Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

I would pretend (metaphorically) to have seen nature and universe themselves not as a picture made or fastened on an immovable wall, but as a sort of painted canvas roof or curtain in the air, incessantly pulled and blown and flapped by a something of an immaterial unknown and unknowable wind. —BORIS PASTERNAK Letter (in English) to Stephen Spender, August 22, 1959

The first edition of Doctor Zhivago, the major work of one of the most important Russian writers of the twentieth century, was an Italian translation published in 1957. The next year translations of the novel into English and a number of other languages appeared and Russian-language editions were published in Italy and the United States. But it would take another thirty years and the reforms of perestroika before the novel could be published in Russia. Those circumstances and all that determined them made the reception of the book highly problematical at the time of its appearance. Pasternak had spent ten years, from 1946 to 1955, writing Doctor Zhivago. He considered it the work that justified his life and his survival, when so many of his fellow Russians had perished during the first decades of the century from war, revolution, famine, forced labor, and political terror. After Stalin’s death in 1953 came a period known as the Thaw, when there was a general easing of the mechanisms of repression and ideological control.

The chill made itself felt in literary circles as well. In September 1956, the editors of Novy Mir returned the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to Pasternak with a detailed letter explaining that the spirit of the novel, its emotional content, and the author’s point of view were incompatible with the spirit of the revolution and the Marxist ideology that was the theoretical foundation of the Soviet state.

When publication of the Italian translation was announced for the fall of 1957, the news caused great uneasiness in the Soviet literary bureaucracy. Pressure was put on Pasternak to make Feltrinelli return the manuscript for revision, telegrams were sent to Milan, and finally, in October 1957, Alexei Surkov, the head of the Writers’ Union, went to Italy to speak with the publisher in person. But Feltrinelli refused to delay the novel’s release and had already licensed translation rights to publishers in other countries.

Doctor Zhivago is a highly unusual book, an incomparable book in the most literal sense. Pasternak suggested its unique quality in his reply to a letter from an English schoolteacher: The objective world in my habitual, natural grasping, is a vast infinite inspiration, that sketches, erases, chooses, compares and describes and composes itself … living, moving reality in such a rendering must have a touch of spontaneous subjectivity, even of arbitrariness, wavering, tarrying, doubting, joining and disjoining elements … Over and above the times, events and persons there is a nature, a spirit of their very succession. The frequent coincidences in the plot are (in this case) not the secret, trick expedients of the novelist. They are traits to characterize that somewhat willful, free, fanciful flow of reality. (Letter in English to John Harris, February 8, 1959; published in Scottish Slavonic Review, 1984)

But in Doctor Zhivago the seeming chaos of events will suddenly be pierced through by forces of a higher order, coming from a greater depth in time—folkloric, cultural, ultimately religious—which are also really present, which reassert their continuing presence, in the most ordinary everyday life. Now, fifty years after its first publication, when the circumstances of the Cold War are more or less behind us, we may be able to read the novel in a new way, to see more clearly the universality of the image that Pasternak held up against the deadly fiction of his time.

In another letter, written to his parents in Berlin in the spring of 1933, on Hitler’s accession to power, Pasternak defined the tragedy that was being played out in Europe with remarkable clarity and in terms that reveal the essence of his historical understanding as it would finally be embodied in Doctor Zhivago: … however strange it may seem to you, one and the same thing depresses me in both our own state of affairs and yours. It is that this movement is not Christian, but nationalistic; that is, it runs the same danger of degenerating into the bestiality of facts. It has the same alienation from the age-old, gracious tradition that breathes with transformations and anticipations, rather than the cold statements of blind insanity. These movements are on a par, one is evoked by the other, and it is all the sadder for this reason. They are the left and right wings of a single materialistic night. (Published in Quarto, London, 1980)

In an important speech to a plenum session of the union, held in Minsk in February 1936, he said: The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it … Art is inconceivable without risk, without inner sacrifice; freedom and boldness of imagination can be won only in the process of work, and it is there that the unforeseen I spoke of a moment ago must intervene, and there no directives can help.

The change in him is suggested by the two versions of the poem “Hamlet” that he wrote in 1946. The first, written in February, before the denunciations of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, has just two stanzas: Here I am. I step out on the stage. Leaning against a doorpost, I try to catch the echoes in the distance Of what will happen in my age. It is the noise of acts played far away. I take part in all five. I am alone. All drowns in pharisaism. Life is no stroll through a field. The second, written in late 1946, consists of four stanzas: The hum dies down. I step out on the stage. Leaning against a doorpost, I try to catch the echoes from far off Of what my age is bringing. The night’s darkness focuses on me Thousands of opera glasses. Abba Father, if only it can be, Let this cup pass me by. I love the stubbornness of your intent And agree to play this role. But now a different drama’s going on, Spare me, then, this once. But the order of the acts has been thought out, And leads to just one end. I’m alone, all drowns in pharisaism. Life is no stroll through a field.

“From the moment of the ghost’s appearance, Hamlet gives up his will in order to ‘do the will of him that sent him.’ Hamlet is not a drama of weakness, but of duty and self-denial … What is important is that chance has allotted Hamlet the role of judge of his own time and servant of the future. Hamlet is the drama of a high destiny, of a life devoted and preordained to a heroic task.”

