Welcome to the ninth 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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The first ten parts of this chapter are taken from Yury’s diary. It’s a narrative technique that moves the story along while giving us Yury’s motivations and thoughts.
1.
It’s winter. Yury’s writing in his diary.
What happiness it is to work from dawn to dusk for your family and yourself, to build a roof over their heads, to till the soil to feed them, to create your own world, like Robinson Crusoe, in imitation of the Creator of the universe, and to bring forth your life, as if you were your own mother, again and again.
He writes about how their lives are now: stealing from the state, hidden away, undiscovered, safe from persecution. Their living is made possible by Samdevyatov; he supplies them with timber and whatever else they need besides what they can grow themselves.
2.
Yury continues to write, beginning with a quote from Tyutchev. Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873) was a poet Pasternak greatly admired. Yury quotes his poem The Summer of 1854. It’s kind of cool that he writes out quotes in his diary. Yury fills us in on how they’ve spent their time since arriving at Varykino. The harvest was successful; they have enough produce and firewood to see them through the winter. It sounds like hard but rewarding work.
They spend their winter nights by the stove, sewing and reading War and Peace and Eugene Onegin. Sounds idyllic to me!
3.
Yury believes that Tonya is pregnant. In fact, he’s sure she is, because he knows the signs even if she doesn’t.
4.
Yury writes about art.
I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm in which there are innumerable concepts and varied phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited.
It’s a fascinating monologue in which he goes on to define art as being a thread that runs through thousands of years. I think I agree, although I'm not entirely sure I understand what he's saying. It would be a good section to discuss. As someone who has read Crime and Punishment a few times, this section stood out to me:
A work of art can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. One is much more shaken by the presence of art in Crime and Punishment than by Raskolnikov’s crime.
Is one? I suppose it depends on how one defines art. I could go into a long explanation of my own ideas here, but that’s a topic for a separate essay. Maybe we could get into it in the comments.
5.
Yury feels signs of his weak heart, inherited from his mother’s side. Tonya is ironing. It reminds Yury of something, but he can’t think what. We can, though. Remember in Chapter 5 Lara was ironing sheets in the hospital near the front:
In the room the scent of lime blossom mixed, as in an old park, with the caraway-bitter smell of dry twigs; to it were added the charcoal fumes of the two flat-irons which Lara used alternately, putting them in turn in the flue to keep them hot.
Yury thinks about going to the library. He feels an urge to write. It will soon be spring and then he’ll be too busy to write. He’s been having headaches and vivid dreams. He’s awoken from a dream by the sound of a woman’s voice; that’s all he remembers. He can’t think whose voice it was.
6.
Earth, sky, moon and stars, all seem riveted together by the frost.
They continue to discuss poetry, particularly Pushkin’s.
'It's as if the air, the light, the noise of life, of real substantial things burst into his poetry from the street as through an open window. Concrete things—things in the outside world, things in current use, names of things, common nouns—burst in and take possession of his verse, driving out the vaguer parts of speech. Things and more things, lined up in rhymed columns on the page.
This reminds me of the discussion we had about Pasternak’s poetry in Chapter 3.
7.
Every man is born a Faust with a longing to embrace and experience and express everything in the world.
Pasternak translated Faust, so he knew it intimately.
Yury is pondering how to work as a doctor and as an artist. He returns to Pushkin—as indeed did Bulgakov, who wove Faust through The Master and Margarita. The pairing is apt: critics have long read the two novels side by side as post-Symbolist works, both holding fast to the Christian and ethical imagination in the teeth of an age built to extinguish it. Pasternak and Bulgakov, each writing in secret and barely published in his lifetime, were waging the same quiet war.1
The fabulous is never anything but the commonplace touched by the hand of genius.
That’s a tombstone line. God, I love this chapter! Pasternak’s words in Yury’s head. The difference between Pushkin and Chekhov on the one hand, and Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on the other. The former create beauty from the everyday.
'What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation. It isn't that they didn't think about these things, and to good effect, but they always felt that such important matters were not for them. While Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky worried and looked for the meaning of life and prepared for death and drew up balance-sheets, these two were distracted, right up to the end of their lives, by the current, individual tasks imposed on them by their vocation as writers, and in the course of fulfilling these tasks they lived their lives, quietly, treating both their lives and their work as private, individual matters, of no concern to anyone else. And these individual things have since become of concern to all, their work has ripened of itself, like apples picked green from the trees, and has increasingly matured in sense and sweetness.'
