Welcome to the fifth week of my sixteen-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
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1.
We ended the previous chapter with the outbreak of the Revolution. This is the February Revolution that led to Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication in March and the formation of a Provisional Government. Headed by Prince George Lvov, the Provisional Government was a coalition of non-Communist liberal and socialist parties. Prince Lvov was a member of the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets (from the party’s initials, pronounced in Russian as KaDe). Lvov was succeeded as head of the Provisional Government in July 1917 by the Socialist Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky. It was this Provisional Government that was overthrown by the Bolshevik coup of October 1917.
True to form, Pasternak now leaves this moment of history alone and we’re straight back into the narrative at the front.
The hospital is evacuated to the fictional town of Melyuzeyevo, close to the front. Yury, Lara and Galiullin get involved in local admin, but they are all itching to get back to their jobs.
2.
The town was very small. At the end of almost every street you could see the bleak steppe and the dark sky, the vast countryside glowering with revolution and war.
Yury writes to Tonya and mentions Lara in passing, given that they both knew her from the old days. He writes that he has made several attempts to go home, but that the trains are either not running or they are full. All three of the main characters here have decided to make the journey home.
Tonya replies by return of post, writing that Yury should forget about going home and instead follow Lara to the Urals. Tonya seems to have a bit of an inferiority complex, much the same way Pasha does with Lara. Yury replies with an apology if he has made Tonya feel that way and declares his love for her:
How is it that you don’t know—or don’t feel deeply enough—that if it were not for you, if it were not for my constant, faithful thoughts of you and of our home, I would never have survived these two terrible, devastating years of war?
3.
The village of Zabushino, to the east of Melyuzeyevo, was declared an independent republic by a local miller named Blazheiko and a group of deserters from the front. They reject the Provisional Government that was in place in Russia between the February and October 1917 revolutions. Pasternak is illustrating the chaos that followed the collapse of the monarchy—the Tsar abdicated in March 1917. Zabushino is a stand-in for some actual self-governing regions that arose during this time, for example, the Kronstadt Commune (1917-21) and the Makhnovist Territory (Ukraine, 1918-21). Those of you who read The White Guard with me earlier this year will have seen the city of Kiev (now Kyiv) change hands several times during this tumultuous period. The ‘republic’ is overthrown by loyalist troops after two weeks, and the deserters retreat into the forests.
My favourite book so far on the Revolutions of 1917 is A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes. In this passage, he quotes a contemporary Russian source that illustrates the chaos of the time:
The revolution of 1917 should really be conceived of as a general crisis of authority. There was a rejection of not just the state but of all figures of authority: judges, policemen, Civil Servants, army and navy officers, priests, teachers, employers, foremen, landowners, village elders, patriarchal fathers and husbands. It was often said at the time — and historians have emphasized this — that only the Soviet had any real authority. Guchkov wrote to Alexeev on 9 March:
The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The latter controls the most essential levers of power, insofar as the troops, the railways, and the postal and telegraph services are in its hands. One can assert bluntly that the Provisional Government exists only as long as it is allowed to do so by the Soviet.1
4.
The hospital where Yury works was a large house donated by a local countess. The owner is now under arrest in Petersburg. Only two of the owner’s housemaids are still working in the building: Ustinya, the head cook, and Mademoiselle Fleury, the governess. Keep Mme Fleury in mind here, as she pops up again later. She gives Lara and Yury sly winks whenever she sees them together, intimating that they ‘were bound to be attracted to each other.’
Mademoiselle clung to her illusions and would not be parted from them at any price.
The revolutionary council of Melyuzeyevo is concerned about the influence of the anarchists in Zabushino and embarks on an enlightenment campaign to counteract it. This takes the form of evening activities in the main square, at which Ustinya would often be heard speaking about local superstitions.
5.
