Welcome to the sixth week of my sixteen-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
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Yury’s been away at the front for around two years. The February Revolution has happened, and possibly the upheaval of the July Days, too—Pasternak doesn’t give us dates. The July Days were a series of anti-war demonstrations by soldiers, sailors and workers in Petrograd (renamed from St Petersburg in 1914 because -burg sounded too German), demanding that power pass from the Provisional Government to the Soviets.
1.
Yury travels through Moscow. People are hanging around the marketplace out of habit: there’s nothing to buy. And people are hawking their possessions, from ball gowns to dirty chunks of sugar. Yury arrives at his house and rings the bell. Tonya answers. They embrace and Tonya immediately apologises for the letter she sent:
‘I wrote you a lot of silly nonsense, forgive me. But we’ll talk about that later.’
Yury asks after ‘father’, Tonya’s father, Alexander Gromeko.
‘Didn’t anyone write to you?—He’s at the borough council from morning till night, he’s the chairman.
It’s one of those Pasternak ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moments.
What exactly was the borough council? (district duma in P&V). Alexander II set up local councils known as zemstvos in the countryside (1864) and dumas in the cities (1870). The dumas became centres for the middle classes, the bourgeois liberal intelligentsia: doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc., people just like the Gromekos. After February, the local dumas were basically extensions of the Provisional Government, itself a liberal institution.
The 1905 Revolutions gave rise to the creation of soviets, as I discussed in my chapter two analysis. By 1917, these had grown as political bodies for the revolutionary workers. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (the ‘Petrograd Soviet’) was formed during the February Revolution of 1917 and was dominated by moderate socialists, mainly the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (the SRs). The Bolsheviks only gained control of it shortly before the October Revolution. So the dual-power situation in the country was between the Provisional Government (liberal) and the Soviets (socialist).
Alexander Gromeko was chairman of the Moscow Duma, which was trying to maintain order while the Provisional Government’s authority was collapsing. In the two years that Yury has been at the front, the country has vastly changed, but Yury, it seems, has not—at least politically anyway.
The Gromekos’ servant, Markel, greets Yury and, in his welcoming speech, quips about Moscow:
Such a mess-up, such a bedlam, the devil couldn’t sort it out—streets dirty, roofs leaking, bellies empty as in Lent—and all this “without annexations or contributions”.
“Annexations and contributions”, or “annexations and indemnities”, as I’ve seen elsewhere, was a slogan that Lenin included in the ‘Decree of Peace’, adopted at the Second Congress of Soviets immediately following the October Revolution. It meant that the Bolsheviks sought to withdraw from the war immediately, without annexing any territory or paying any indemnities (Russian: контрибуции) for war reparations. It was a popular idea and helped the Bolsheviks consolidate power. The Decree of Peace led to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 1918, which brought Russia out of the war, but it was certainly not on the lines of ‘without annexations or contributions’—it ended up costing Russia dearly.
2.
Tonya explains to Yury that Markel is brighter than he looks and he’s ‘sharpening his knife—only he hasn’t quite decided yet who it’s for’. She tells Yury that they’ve let out the bottom floor of their apartment to the Agricultural Academy, and that ‘we don’t say rooms anymore, it’s called living space nowadays.’ She might be saying that tongue-in-cheek, but it shows how society is changing, including the language. Private property is gone to be replaced by allocated living space.
Yury expresses his approval, stating that the hospital he’d been working in was too large for one family:
there really was something unhealthy in the way rich people used to live. Masses of superfluous things. Too much furniture, too much room, too much refinement, too much self-expression. I’m very glad we’re using fewer rooms. We should give up still more.
I must admit that I’m surprised to read that coming out of Yury’s mouth. This next line sounds much more like Yury:
Just now, I was looking out of the train window—I thought, what is there in the whole world worth more than a peaceful family life and work? The rest isn’t in our hands.
And then there’s this autobiographical line that reminds us that Pasternak stayed in Russia while his family got out:
A grown-up man is supposed to grit his teeth and share in whatever’s coming to his country.