Now it has become an act of witness, the acceptance of a duty. The second version of “Hamlet” became the first of Yuri Zhivago’s poems in the final part of Doctor Zhivago. With the new resolve that had come to him, Pasternak was able to take up the long prose work he had been contemplating all his life and finally complete it.

There is an extraordinary play with the names of minor characters in the novel. They are all plausible, but often barely so, and they sometimes have an oddly specific meaning. For instance, there is Maxím Aristárkovich Klintsóv-Pogorévshikh, whose name has a rather aristocratic ring until you come to Pogorévshikh, which means “burned down.” Others are simply tongue twisters: Anfím Efímovich Samdevyátov, or Rufína Onísimovna Vóit-Voitkóvskaya. There are too many of these names for us to comment on them, but the Russian-less reader should know that for Russian readers, too, they are strange and far-fetched, and that Pasternak clearly meant them to be so. Dmitri Bykov, in his Boris Pasternak (Moscow, 2007), thinks they suggest a realm alien to Zhivago—deep Siberia, the city outskirts—and almost a different breed of man.

The place-names for the parts of the novel set in the Moscow region and western Russia are real; the place-names in the Urals—Yuriatin, Varykino, Rynva—are fictional. And there is a corresponding difference in “worlds”—the one more historical, the other more folkloric. The novel moves from the one to the other and back again. There is also a double sense of time, marked by two different calendars, civil and church-festal, the first linear, the second cyclical.

“The house soon turned into a sleeping kingdom.”

We have tried to match as closely as possible the wide range of voices, the specific cadences, and the sudden shifts of register in Pasternak’s prose.

The poems of Yuri Zhivago, which make up the final part of the novel, are not merely an addendum; they are inseparable from the whole and its ...

Some clearly reflect moments in the novel; we even overhear Zhivago working on several of them; but it is a mistake to try to pinpoint each poem to ...

In translating them, we have let the meaning guide us, and have welcomed poetry when it has offered itself. We have sacrificed rhyme, but have tried to keep the rhythm, especially when it is as important as it is in “A Wedding,” which is modeled on a popular song form called the chastushka. Above all, we have tried to ...

“You come across talented people,” said Nikolai Nikolaevich. “But now various circles and associations are the fashion. Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it’s a faith in Soloviev,6 or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently. Is there anything in the world that merits faithfulness? Such things are very few. I think we must be faithful to immortality, that other, slightly stronger name for life. We must keep faith in immortality, we must be faithful to Christ! Ah, you’re wincing, poor fellow. Again you haven’t understood a thing.”

But that’s all rubbish. Let’s go back to what we were talking about. I said we must be faithful to Christ. I’ll explain at once. You don’t understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one’s neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man’s heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable—namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. Bear in mind that this is still extremely new. The ancients did not have history in this sense. Then there was the sanguinary swinishness of the cruel, pockmarked Caligulas, who did not suspect how giftless all oppressors are. They had the boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. Ages and generations breathed freely only after Christ. Only after him did life in posterity...

He went to the ravine and began to climb down. He climbed down from the sparse and clean woods that covered the top of the ravine to the alder bushes that spread over its bottom. Here there was damp darkness, windfall and carrion; there were few flowers, and the jointed stalks of horsetail looked like rods and staffs with Egyptian ornaments, as in his illustrated Holy Scriptures. Yura felt more and more sad. He wanted to cry. He fell to his knees and dissolved in tears. “Angel of God, my holy protector,” Yura prayed, “set my mind firmly on the true path and tell dear mama that it’s good for me here, so that she doesn’t worry. If there is life after death, Lord, place mama in paradise, where the faces of the saints and the righteous shine like stars. Mama was so good, it can’t be that she was a sinner, have mercy on her, Lord, make it so that she doesn’t suffer. Mama!”—in heartrending anguish he called out to her in heaven as a newly canonized saint, and suddenly could not bear it, fell to the ground, and lost consciousness.

“I’ve got to quit. I’ll turn in my resignation from the health commission and the institute, and try to hang on at the hospital until they throw me out. I don’t want to frighten you, but at times I have the feeling that I’ll be arrested one of these days.” “God forbid, Yurochka. Fortunately, we’re still far from that. But you’re right. It won’t hurt to be more careful. As far as I’ve noticed, each time this young power installs itself, it goes through several stages. In the beginning it’s the triumph of reason, the critical spirit, the struggle against prejudices. “Then comes the second period. The dark forces of the ‘hangers-on,’ the sham sympathizers, gain the majority. Suspiciousness springs up, denunciations, intrigues, hatred. And you’re right, we’re at the beginning of the second phase.

Midway through their reading it grew dark, they had difficulty making out the print and had to light the lamp. And Moscow below and in the distance, the native city of the author and of half of what had befallen him, Moscow now seemed to them, not the place of these events, but the main heroine of a long story, which they had reached the end of that evening, with the notebook in their hands. Though the brightening and liberation they had expected after the war did not come with victory, as had been thought, even so, the portents of freedom were in the air all through the postwar years, constituting their only historical content. To the aging friends at the window it seemed that this freedom of the soul had come, that precisely on that evening the future had settled down tangibly in the streets below, that they themselves had entered into that future and henceforth found themselves in it. A happy, tender sense of peace about this holy city and about the whole earth, about the participants in this story who had lived till that evening and about their children, filled them and enveloped them in an inaudible music of happiness, which spread far around. And it was as if the book in their hands knew it all and lent their feelings support and confirmation.