Yury is seeking the stamps and permissions that he needs to travel home. He needs a signature from the town major, or, according to P&V’s translation, the commandant (Russian: комендант), known by the nickname, ‘the district’ (Russian: уездный). The Hayward/Harari translation misses this bit out for whatever reason. There’s a brief mention here of the restoration of the recently abolished death penalty as a means of maintaining order and discipline. One of the first acts of the Provisional Government was to abolish the death penalty. It was reinstated in July 1917 owing to mass desertions during the war with Germany. It’s to this that Pasternak is referring here. The new commissar is in the room with the town major, a young boy, ‘just out of the schoolroom and burning like a candle with the flame of his ideals.’ Everyone is concerned about the deserters in the forests at Biryuchi. The town major states that there’s a Cossack regiment near the Biryuchi railway station who are loyal to the Reds and could be used to put down the rebels, but Commissar Gintz (or Gents—the narrator isn’t sure) vehemently disagrees. He seems idealistic and suggests getting to know the rebels instead:
They may be rebels, gentlemen, they may even be deserters, but remember, they are the people. And the people are like children, you have to know them, know their psychology. […] I’ll go and have a heart-to-heart talk with them and you’ll see, they’ll go back to the positions they have deserted as good as gold.
I fear the worst for the young commissar.
Yury sneaks off to go and have a talk with Lara and apologise to her if she feels that he’s been leading her on.
6.
Lara has returned from the country, where she was helping to set up local councils in the villages. Yury goes to knock on Lara’s door, but then thinks that he ought not to after all; she’ll be tired after her trip. Instead, he leans out the window, and we’re treated to a wonderful description of the sights, sounds and smells of the summer’s night. The moon rises crimson, ‘the colour of the new brick mill in Zabushino, then it turned yellow like the water-tower at Biryuchi.’ Yury goes out to listen to the speeches in the square.
7.
Instead of listening to the speeches, Yury is so ‘overcome by the splendour of what he saw that he sat down on the bench outside the fire station and looked instead of listening.’ He soon overhears a familiar voice: it’s Commissar Gintz making the same speech as he’d made in the town major’s office. He’s assuring the crowd that the uprising in Zabushino was caused by Bolshevik agitation. Remember that the Bolshevik coup of October has yet to happen. Ustinya approaches the speakers’ crate and counters Gintz’s speech as if at the despatch box. She talks of humanity, rather than Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, then goes on to talk of pillars of salt and cries of ‘Balaam, Balaam!’ The Bolsheviks (‘Majority’) and Mensheviks (‘Minority’) were political groups that emerged after the schism in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903. The Mensheviks were more moderate.
Yury goes to bed.
8.
Yury sees Lara the following evening. She’s doing the laundry. Lara wonders why Yury didn’t knock last night. Mme Fleury told her about Yury’s asking for her room. They have a long conversation about Lara’s trip to the villages and Yury relates the story of the commissar’s idealism. Yury then finally gets to what he wanted to talk about the night before, only he’s feeling frustrated about the whole thing.
Why the hell can’t a grown-up man talk to a grown-up woman without being suspected of some ulterior motive! Damn all motives—ulterior or otherwise.
Yury feels overwhelmed by the enormity of what’s happening around them. He opens up to Lara and tells her how he really feels. It’s a moving scene, at the height of which Lara burns the blouse she’s ironing. She asks Yury to calm down before continuing his monologue. It proves to be their last conversation before Lara leaves the following day.
What are we to make of this discourse? Edith W. Clowes has an interesting idea that Yury and Lara’s dialogue here illustrates how the novel is more like an ocean than a river in terms of its themes.
Many Russian novels are structured like rivers: their plots flow in one direction — toward victory, say, as in War and Peace, or toward suicide, as in Anna Karenina. But Doctor Zhivago is more like an ocean. The very evident climaxes that do occur are not linear. Rather, they are really moments of revelation that happen when out of this “mess and chaos” one finds a pattern, a series of images, and an “immediate perception” that leads to the effect of transcendence, of self-overcoming (Danow, “Epiphany,” 895). All these observations lead us to view the “story” of Doctor Zhivago as a cognitive process, open only to separate lichnosti in dialogue with one another, of arriving at insight about one’s existence.2
Yury and Lara believe they are about to part forever, which may explain why Yury felt able to open up to Lara. Is Yury feeling that the historical events going on around them eclipse the banality of the lives of two individuals? I don’t think so, because of the description Pasternak gives us of how the lives of individuals are the tributaries of the bigger events:
The revolution broke out willy-nilly, like a breath that's been held too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions—his own personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions are flowing into it—the sea of life, of life in its own right.
