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1.
Yury and his family have arrived at the Urals, and the contrast with Moscow couldn’t be more stark:
From now on they were in a different territory, in a new and different provincial world which had created a gravity of its own.
Pasternak describes the earth, ‘black with oil’. The southern Urals is a fertile region. A passing sentry tells Yury that it’s time to plant the crops, which is precisely what he would be doing were it not for this ‘civil war and this plague of counter-revolution.’
3.
Yury gets back into the train carriage. Tonya tells him that the sentries have explained what’s happening and that the passengers are all congratulating Yury on having escaped from Strelnikov. There are some new passengers on the train, including one Samdevyatov, another name for you all to contend with! Yury comments on his name, too:
With a name like that he ought to have come straight out of an old Russian ballad, complete with a bushy beard, a smock and a studded belt.
In Russian, sam means ‘self’ and devyat is the number nine. Such names are given to characters in Russian folktales, so Pasternak is having fun by giving a Soviet-era lawyer and businessman a folk name. Samdevyatov is local to the region and knew Yury’s father. He also knows Lara. Tonya warns Yury to be careful: Samdevyatov is a Bolshevik. Samdevyatov told Tonya that the railway station at Yuryatin has been damaged in the fighting, so their train is being redirected right past the station nearest their destination, Varykino.
4.
Yury and Samdevyatov talk during the journey, with Samdevyatov pointing out local landmarks as they pass. At times, they have to shout over the noise of the train to be heard.
Gasparov argues that by layering narratives that move at different speeds, Pasternak allows the reader to ‘symbolically overcome time’, and, by association, ‘overcome death’.1 It’s the same symphony metaphor we discussed in Chapter 1, which I find fascinating. I see the novel’s main theme as being the overcoming of death.
Anna Pasternak, Lara, (London: William Collins, 2016), 245.
5.
Samdevyatov explains that he’s a lawyer. He works on ‘peculiarities of the transitional period.’ He knows the region like his own backyard, within a 100-mile radius. He doesn’t believe that the estate manager, Mikulitsin, will receive them well at all, and that living off the land is a utopian dream.
Another problematic phrase from Yury:
‘There you are. You are a bolshevik, and yet even you admit that what’s going on isn’t life—it’s lunacy, it’s an absurd nightmare.
He was a brave man, old Boris Pasternak! — although he didn’t take too kindly to being called old at the age of 68, as we learn from Anna Pasternak’s excellent book, Lara:
Boris was incensed at being addressed as ‘old fellow’ in Olga’s presence. According to Olga, he still thought of himself as ‘young and healthy and the hero of the hour into the bargain.’2
Yury ponders turning back, especially after hearing that it was unlikely Mikulitsin would receive them. Samdevyatov goes back on what he’d said earlier, and says that Mikulitsin will huff and puff, but then he’ll melt and let them stay. Seemingly, he’s one of the kindest men you’ll find. Samdevyatov then tells the story of the Mikulitsins.
6.
Mikulitsin arrived in the Urals region from St Petersburg twenty-five years ago. He married one of the four Tuntseva sisters, Agripinna. They have a son, Liberius, who goes off to fight in the Great War. Agripinna dies just before the Revolution. Liberius returns a decorated, ‘fully bolshevised’ war hero. Samdevyatov asks Yury whether he’s heard of the ‘Forest Brotherhood’. He hasn’t. He then explains to Yury who the partisans are, and I’m glad for that as I wasn’t sure myself. Liberius is the commander of the partisans belonging to the Forest Brotherhood.
Mikulitsin remarried. His second wife, Helen, is an ingénue, ‘both by nature and intention.’
Mikulitsin was a Socialist Revolutionary and had been elected to the Constituent Assembly. This was formed under the Provisional Government after the February Revolution and was overthrown by the Bolsheviks after they failed to secure a majority. It met for just a single thirteen-hour session (from 4 p.m. on 18 January to 5 a.m. on 19 January 1918).
Yury realises that father and son must therefore be politically opposed, something that was common in those days. And indeed, it is still common today.
The three remaining Tuntseva sisters still live in Yuryatin. Avdotya works at the library, Glasha does a bit of everything—she’s the one that Samdevyatov thought he saw working the railway points—and Sima has become ‘a bit touched in the head, she’s got religious mania.’
The train reaches Samdevyatov’s station and he alights. Tonya says to Yury:
I don’t know about you, but I feel he’s been sent to us by fate. I think he’ll play some helpful part in our lives.’
Yury agrees, but he’s worried that they will be more conspicuous at Varykino than they were in Moscow, given that Tonya’s Krueger relations are so well known in the region.
7.
Yury, Tonya and family alight at Torfyanaya. It sounds idyllic.