That Pasternak did, and not without cost. He did manage six hours in Berlin on his way to the Paris congress in June 1935, where he saw his sister Josephine for the last time — but his parents were in Munich, and he never saw them again after 1923.1
Tonya tells Yury that his uncle Kolya is back from Switzerland. Apparently, he’s ‘gone Bolshevik’. He and Alexander Gromeko have been having arguments.
Tonya and Yury agree on which rooms they’re going to use to get through the winter and to have a housewarming to share the duck that Yury got from Pogorevshikh on the train.
3.
Yury is reunited with his son, Sasha. Yury was called up just after Sasha was born, so it’s a delight for him to see Sasha again. It’s not reciprocated. Sasha doesn’t know his father and is frightened of him.
4.
The duck party is not a success. It ends up being rather dull.
His friends had become strangely dim and colourless. Not one of them had kept his own outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid in his memory. He must have over-estimated them in the past.
Misha Gordon tries to be happy and fun, when his previous character was somewhat more melancholic and serious. Nicky Dudorov has gone the other way, from unstable and erratic to earnest. There’s an interesting tidbit about Nicky, that, despite being one of Yury’s closest friends at school, he had never used the informal ty form when addressing him. I find that rather strange. He asks Yury about a couple of Mayakovsky poems. Mayakovsky was fully on board with the Revolution and threw himself into it. In A People’s Tragedy, Orlando Figes tells us ‘The Futurist poets, for example, such as Mayakovsky, practically threw themselves at the feet of the Bolsheviks, seeing them as an ally of their own struggle against ‘bourgeois art’.’2 Mayakovsky’s revolutionary fervour was not to last; it ate him up from the inside, and he committed suicide in 1930.
The biggest attraction of the evening is Uncle Kolya. He’s living in a hotel, having secured a room through his local connections. Yury remembers him fondly as ‘the idol of his childhood, the teacher who had dominated his mind as a boy.’
They meet, not as uncle and nephew, but as two artists.
Uncle Kolya, however, is quite different when in others’ company. He is indeed pro-Bolshevik, and he speaks often of two Socialist Revolutionaries who shared his views. Remember that the Soviets in 1917 were initially dominated not by the Bolsheviks but by moderate socialists — chiefly the Mensheviks and SRs.
The Socialist Revolutionary Party was arguably more popular than the Bolsheviks, certainly among the peasantry. Less rigidly Marxist than Lenin’s party, the SRs emerged from the older populist tradition and believed that the peasantry, rather than the industrial proletariat, would be the driving force of revolution in Russia. By late 1917, divisions were already emerging within the party between moderates who supported cooperation with the Provisional Government and more radical elements who would later align themselves with the Bolsheviks after October.
Uncle Kolya and Alexander Gromeko have a political debate.
Shura Schlesinger arrives and tells Yury that she’s ‘read it, it’s wonderful, I didn’t understand a word but it’s full of talent, you can tell at once.’ She must be referring to the book of Yury’s poetry that Nicky and Misha had published without asking. If you’d forgotten who this minor character was (I had!), she was Anna Gromeko’s bosom friend and confidante and first appeared in 2:20. Yury gives a rousing, revolutionary speech:
The sea of blood will rise until it reaches every one of us and submerges all who stayed out of the war. The revolution is this flood […] in these five or ten years, we have experienced more than other people do in a century […] The new order of things will be all round us and as familiar to us as the woods on the skyline or the clouds over our heads. There will be nothing else left.
The party ends, and the guests depart. Yury tells Tonya that she and her father are the only people he loves.
5.
September is nearly over. So we haven’t had the October Revolution yet. That got me wondering how Markel would have known the phrase, ‘without annexations or contributions.’ He can’t have got it from the Peace Decree, as that was enacted the day after the October Revolution. It was actually a popular slogan at least as early as February and had currency at the time, so Markel’s using it is in keeping with the anti-war factions.3
Winter is the main theme in this part. Everything is in short supply, including fuel for keeping warm.
This line sums up how Pasternak thinks of these sweeping historical events:
What saved his reason were the everyday details of his life, his work, his worries. His wife, his child, the need to earn, the humble daily ritual of his practice, these were his salvation.
And that’s how it is, isn’t it? We live through wars, pandemics and revolutions, while our lives carry on in their own small ways. I find it comforting.
