Welcome to the seventh 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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It’s a long chapter this week and it covers a lot of ground, both in terms of plot and distance travelled by Yury and his family.
1.
The Zhivagos are getting ready to leave for Varykino. Yury doesn’t want to go. He talks of the old Mikulitsin, the estate manager, whose name he remembers only because the family struggled to pronounce it.
2.
Yury goes to the station to see how one travels these days. It’s chaos, with sick people lying on floors for refuge. A porter tells Yury to come every day to check for trains and that he’ll need to pay a bribe to ‘grease the wheels’. He taps his Adam’s apple and mentions bringing vodka. This is still something that Russians do to indicate drinking alcohol. One folk explanation traces the history back to Peter the Great, though I take it with a pinch of salt.
How did this strange gesture come about? A legend has it that after a carpenter was able to fix a cross on the tallest spire of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St Petersburg, Peter the Great wanted to thank him for his service. When the carpenter was asked what he would like as a reward, he said he wanted a piece of paper which would entitle him to a free drink in any tavern across the land. Unfortunately, he ended up losing the paper after getting blind drunk one day. So the tsar authorised a tattoo on his neck and all the carpenter would need to do then was tap on the side of his neck to show the stamp.1
(See number 2 in this short video.)
3.
Yury is called in to treat a member of the government and is paid in vouchers for the ‘newly introduced closed-consumer shops.’ These were early examples of the privileged distribution networks that would later become a permanent feature of Soviet life. Yury and Alexander Gromeko, who has also received vouchers, go to the shop and fill pillowcases with products unavailable to the masses: flour, sugar, etc.
4.
Tonya’s at home taking care of the packing. It sounds complicated. Their money should be in kerenkas, paper bills introduced by the Kerensky Government in 1917. They were short-lived due to the period's massive inflation.
5.
There’s a snowstorm the day before they are due to leave. Tonya leaves the flat in the care of an elderly couple who live in the building. Both Yury and Tonya feel emotional at having to leave the flat; it reminds them of those they’ve lost.
6.
Yury and Tonya leave at dawn. It’s snowing. Tonya and her father take a cab to the station and Yury, at his own request, walks.
7.
Tonya and her father are queuing for tickets. My translation says that ‘Nyusha and Sasha were walking about outside,’ and I was like, ‘Nyusha?’. She’s first mentioned at the start of Chapter 6 as a nanny for Yury and Tonya’s son, Sasha. The P&V translation lists them as Nyusha and Shurochka, and Tonya is named as Antonina Alexandrovna. That’s how the original text lists the characters, too, so it’s wild how different the translations are.
It’s still snowing:
The falling snow could be seen only beyond the far end of the roofs; seen so far away, it looked almost still, sinking to the ground as slowly as bread-crumbs, thrown to the fishes, sink through water.
Chaos erupts when people waiting to board the train see queue-jumpers. They’d calm down if they only knew that these ‘queue-jumpers’ were in fact convicts bound for the front.
8.
The Zhivagos managed to get a corner to themselves on the top tier of bunks. It reminds me of Pasternak’s lover Olga’s being taken to a labour camp in 1950.
From Butyrki, Olga and the other prisoners were crammed into a passenger coach. The stench was suffocating. Olga was fortunate enough to get a ‘berth’ on the luggage rack at the top of the compartment, from where she could see the sky.2
There are hundreds of passengers from all walks of life and the journey is long and uncomfortable.
9.
Tonya wakes as they approach a large station. Napkins of snow are hung on trees as a sign of hospitality, mirroring the tradition of offering salt on napkins. Locals have come to meet the train to trade their wares. Tonya trades her embroidered towel for half a roasted hare. A swindler eats a trader’s food and goes off without paying.
10.
