
Yury and Misha are enjoying a meal together in a Galician peasant’s cottage. They spend the next few days together, discussing the horrors of war. Wounded men are being carted to the hospital, including one with a particularly gruesome wound, which turns out to be fatal. Lara happens to be standing at the entrance as the wounded man dies, as are Yury and Misha. The soldier who died was Private Gimazetdin Galiullin. He died while his son, Lieutenant Galiullin, was also a witness to his father’s death. What a massive coincidence that all these people should be together in one place at such a time as this.
Once again, coincidence shows up as an example of the lyric vs the epic, much like in a play, when the plot is contrived in a way that brings the characters together on stage, or like melodies in a symphony, as Boris Gasparov discusses in his essay on temporal counterpoint:
Let us ask ourselves: in what way can writing "symphonies" be construed as a means to the ultimate end of overcoming death articulated by Vedenyapin? One of the salient features of music in general […] is its ability to deal simultaneously with several melodic lines whose development differs in time. Interrelations between different voices, that had started at different points of the composition and progressed with different speed, create infinite possibilities for variation, with different melodic lines sometimes diverging far from one another, and sometimes merging into one.3
I find this argument compelling and will no doubt come back to this idea. It goes against what Pasternak claimed he was doing: writing an epic. He claimed in a letter in 1952 that “I need to build a house for which all this poorly written verse can be the window frames”.
Intentions of writing a novel that would sum up his entire creative career, a novel that would show "all of life" are repeated throughout Pasternak's correspondence and documented oral conversations from the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. One example: on July 9, 1952, Pasternak wrote to V. T. Shalamov about his need to make the transition from what he dismissively called “writing verse” to a new, more significant and “real” job: “from all these innumerable failures and things said in the wrong words [nedomolvka] ... I must forge ahead and step across to a world that will give me a unifying idea for all these trivial attempts; I need to do something in life; I need to write a story about life that brings out something new about life, a discovery or a conquest; I need to build a house for which all this poorly written verse can be the window frames.”4
11.
Yury and Misha witness a Cossack’s toying with an old Jew for entertainment and they put a stop to it. Yury makes his sympathies towards the Jews known, but Misha remains silent.
12.
Yury tells Misha how he saw the Tsar during his first spring in the army. He’d come to inspect the unit of which he was an honorary Colonel. Yury was struck by how weak he’d seemed, how ordinary. He made no great speeches about ‘The people, my people.’ And now there are journalists writing bogus ‘linguistic graphomania’ or ‘sketches and scenes’, as well as scepticism and misanthropy. It’s a fascinating scene that shows Yury as a writer, a poet and an artist. Misha responds by finally commenting on the Jewish question, referring back to the Cossack’s toying with the old Jew, and to what he and Yury were both taught by Yury’s uncle Nikolay. It’s an interesting monologue about the Kingdom of God and how Misha sees the gospels.
It’s perhaps reiterating the notion of Tolstoyism here. In Chapter 1, we learned that “‘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…” This was in reference to Uncle Nikolay’s being described as a ‘Tolstoyan and a revolutionary idealist.’ So when Misha talks here of the Kingdom of God, he’s drawing on this tradition: the idea that Christianity is something to be lived rather than institutionalised, a personal code of non-violence. Yury feels this too, which we see when he talks of how he finds it difficult to accept ‘the ruthless logic of mutual extermination.’
13.
It’s time for the unit to move on. Misha Gordon’s linen hasn’t been washed yet. Isn’t that always the way? That’s how it is in the army—you just get used to a place, and then it’s time to move on. The Germans break through, and the village is now under fire. They have to evacuate. Yury and Misha split up, and Yury is blown off his feet by an exploding shell.
14.
Yury recovers. It’s now the end of February 1917. Yury learns that a new nurse has joined the hospital staff. Any guesses as to who it might be? Yury is reading mail from Tonya when Lara steps into the ward. Galiullin is recovering opposite Yury. Both men recognise Lara, but neither knows that the other knows her. Lara takes Galiullin’s pulse, after which he tells her that he knew Pasha and has his belongings for her. She’s surprised and asks for confirmation of what she’s heard, that Pasha had been killed in action. Galiullin chooses to lie and tells her instead that Pasha was captured. Only we, the readers, know what actually happened. Lara doesn’t believe him.
Lara then approaches Yury. Remember that he’d seen her, but had never spoken to her, so it’s not surprising that she doesn’t recognise him. He wants to tell her they’ve met before, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he rather brusquely tells her that he’s a doctor and that he’ll look after himself. Lara wonders at his rudeness, thinking of him as ‘intelligent in the best sense of the word, alive and with an attractive mind’. However, she realises now that Pasha is dead, she has no reason to remain and should instead make plans to return to Moscow, collect Katya and go home to live her life in Yuryatin. She feels that, now that the war is lost, nothing is sacred.
Everything had changed suddenly—the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, who to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself.
Yury learns that Misha Gordon and Nicky Dudorov had published his book without permission. Is this the first time we’ve learned that Yury has written a book? I think it is.
There’s an intended connection here between the outbreak of the Revolution and the outbreak of this young poet’s first publication at the same time. Pasternak tells us that Yury’s work was ‘praised and regarded as showing great literary promise.’ Carol J. Avins writes:
Will revolutionary upheaval […] enrich his art? The connection has more than a single significance: after all, the impact of the 1917 revolutions on Zhivago’s life is in large measure the subject of the entire novel.5
Lara’s annoyed at herself for not having asked Galiullin who he was. She asks him the next day, whereupon he explains that he was at the Tiverzins at 38 Brest Street, and Lara’s beside herself in surprise.
The chapter ends with the outbreak of the Revolution. It gets a single sentence and, as with the Brusilov Offensive, passes almost unnoticed. This shows, once again, the lyric vs epic argument I set out above and in my Chapter 1 analysis. In epic novels, War and Peace being perhaps the clearest example, history shapes the characters. In this novel, the characters live their lives almost despite history. Pasha joins the war effort not out of a feeling of patriotism, but because he’s misunderstood his relationship with Lara. And Lara, for her part, becomes a nurse to find her husband. For them, the big moments of history pass like the weather.
Catch you next week for Chapter 5!
Edith W. Clowes, ‘Doctor Zhivago in the Post-Soviet Era: A Re-Introduction’, in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. Edith W. Clowes (Northwestern University Press), p. 17.
Clowes, ‘Characterization in Doctor Zhivago: Lara and Tonya’, pp. 65–66.
Boris Gasparov, “Temporal Counterpoint as a Principle of Formation,” in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. Edith W. Clowes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 91–92.
“‘Razgovory o samom glavnom’: Perepiska B. L. Pasternaka i V T. Shalamova,” Iunost' 10 (1988), 55.
Carol J. Avins, ‘Yury Zhivago’s Readers: Literary Reception in Pasternak’s Novel and in His Time’, in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. Edith W. Clowes (Northwestern University Press), p. 53.