Yury’s back at work in the Hospital of the Holy Cross. The staff are divided into two camps: the moderates and the revolutionaries. Yury is neither. Alongside his normal duties, he’s been put in charge of statistics. He’s having to fill in endless forms, something that hadn’t changed by the time I was working in the former USSR in the 2000s.
Pasternak treats us to a wonderful description of late summer that belies the chaos that’s happening outside. The chemistry demonstrator comes in and disturbs Yury’s writing. He talks about Tarasyuk, how he’s gone off to join the revolution with his rifle.
“Turn your bayonets against your masters,” so Tarasyuk turned. … There’s Marxism for you.
They discuss how the city has changed and, more importantly, whom to go to for firewood. The rat catcher is the woman to go to for logs. And the crossroads at Silver Street (Serebryany / Серебряный) and Silent Street (Molchanovka / Молчановка) marks the entryway to the rabbit warren, a whole network of alleys leading to the old thieves’ den near Smolensky, where the street lamps are known as bruisers (синяки).
This is an old part of Moscow that had a marketplace on Smolensky Square. There is a Malaya Molchanovka Street not far from Smolensky Square, but I can’t find a Serebryany Street. In any case, the old marketplace would have been a hive of people hawking their possessions, making it a reasonable hangout for thieves as well.
6.
Yury finds a man lying unconscious at the crossroads. He’s been mugged. Yury takes him to the hospital and nurses him back to health. The man turned out to be a prominent politician who later served as a protector for Yury. I wonder if this has anything to do with Pasternak’s apparent protection from Stalin during the purges. Some accounts attribute this protection to Stalin’s love of Pasternak’s poetry, particularly his poems about Georgia, Stalin’s home region.
7.
Tonya’s plan of living on the top floor through winter has come to pass. They’re having trouble keeping the stove going. Uncle Kolya bursts in and tells them that there’s fighting on the streets, urging Yury to come and see it:
Come on, Yura, put your coat on and come out. You’ve got to see it. This is history. This happens once in a lifetime.
Misha comes in and says the same.
Sasha gets sick, but Yury can’t go out and get milk and soda to relieve Sasha’s symptoms while the fighting is going on in the streets. The proletariat has the upper hand over the bourgeoisie.
8.
The fighting eases off over the next few days, but it’s still not safe for Yury to go to work. There are rumours of negotiations between the two sides. In late October, Yury calls on a colleague. As he’s walking the nearly empty streets, a blizzard starts up.
There was something in common between events in the moral and the physical world, between disturbances near and far, on earth and in the sky.
A young boy selling newspapers overtakes Yury at the crossroads. Yury buys one and reads that the Provisional Government has been overthrown:
it gave the official announcement from Petersburg that a Soviet of People’s Commissars had been formed and that Soviet power and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were established in Russia.
Yury just happens to be reading the news at the previously mentioned crossroads. He goes into the entrance of a tenement building to get better light for reading when a boy of around 18, with narrow Kirghiz eyes, comes down the stairs and stops in front of him.
His face had something aristocratic about it, the fugitive spark and reticent delicacy which give an impression of remoteness and are sometimes found in people of a complex, mixed parentage.
It’s interesting that Yury should meet this boy on the very day of the October Revolution. I’m hesitant to give spoilers here, so I shall simply ask that you bear this scene in mind for later.
As Yury heads for home, he comes upon a pile of timber in the street that’s being guarded by a man with a rifle. Yury waits until the sentry’s back is turned and makes off with a beam from the bottom of the pile: a fortuitous discovery indeed, as the family’s wood supply had just run out. So, Revolution, the stranger on the stairs and then a lump of firewood. It’s been quite a day.
As Yury feeds the fire, he breaks out into a discourse on the Revolution, which could be one of the scenes that caused Pasternak some trouble with the censors. His discourse ends with the phrase:
That’s real genius. Only real greatness can be so misplaced and so untimely.
But just imagine the kinds of conversations that would have been going on in Moscow and in Petrograd. The oppression hasn’t begun yet, according to the plot, but at the time of the novel’s writing, it most certainly had.