The conscripts’ wagons are not big enough to hold them all, so some have been distributed among the passengers. There are a few in car fourteen, the car the Zhivagos are travelling in. It turns out that the train will be travelling through the Vyatka province, the home province of two conscripts in the railcar. We learn that one of the conscripts, Pritulyev, was picked up during a militia round-up in Petersburg. Note that Pasternak does not use the more recent moniker of Petrograd, a deliberate decision on his part. Recall that we discussed the -burg suffix as sounding too German in our previous chapter essay. Pasternak is quietly resisting the renaming of cities for ideological reasons, patriotic though this one may have been.
11.
The younger conscript, Vassya, is there simply because his uncle went through the wrong door and was rounded up with the other conscripts. His uncle then tricked the guards into letting him say goodbye to his wife, and they took Vassya as security. The uncle and aunt disappeared and thus Vassya was ‘recruited’.
12.
One of the conscripts, Kostoyed, discusses the peasants' plight following the Revolution with Yury. Yury believes that the peasants outside the main cities are living as before, without any hardship imposed on them by those above. Kostoyed disagrees.
‘When the revolution came and woke him [the peasant] up, he decided that this was the fulfilment of his dream … Instead of that, he found he had only exchanged the old oppression of the tsarist state for the new, much harsher yoke of the revolutionary super-state.’
Yury replies that history hasn’t consulted him and so why should he bother.
‘It’s true that I want to believe that the peasants are better off and the villages are prosperous.— If I can’t believe that, then what am I to do. … I’ve got to go on living, I’ve got a family.’
Vassya and Pritulyev talk of their home villages as the train passes through their province.
13.
The train passes through regions where armed bands were patrolling. The train is often stopped and papers are checked by security patrols. It stops one night and Yury gets off to see what’s going on. The sailors on the train go and see, and it looks to Yury like they’re chasing the driver. Yury follows, finding the driver half-buried in deep snow and arguing with the sailors. The driver had stopped for safety’s sake and the sailors are angry about it.
14.
The train moves at a snail’s pace the next day. The snow has made the journey treacherous. The train stops at a burned-out village, and the driver quizzes the stationmaster about what happened. It’s the first time we hear the name Strelnikov. He’s some kind of renegade revolutionary in an armoured train and had taken out the village after mistaking it for another village of the same name in a different district. Their crime: anti-revolutionary activity. The stationmaster tells the driver that he’ll have to wait out the blizzard for a couple of days; the snow is too deep for the train to pass.
15.
The passengers are supplied with shovels and they dig out the snow for three days to allow the train to pass.
These were the best three days of the journey. … There was something about [the country] that reminded one of the rising of Pugachev as seen by Pushkin and the savage Asia of Aksakov’s sketches.
Pugachev—pronounced Pugachov, with the stress on the final syllable—led a peasant and Cossack rebellion in 1773–1774. He claimed to be the murdered Tsar Peter III, returned from the dead, and to have gathered up a peasant army. Pushkin is mentioned, as this is the theme of his story, The Captain’s Daughter.
Edith W. Clowes remarks on Pasternak’s Pushkin influence:
Neither is it by chance that Pushkin's lengthiest prose fiction, the historical romance The Captain's Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, 1833-36) finds frequent echo in the second half of Doctor Zhivago (Smirnov, 130-31). These two works form the major milestones in Pushkin's own effort to shift from long verse narrative to the prose novel.3
Aksakov was a nineteenth-century Russian writer known for his descriptions of life in the Volga-Ural region, which he depicted as the borderland between Europe and Asia. The Ural Mountains are regarded as the geographical border between these two continents and cultures. Aksakov’s Sketches are a series of autobiographical and nature pieces, including Notes on Fishing (1847) and Notes of a Provincial Wildfowler (1852). Pasternak suggests that the Revolution has scraped away the veneer of civilisation and revealed the old country beneath. Yury finds himself wondering whether the house he can see atop a hill is inhabited.
The house teased his curiosity but kept its sorrowful silence. Questions were not in order these days and no one ever answered them.
What a line!