They were struck by the silence, the emptiness and tidiness of the station. It seemed strange not to be surrounded by a milling, cursing mob. History had not caught up with this remote provincial life which had yet to become as savage as in the capitals.
I wonder if that’s how Pasternak felt at his dacha in Peredelkino. Although it was only 50 km from Moscow, it must have felt like a different world in many ways. Tonya has a visceral reaction to the feeling of the place and, instead of coming out with what she had planned to say, about how Strelnikov might have planned to have them arrested as soon as they alighted, she instead bursts into tears of joy.
In The Zhivago Affair, authors Finn and Couvée describe Sergio D’Angelo’s trip from Moscow to Peredelkino, a journey Pasternak would have been intimately familiar with. Perhaps he was drawing on this when describing Tonya’s elation upon arriving at Torfyanaya station:
Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (London: Harvill Secker, 2014), 3.
The stationmaster asks after Tonya and then goes on to ask about Moscow. Alexander Gromeko introduces the family and the stationmaster informs him that Samdevyatov had called ahead to ask that he look out for them. He recognises Tonya as being a Krueger as soon as they mention Varykino. It turns out the stationmaster and Ivan Krueger had built the road together. He warns Tonya to be wary of mentioning the family connection in times like these. The stationmaster calls Bacchus to get a horse and cart ready to take them to Varykino. At the mention of Bacchus, the travellers are reminded of the local legend they’d heard of the man with an ‘indestructible set of steel bowels.’
8.
We’re treated to a wonderful description of the scenery as the family is taken by cart to Varykino. Tonya wonders out loud whether this Bacchus could be the same Bacchus that they were told about. It can’t be—that legend is over one hundred years old.
The driver is a hoot, coming out with old songs and addressing his mare by a masculine name and patronymic and speaking to himself in a rural dialect. He tells Tonya that he recognises her as a Krueger. He’d overheard their talking about Bacchus and tells them that the Bacchus of legend died some forty years ago. He’s surprised to learn that news of the Forest Brotherhood has not reached Moscow.
9.
The family’s first meeting with the Mikulitsins is painful. It begins in silence and ends in noisy confusion and absurdity. The Zhivagos are embarrassed and the Mikulitsins are dumbfounded. Why did the Zhivagos think it was okay to impose like this? But all the Zhivagos want is a corner of any old tumbledown hut and a kitchen garden. Tonya points out the family connection to the Kruegers, and Mikulitsin asks how she could even mention that name. Mikulitsin had grown up a revolutionary and had served in the Constituent Assembly. He’s worried about how it will look, but how does he know the Zhivagos’ politics?
Mikulitsin relents and brings the family into the house. It seems that Samdevyatov was right.
‘Well, there isn’t any point in squabbling in the yard. We can go inside. Not, of course, that I can see any good coming of it, but we see as in a glass darkly.
This last phrase is translated in P&V as ‘but these be the dark waters in the clouds, the shadow-scripted murk of secrecy.’ While I’m not a big fan of P&V’s translations, what I do like is that they provide rich footnotes. They tell us here that the ‘phrases and rhythms are loosely based on Psalm 18:11: “He made darkness his covering around him, his canopy thick clouds dark with water.”’3 They certainly knew their bible. Even Bacchus made an allusion to the bible when shouting at his horse.
10.
Yury and Alexander make plans. They need to repair their lodgings and then get planting as soon as possible. They share a meal with their hosts, and Yury is taken with Mikulitsin’s study.
‘What a splendid study, it must be a perfect place to work in, a real inspiration!’
I can imagine Pasternak here. He was quite fussy about where he wrote and meticulous in keeping his study tidy and free from distraction.
Pasternak is methodical in his writing habits. He first puts a watch on his desk, draws a pencil from the box he keeps there, and writes in longhand, reusing every sheet of paper (once on each side for separate works): “It’s not only economical, but it’s more cozy. The paper is not so fresh. It belongs to me, you might say.”4
They look at some photos taken by Liberius with a stereoscope that he made himself. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s as I did, you might have had a stereoscope called the View-Master like this:
The Mikulitsins’ might have looked more like this one:
The Brewster Stereoscope, 1870. (Via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Liberius still hasn't settled down, but he's now out capturing district after district for the Soviets from Komuch, an anti-Bolshevik provisional government that had established its own military force in the Volga region and was fighting to restore the Constituent Assembly, which the Bolsheviks had dissolved.
Tonya is surprised that they have real sugar, biscuits and tea. Helen Mikulitsina asks Tonya a series of science questions, then says they’d had a wonderful science teacher at the school in Yuryatin. His name was Antipov.
Some people say that this scourge of ours, Commissar Strelnikov, is Antipov risen from the dead. But it’s only a silly rumour, of course.
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), 92.