9.
The next three winters are harsh, and the narrator tells us that they all merge into one memory. The two parts of life did not yet interlock, and civil war broke out in 1918. In Moscow, the Bolsheviks are on the ascendant. Yury’s hospital has changed. Previously well-paid doctors leave as a civic gesture of protest, but Yury stays.
10.
Yury and Tonya are living frugally, as is everyone in Moscow. Tonya learns to bake bread in the Dutch stove, enough to have some to sell in order to keep the stove burning, but it doesn’t work out. Tonya goes out looking for peasants’ selling vegetables. Commerce of any kind is now illegal, so she has to be careful. She trades an old wardrobe for some birch logs. Yury comes home to find a message. He’s to make a house call in exchange for a bottle of German cognac and a pair of stockings. They assume that these clients must be nouveaux riches. The narrator goes on to explain:
These operators were basically licensed speculators who operated in a grey area during the period of war communism. The New Economic Policy of 1921, which followed the civil war, loosened the trading restrictions somewhat and gave rise to the so-called NEP men. What’s happening here is an early version of the NEP men, but less overt. There were, of course, real speculators, too, such as the peasant trading the birch logs. There were harsh penalties for them.
11.
Yury makes his house call. A young man explains that he believes his wife is suffering from nervous shock after an unwound clock chimed the hour. Yury diagnoses typhus and recommends that she be sent to the hospital immediately for full-time care. Yury needs a stamp from the house committee to admit her. House committees were set up after the Revolution to manage the allocation of living space, among other things. They were tiny, official bodies for neighbourhood monitoring and surveillance. Note that the chair of this house committee is a local duma delegate.
12.
The house committee’s boardroom is in the basement. The chair makes a speech, informing the committee that the building has been allocated as a hostel for visiting delegates and is to be renamed the Tiverzin Hostel after Comrade Tiverzin, ‘who lived here before he was deported’. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same Tiverzin from Chapter 2, the one who was friends with Pasha Antipov and whose family looked after Pasha. The residents have a year to find alternative lodgings. An argument breaks out between Aunt Fatima, the caretaker, and the delegate, whom we shortly learn is called Comrade Demina. Yury enters and asks for a member of the house committee. Aunt Fatima is called; it turns out she’s Yusupka Galiullin’s mother. Here’s another of those coincidences that Pasternak loves. Yury asks her about the stamp he requires and then informs her that he served with her son at the front. She ushers him outside. She tells him that her son came home for a couple of days and told her about Yury and that he knows Lara. And finally, she tells him that Comrade Demina is Olya, a seamstress and friend of Madame Guishar’s and another coincidence.
13.
Olya Demina and Yury leave together, and Olya tells him about Lara’s wedding and her leaving for the Urals with Pasha.
She married Pasha with her head, not with her heart.
She tells Yury that she thinks Lara’s brother was shot in the war and that she’ll see that Lara’s mother is all right.
When Yury arrives home, Tonya tells him about a clock that her father broke, and that came back to life all on its own. Another coincidence.
‘My typhus hour has struck,’ laughed Yury.
14.
Life in Moscow is precarious. Yury falls ill with typhus.
15.
Yury has fever dreams about writing poetry and the boy with the Kirghiz eyes.
16.
Yury recovers and gets stronger with the help of bread, butter and sugared tea. As he improves, he begins to wonder where these supplies might have come from. He asks, and Tonya replies that they came from Yury’s half-brother, Yevgraf, from Tomsk. He’s the boy with the Kirghiz eyes. So it wasn’t just a fever dream; he really had been there. They believe that Yevgraf must have connections, as he’s been able to supply them with all sorts of foodstuffs: rice, sugar, currants. He’s advised them to get out of the city. Tonya thinks of the Krueger place in the Urals, so in April, they leave for the former Varykino estate near Yuryatin.
Catch you next week for Chapter 7!
Anna Pasternak, Lara, (London: William Collins, 2016), 28.
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, 100th Anniversary ed. (London: The Bodley Head, 2017), 737.
The History of the Civil War in the U.S.S.R., Volume 1, Chapter V: The Bolshevik Party Works to Win the Masses.