In Lara, Anna Pasternak gives us an idea of where this scene came from in Boris’s mind. Boris’s sister, Josephine (1900–1993) says:
16.
Yury will forever recall the ruined station as a place of refuge. The snow has finally cleared enough for the train to move on.
17.
Yury and Tonya are out on the tracks before the train leaves. They overhear two voices arguing from the other side of the tracks; it’s the two women who are travelling with conscript Pritulyev. They’re fighting over him.
Hayward / Harari
Born in the gutter, married in a ditch, laid by a rat and a hedgehog for a brat!
Pevear and Volokhonsky
Born in a ditch, married in a gateway, made pregnant by a rat, gave birth to a hedgehog…
Original text
Из канавы рожденная, в подворотне венчанная, крысой забрюхатела, ежом разродилась...
18.
As they travel, the scenery changes from open steppe to the rugged terrain of the Urals.
19.
Pasternak gives us a poetic scene of the coming of spring, as the snows melt and the forests awaken.
20.
The villages become more frequent, and Yury overhears local passengers discussing the politics of the region: the Whites are gaining the upper hand over the Reds and, unless he’s misheard, are being led by Galiullin, whom he last saw at Meluzeyevo.
21.
Yury awakens in the middle of the night with an intense sense of happiness. The train has stopped near a waterfall and the sound is soothing. Two men are talking below his bunk about corn requisitioning. They hear another train: it’s Strelnikov’s armoured train. The two men discuss whom Strelnikov is hunting: Hetman Galileyev, Prince Galileyev or Ali Kurban? .
22.
Yury awakens again, still feeling a sense of happiness.
23.
The next morning, Tonya tells Yury that Pritulyev and Vassya have escaped, along with the two women who were fighting over Pritulyev. So too has their guard, Voronyuk. The labour unit commander is demanding that the train remain where it is until the prisoners are caught, while the train commandant is refusing because he has conscripts to transport to the front.
Pasternak gives us another poetic description of the landscape. The train appears to be gliding over the surface of the meltwater.
Typical wooden buildings in a village in the Central Ural Mountains near Kungur, Russia
A train passing through the central Ural Mountains in Russia
24.
We get a switch in the POV character; we’re now with Vassya, the young escapee. He’s mesmerised by the waterfall. He’s with one of the women who, it seems, had pushed the other one off the train. They’ve been on the run for two days. Vassya urges ‘Auntie Polya’ to go; they must get to a village.
25.
The train stops to refuel. The passengers disembark, and volunteers are called to cut wood for the tender. Yury and Alexander Gromeko share a saw.
26.
They discuss their convictions while they saw the wood. Gromeko says:
The regime is hostile to us, its philosophy is alien to me, I have not been asked if I consent to all these changes. But I have been trusted, and my own actions, even if they were not freely chosen, put me under a certain obligation.
He goes on to say that he’s on board with the new regime in a way. He’ll pitch in with the ‘collective squandering of thousands for the sake of earning a copeck’s worth of living’.
No, the age of property in Russia is over, and anyway, we Gromekos lost our acquisitive passion a generation ago.
27.
Yury awakens early. It’s too hot and stifling in the train car. The train is shrouded in mist. Yury hears distant artillery fire and remembers they are near the front. Which front, though? Good question. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918, pulling Russia out of the Great War. The Civil War following the October Revolution is now breaking out between the Reds (Bolsheviks) and the loosely allied anti-Bolshevik Whites, and the Urals region saw some of the fiercest fighting—as we shall see shortly.
Yury steps around the front of the train and is stopped by a sentry. They argue and Yury walks away before it gets serious. He hears sounds coming from the river and goes down the bank to investigate. He’s stopped by a second sentry, who also questions him. The first sentry had followed Yury through the mist, and now the two of them demand Yury’s papers and take him off to see ‘the boss’. The sounds on the river had been made by a fisherman, who tells Yury that the sentries are hunting someone and have simply mistaken him for their quarry. Yury should demand to see the boss and it will all be straightened out. Yury learns from the fisherman that Yuryatin has now been recaptured by the Reds and that the boss in question is Army Commissar Strelnikov. A third guard appears and leads Yury off to see Strelnikov, who is using a train car as his headquarters.
