Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

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been thought, even so, the portents of freedom were in the air all through the postwar years, constituting their only historical content.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.