Is he talking about slice-of-life fiction? I don’t know Chekhov or Pushkin so well, but I did study Gogol in depth at university some thirty years ago. It’s an interesting passage to think about. I’m not entirely sure that I agree. Is it possible that these are only Yury’s thoughts and not Pasternak’s? It seems unlikely, but it’s possible.
8.
Spring arrives. Yury thinks of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin again; Pushkin describes the spring in Chapter 7. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin’s famous novel in verse, written between 1823 and 1831. It’s so well known that it’s almost part of Russia’s DNA. Ivan Turgenev is invoked here too. He wrote about birdsong in his piece "About Nightingales" in his collection Literary Reminiscences (1874).
9.
Spring is in full swing, so there’s no longer any time for writing. A patient calls in to see Yury. He tries to fob the patient off, but he insists. There’s another sledge in the yard—it belongs to Yury’s half-brother, Yevgraf. He has called in out of the blue. Yevgraf doesn’t give much away about where he’s been or what he’s been doing. His connections seem even more mysterious than Samdevyatov’s. He promises to make their lives easier, to give Tonya more time with Sasha and Yury more time to practice medicine.
For the second time he has burst into my life as my good genius, my rescuer, resolving all my difficulties.
10.
Yury becomes a frequent visitor to the library in Yuryatin. The local visitors are divided between intellectuals, who look puffy and unhealthy, and the poorer folk, looking hale and hearty. One of the library assistants brings to mind the woman who was working the points on the railway as they approached the station at Torfyanaya—it must be Avdotya. The narrator told us in the previous chapter that she worked at the library. Yury tries to remember what Samdevyatov had told him about Yuryatin on the train, but it’s fuzzy.
11.
Yury hits his borrowing limit at the library. I have to say, for a book lover, this chapter really resonates! We get a description of Yury’s morning in the library and then he catches a glimpse of someone he recognises: it’s Lara! She’s talking to the librarian, now confirmed as Avdotya Tunteseva, and her very presence has lifted Avdotya’s spirits, as well as those of the other library patrons. Lara is clearly well regarded in Yuryatin.
12.
Yury feels an unusual shyness about approaching Lara. Instead he seats himself in such a way so as to turn his face away from her. He now knows that the voice he’d heard in his dream at Varykino had been Lara’s. Yury can no longer concentrate on his reading. He finds himself thinking of Lara and how well she does everything. Lara’s presence affects him as it did the librarian and the other library patrons. Her calming influence enables him to focus on his reading again, and this he does with gusto. After he’s finished, he feels able to reward himself by approaching Lara, only she’s gone. Lying on the counter are the books that she was reading, books on Marxism. He discerns her address from the library card poking out of a book she’d been reading.
13.
On a cold, windy day at the beginning of May, Yury decides to pay a call on Lara at her home. He sees her fetching water from the well and retrieves her headscarf after it’s blown off by a gust of wind. She recognises him instantly and they go back to her building together. She’d seen him in the library and had also known that he’d been living in the area for the past year. Yury is taken by how effortlessly she carries the water, with the same kind of ease that she does everything.
There is the same ease and harmony in everything she does, as if, way back in her childhood, she had taken a flying start in life and everything had followed of itself, as naturally as a result flows from a cause.
14.
Lara takes Yury into her rooms. She and Katya got a room after the Town Housing Department took over their school. Yury sees the sign through the window: Moreau & Vetchinkin. Seed drills. Threshing machines. It reminds Yury of arriving on the train after his meeting with Strelnikov. He’s forgotten that Strelnikov is Pasha Antipov, Lara’s husband, and tells her about the encounter. Lara finds it extraordinary, ‘as if you were predestined to meet’. There’s no way she can’t know that it’s Pasha, right? She comments that Strelnikov seems to have made a good impression, and Yury replies that he has, but then goes on to say that he thinks he is a doomed man.
Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying, not as criminals, but as machines that have got out of control, like a run-away train.
This passage is quoted in Lara by Anna Pasternak as an example of Pasternak's being critical of the regime. In his speech at the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934, Alexei Surkov said:
‘The immense talent of B. L. Pasternak will never fully reveal itself until he has attached himself fully to the gigantic, rich and radiant subject matter [offered by] the Revolution; and he will become a great poet only when he has organically absorbed the Revolution into himself.’2
Surkov went on to become general secretary of the Writers’ Union and an enemy of Pasternak’s.
Yury’s speech here to Lara isn’t as much anti-revolutionary as it is life-affirming. He sees the regime as being willing to tear everything down, but without having thought about what might replace it.
Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself—the gift of life—is such a breath-takingly serious thing!