28.
Yury is taken to Strelnikov.
Yury had had a very different idea of the background of Strelnikov, the famous non-party military expert who was the pride and terror of the region.
I ask that you keep this scene in mind for reasons I don’t want to reveal just yet, since Pasternak isn’t revealing it now either. Yury’s taken by the way that Strelnikov’s staff are busy with trifles—fixing phone lines, getting the typewriter unjammed—while, outside, there’s a war going on. He figures that he can’t be in any trouble.
29.
Yury stares out the window and sees a scrapyard for old train engines and cars. As the mist begins to clear, he can just make out the town of Yuryatin on top of the hill. He recalls how Lara Antipova had talked of it when they were at the front. He sees some prisoners’ being led by Red Army guards, including a schoolboy with a head wound. Yury’s taken by the boy’s school cap, which keeps falling down over the boy’s eyes, and he then jams it back on his head.
This scene illustrates Pasternak’s view on life as perfectly summed up by Italo Calvino and quoted in The Zhivago Affair:
In a long essay entitled “Pasternak and the Revolution,” Italo Calvino wrote that “halfway through the twentieth century the great Russian nineteenth century novel has come back to haunt us, like King Hamlet’s ghost.” Calvino argued that Pasternak “is not interested in psychology, character, situations, but in something more general and direct: life. Pasternak’s prose is simply a continuation of his verse.” He wrote that Pasternak’s “objections to Soviet communism seem to move in two directions: against the barbarism, the ruthless cruelty unleashed by the civil war” and “against the theoretical and bureaucratic abstractions in which the revolutionary ideals become frozen.”4
Strelnikov enters. He makes an impressive entrance as a confident, powerful man.
How was it that they had never been thrown together, that their paths had never crossed?
Or had they? 😏
Strelnikov congratulates the men on having successfully driven back the enemy. The enemy commander had once been a friend of Strelnikov’s; they’d grown up together. He remembers that Yury is there and sees immediately that he’s not the man they’re looking for. All the same, he takes a look at his papers and the name Doctor Zhivago seems familiar to him somehow.
30.
Who, in reality, was Strelnikov?
Pasternak must have been having fun with this reveal. It’s not laid out as to be unequivocal, but he gives us just enough for the reader to figure out who Strelnikov is. Look at the clues: born in Moscow, university, school teacher in the provinces, MIA from the front believed killed, lived with Tiverzin as a child. His father was jailed after the 1905 revolution. Are you getting it?
There is an argument to be made about Strelnikov’s being at least partly inspired by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky famously led the Red Army from an armoured train, having come not from a military background but from a bookish, intellectual one.
He also became a semi-mythical military commander known for his ferocity in destroying the enemy, with no apparent compassion. It’s hard to say whether Trotsky was a conscious inspiration for Pasternak, but the resemblance is striking enough that it’s difficult to read the Strelnikov scenes without thinking of him.
31.
Strelnikov asks Yury why he’s leaving Moscow for Varykino. He calls Yury a deserter and tells him that it’s the time for ‘angels with flaming swords and winged beasts from the abyss, not for sympathisers and loyal doctors.’ He had, however, promised to let Yury go, and this he does, but ‘just this once’.
We leave the chapter with the reveal nailed home. Strelnikov looks out the window towards where he’d lived with his wife and daughter, where he’d been a schoolteacher. It is, of course, Pasha Antipov!
Catch you next week for Chapter 8!
https://www.talkrussian.com/post/little-known-explanation-to-a-russian-gesture
Anna Pasternak, Lara, (London: William Collins, 2016), 112.
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), 11.
Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (London: Harvill Secker, 2014), 151.