In his essay on temporal counterpoint, Boris Gasparov presents this scene as the third of seven episodes that serve as examples of contrapuntal interweaving:
Episode 3 (5:8-9). It is the eve of Lara's return home from the front. Her final conversation with Zhivago is marked by a contrast between surface simplicity, indeed, triviality, and hidden tension. A pedestrian detail serves as the background for the conversation: Lara is ironing laundry, steam is rising from the iron, and at the most dramatic point in the conversation the smell of something burning reaches them - she has forgotten about the iron and “burned a hole in a blouse.” This detail stands out in all its unpleasant and possibly excessive banality. Annoyed, Lara sets the iron down on the stand “with a thump,” thus marking with this gesture her resolution to break off the conversation and part as they believe, forever.3
9.
The night before Yury leaves for home, there’s a terrible storm. Mademoiselle Fleury is awakened by a knocking at the door. She’s annoyed that no one is answering. She thinks of Galiullin and then remembers that they’d sent him off disguised as a civilian after ‘that horrible lynching at Biryuchi station when they killed Commissar Gintz’ — Spoilers!
Mme Fleury meets Yury on the landing. He’s been awakened by the knocking too and is going to see who it might be. It turns out to be a broken shutter blowing in the wind.
In his essay on temporal counterpoint, Boris Gasparov points out that this knocking mirrors the knocking that Yury heard in the opening scene of the novel and that, on both occasions, it’s a portent of death.
Clearly the knock is a mystical gesture signaling death. It should also be noted that the knock of an unseen traveler typically represents a visit by the angel of death. The answer to the question as whom [sic] of the two residents of this house the angel of death was visiting will be given, to protagonist and reader alike, at the end of the novel when Zhivago and Fleury again meet at the “Hippodrome of Life.”4
The earlier scene is when Yury is awakened by a knocking at the window during a snowstorm after his mother’s funeral. (1:2).
10.
We return to the aforementioned incident at Biryuchi station. Blame may be apportioned to the telegraphist, Kolya Frolenko. Galiullin telephones Kolya at the station and asks him to pass on a message to Commissar Gintz, to ask Gintz to wait for him. Kolya is too busy dealing with an approaching train filled with Cossacks and does not pass on the message. He also deliberately delays the train for reasons that are not made clear. The train arrives anyway, and Kolya makes his displeasure plain by shaking his fist at the train driver.
The driver not only understood him but managed to convey by a shrug of the shoulders and a nod in the direction of the train: ‘What am I to do? I’d like to see what you’d have done in my place. He’s the boss.’—‘You’re a filthy brute, all the same,’ Kolya replied by gestures.
Are we to assume, then, that Kolya sympathises with the rebels?
The Cossacks alight from the train, ride off into the woods and surround the rebels. Commissar Gintz leaps onto a pile of timber in the middle of the ring of Cossacks and addresses the rebels with patriotic fervour. The rebels are not impressed—they’ve heard it all before. Gintz, however, with the hubris of youth and his rank, carries on with his speech, ‘disregarding their rising murmurs.’ Gintz believes that he’s under the protection of the Cossacks; however, his speech also begins to rankle with them, and they slowly sheath their swords, dismount from their horses, and join the deserters. A concerned Cossack officer advises Gintz to leave quickly while he still can, but Gintz feels that running would be beneath his dignity, so he walks away calmly. He then has another moment of patriotic fervour and, instead of taking shelter in the station, he climbs onto a water butt to deliver another speech. He gets no further than a few words when the lid of the water butt overturns and he falls in. The men burst out laughing and one of them shoots Gintz dead. The others then plunge their bayonets into the dead man and it’s over. A gruesome scene indeed, and one that I’m curious about. It shows the breakdown of order and the ensuing chaos between the February and October revolutions.