Lara tells him that there has been a lot of looting and shelling in the town, and that it was even worse under the Whites. She goes on to mention that Galiullin had turned up with the Czechs as a sort of governor-general.
The Czech Legion was formed by Czech nationalists who were working in Russia when the Great War broke out. It was enlarged by Czech and Slovak POWs and deserters from the Austrian army and, by 1917, had grown to some 35,000 soldiers. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they resolved to fight as part of the Czech army in France. To avoid risking crossing enemy lines, they decided to travel the long way round, along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok in Russia’s far east, and then across the USA. This journey took them through the Urals region, where they were drawn into the Civil War. You can read about it in depth in Orlando Figes’ excellent book, A People’s Tragedy.3
Lara explains how helpful Galiullin had been during that time, how he’d helped Lara to keep people safe. She explains that she’s known him since childhood and that she understands the Revolution better than Yury, as she’d grown up poor, right in the thick of it, while the rail workers’ strikes were going on.
Lara’s daughter Katya comes into the room and is introduced to Yury. She’s around eight years old. Lara invites Yury to have dinner with them, but he declines as it takes about four hours to get back to Varykino and so he has to leave. She persuades him to stay for another half hour…
15.
Lara does know that Strelnikov is her husband. Of course she does! Yury admits to having heard the rumours but doesn’t believe Lara. Lara explains that it was Strelnikov who had shelled Yuryatin, the very town where his wife and child are living. Horrible. ‘Of course it was his duty.’ Oh, Lara… She does, however, go on to call his resisting the temptation to come and see them ‘inconceivable.’ He’s in Siberia now fighting against Galiullin, two men who grew up together as best friends. She says that Galiullin knows only too well who Strelnikov is. She explains that the young cadets would kill their instructors at the Military Academy if they didn’t like them, claiming that the instructors were Bolshevik sympathisers. And they would beat up Jews. Lara said she would stand outside the building Strelnikov was using as his headquarters in the hope of seeing him. Pasha’s own father now lives close by in exile, as does Tiverzin—remember them from the railway strikes right at the beginning of the novel? Neither Pasha nor his father have made an effort to see one another.
They are made of stone, these people, they aren’t human, with all their rules and principles.
Despite everything, Lara believes that Pasha still loves them.
He wants to come back as a conqueror, full of honour and glory, and lay his laurels at our feet. Just like a child!
She might just be onto something.
16.
Two months have passed. Yury did end up staying at Lara’s that night, telling Tonya that he’d stayed at Samdevyatov’s inn. Yury’s been going back and forth over these two months, and he feels like a criminal. He’s feeling the weight of guilt, something about which Pasternak knew only too well. He’d had an affair with Zinaida Neuhaus, who later became his second wife, and then with Olga Ivinskaya, whom he never married but who was the love of his life—and, Anna Pasternak argues, the inspiration for Lara.
‘What next?’ He sometimes asked himself, and hoped wretchedly for some impossible, unexpected circumstance to solve his problem for him.
This brings to mind the morning Zinaida found Olga out. As Anna Pasternak tells it, Boris was outside at his ablutions, and Zinaida was tidying his desk for the day's work when she came upon a love letter from Olga. What makes it so strange is that Boris kept a famously bare, clutter-free desk and claimed never to hold on to letters at all, so how it came to be lying there is its own little mystery. However it surfaced, whether she moved a book to dust or it sat open in plain view, she stood and read it. (Remember we talked about how meticulous he was about keeping his workspace tidy?)
I must admit that in reading this passage alongside this biography, I find it difficult to separate Pasternak from Yury Zhivago. And knowing, as I do, how both stories end, it’s even more challenging to separate them.
Yury decides to go home and confess his affair to Tonya and never see Lara again. As he’s riding through the forest, he hears a nightingale begin to sing.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’ It called entreatingly. ‘Awake, O my soul, why dost thou slumber?’
This stirs Yury to change his mind. He doesn’t need to confess today. He would go back and finish his conversation with Lara, ‘more tenderly, in a manner more suitable to a last farewell.’ As he reaches the crossroads at the Moreau & Vetchinkin sign, he’s stopped by three horsemen. The chief among them informs Yury that he’s been recruited as the Comrade Doctor for the Forest Brotherhood. If he resists, he’ll be shot.
Catch you next week for Chapter 10!
The comparison is widely made; see Lesley Milne, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 234, quoted in Laura D. Weeks, ed., The Master and Margarita: A Critical Companion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 95.
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, 100th Anniversary ed. (London: The Bodley Head, 2017), 576.