Gintz was a commissar, but who was in charge? He would have been appointed by the Provisional Government and, politically, he’d have been a liberal. He believed he could appeal to the deserters' hearts and have them rejoin the fight against the Germans. He believed in the February Revolution and saw the way forward for Russia as a liberal democracy, united against the enemy. But he was young and naive; the fighting men had seen horrors and didn’t take well to these young upstarts telling them how things were going to be. In a sense, Gintz represents the failure of the February Revolution, especially since, as we know from the previous chapter, this scene takes place in summer, and it was in July that the February Revolution really began to fall apart, in the so-called July Days.
In a manner underestimated by all historians, the events of 4 July were characterized by almost total confusion. The Bolshevik leaders made everything up as they went along.5
11.
Mademoiselle Fleury calls Kolya to arrange a seat for Yury on the train to Moscow. Kolya’s busy dealing with the situation we’ve just discussed.
12.
Yury heads to the station. People have been camped outside for months, trying to get on a train without any luck. The station master expresses some sympathy for the commissar's pointless death. He promises Yury a seat on the local train, but warns him to keep quiet about it, or there’ll be chaos.
13.
Even so, there is chaos as soon as the train appears. Yury somehow manages to board. The train is packed as they head to Sukhinichi, where Yury is to disembark for the Moscow train.
14.
The train for Moscow is a ‘mysterious train under special orders.’ Yury gets a seat in a second-class compartment. There’s another passenger in his compartment, which is lit by a guttering candle. The passenger has a dog with him and a rifle in a leather case: he’s been shooting somewhere. They engage in conversation, and Yury notes that the passenger speaks in a strange manner, but can’t work out why. They blow out the candle and bed down for the night. After the candle has been extinguished, Yury asks the passenger a question and gets no response.
The journey from Sukhinichi to Moscow by train today would take just under three hours. I guess trains were slower in 1917!
15.
Yury can’t sleep. His thoughts are swirling around in his head. He thinks of his life with Tonya: safe, comfortable. He has been away for two years and he’s longing for the comfort of home.
Here too were his loyalty to the revolution and his admiration for it, the revolution in the sense in which it was accepted by the middle classes and in which it had been understood by the students, followers of Blok, in 1905.
This familiar circle also contained the foretaste of new things. In it were those omens and promises which before the war, between 1912 and 1914, had appeared in Russian thought, art and life, in the destiny of Russia as a whole and in his own, Zhivago’s.
So Yury is sympathetic to the revolution. It’s nice to see Blok’s being mentioned here. I mentioned that Pasternak was a fan of Blok’s poetry in 3:10. Yury’s thoughts of returning to the comfortable old life are mixed with thoughts of the new, springing from his experiences in the war and the Revolution as it really is, not as the idealised revolution of 1905. It reminds me of the hero’s journey, in a sense, of Bilbo Baggins’ returning to the Shire after defeating Smaug, expecting to return to his old ways but unable to because he himself has been changed by his adventures. And there’s Lara, of course. He’s trying not to love her, but the heart goes where it will. Besides which, we, the readers, know something Yury doesn’t: October is coming.
16.
Yury and his travelling companion have breakfast together in their compartment as they approach Moscow. We learn that his companion is the son of reactionary parents—so against the Revolution—and that he’s deaf. Having learned where the traveller had come from, Yury deduces that he had had something to do with the independent republic of Zabushino, and he was right. It turned out to have been his travelling companion’s idea. They discuss political ideologies and Yury feels quite agitated by his interlocutor’s idealism. As they pull into Moscow, his travelling companion gives Yury a duck from his shoot to take home to his wife.
Catch you next week for Chapter 6!
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, 100th Anniversary ed. (London: The Bodley Head, 2017), 359.
Edith W. Clowes, “Doctor Zhivago in the Post-Soviet Era: A Re-Introduction,” in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. Edith W. Clowes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 16–17.
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), 104.
Gasparov, “Temporal Counterpoint,” 105.
Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 426.
