Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

  The yard porter Markel came to put the wardrobe together. He brought along his six-year-old daughter Marinka. Marinka was given a stick of barley sugar. Marinka snuffed her nose and, licking the candy and her slobbery fingers, watched frowningly as her father worked.

  For a while everything went smoothly. The wardrobe gradually grew before Anna Ivanovna’s eyes. Suddenly, when it only remained to attach the top, she decided to help Markel. She stood on the high bottom of the wardrobe and, tottering, bumped against the side, which was held together only by a mortise and tenon. The slipknot Markel had tied temporarily to hold the side came undone. Together with the boards that went crashing to the floor, Anna Ivanovna also fell on her back and hurt herself badly.

  “Eh, dear mistress,” Markel murmured as he rushed to her, “why on earth did you go and do that, dear heart? Is the bone in one piece? Feel the bone. The bone’s the main thing, forget the soft part, the soft part’ll mend and, as they say, it’s only for ladies’ playzeer. Don’t you howl, you wicked thing,” he fell upon the weeping Marinka. “Wipe your snot and go to mama. Eh, dear mistress, couldn’t I have managed this whole clothing antimony without you? You probably think, at first glance I’m a regular yard porter, but if you reason right, our natural state is cabinetmaking, what we did was cabinetmaking. You wouldn’t believe how much of that furniture, them wardrobes and cupboards, went through my hands, in the varnishing sense, or, on the contrary, some such mahogany wood or walnut. Or, for instance, what matches, in the rich bride sense, went floating, forgive the expression, just went floating right past my nose. And the cause of it all—the drinking article, strong drink.”

  With Markel’s help, Anna Ivanovna got to the armchair, which he rolled up to her, and sat down, groaning and rubbing the hurt place. Markel set about restoring what had been demolished. When the top was attached, he said: “Well, now it’s just the doors, and it’ll be fit for exhibition.”

  Anna Ivanovna did not like the wardrobe. In appearance and size it resembled a catafalque or a royal tomb. It inspired a superstitious terror in her. She gave the wardrobe the nickname of “Askold’s grave.” By this name she meant Oleg’s steed,1 a thing that brings death to its owner. Being a well-read woman in a disorderly way, Anna Ivanovna confused the related notions.

  With this fall began Anna Ivanovna’s predisposition for lung diseases.

  2

  Anna Ivanovna spent the whole of November 1911 in bed. She had pneumonia.

  Yura, Misha Gordon, and Tonya were to finish university and the Higher Women’s Courses in the spring. Yura would graduate as a doctor, Tonya as a lawyer, and Misha as a philologist in the philosophy section.

  Everything in Yura’s soul was shifted and entangled, and everything was sharply original—views, habits, and predilections. He was exceedingly impressionable, the novelty of his perceptions not lending itself to description.

  But greatly as he was drawn to art and history, Yura had no difficulty in choosing a career. He considered art unsuitable as a calling, in the same sense that innate gaiety or an inclination to melancholy could not be a profession. He was interested in physics and natural science, and held that in practical life one should be occupied with something generally useful. And so he chose medicine.

  Four years back, during his first year, he had spent a whole semester in the university basement studying anatomy on corpses. He reached the cellar by a winding stair. Inside the anatomy theater disheveled students crowded in groups or singly. Some ground away, laying out bones and leafing through tattered, rot-eaten textbooks; others silently dissected in a corner; still others bantered, cracked jokes, and chased the rats that scurried in great numbers over the stone floor of the mortuary. In its darkness, the corpses of unknown people glowed like phosphorus, striking the eye with their nakedness: young suicides of unestablished identity; drowned women, well preserved and still intact. Alum injections made them look younger, lending them a deceptive roundness. The dead bodies were opened up, taken apart, and prepared, and the beauty of the human body remained true to itself in any section, however small, so that the amazement before some mermaid rudely thrown onto a zinc table did not go away when diverted from her to her amputated arm or cut-off hand. The basement smelled of formalin and carbolic acid, and the presence of mystery was felt in everything, beginning with the unknown fate of all these stretched-out bodies and ending with the mystery of life and death itself, which had settled here in the basement as if in its own home or at its headquarters.

  The voice of this mystery, stifling everything else, pursued Yura, interfering with his dissecting. But many other things in life interfered with him in the same way. He was used to it, and the distracting interference did not disturb him.

  Yura thought well and wrote very well. Still in his high school years he dreamed of prose, of a book of biographies, in which he could place, in the form of hidden explosive clusters, the most astounding things of all he had managed to see and ponder. But he was too young for such a book, and so he made up for it by writing verses, as a painter might draw sketches all his life for a great painting he had in mind.

  Yura forgave these verses the sin of their coming to be for the sake of their energy and originality. These two qualities, energy and originality, Yura considered representative of reality in the arts, which were pointless, idle, and unnecessary in all other respects.

  Yura realized how much he owed to his uncle for the general qualities of his character.

  Nikolai Nikolaevich was living in Lausanne. In the books he published there in Russian and in translation, he developed his long-standing notion of history as a second universe, erected by mankind in response to the phenomenon of death with the aid of the phenomena of time and memory. The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.

  Even more than on Yura, the circle of these notions had an effect on his friend. Under their influence, Misha Gordon chose philosophy as his specialty. In his department, he attended lectures on theology, and he even had thoughts of transferring later to the theological academy.

  The uncle’s influence furthered Yura and liberated him, but it fettered Misha. Yura understood what role in Misha’s extreme enthusiasms was played by his origins. From cautious tactfulness, he did not try to talk Misha out of his strange projects. But he often wished to see an empirical Misha, much closer to life.

  3

  One evening at the end of November, Yura came home late from the university, very tired, having eaten nothing all day. He was told there had been a terrible alarm in the afternoon; Anna Ivanovna had had convulsions, several doctors had come, they had advised sending for a priest, but then the idea was dropped. Now it was better, she was conscious and asked them to send Yura to her without delay, as soon as he came home.

  Yura obeyed and, without changing, went to the bedroom.

  The room bore signs of the recent turmoil. With soundless movements, a nurse was rearranging something on the bedside table. Crumpled napkins and damp towels from compresses lay about. The water in the rinsing bowl was slightly pink from spat-up blood. In it lay glass ampoules with broken-off tips and waterlogged wads of cotton.

  The sick woman was bathed in sweat and licked her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. Her face was noticeably pinched compared with the morning, when Yura had last seen her.

  “Haven’t they made a wrong diagnosis?” he thought. “There are all the signs of galloping pneumonia. This looks like the crisis.” Having greeted Anna Ivanovna and said something encouragingly empty, as people always do in such cases, he sent the nurse away. Taking Anna Ivanovna’s wrist to count her pulse, he slipped his other hand under his jacket for the stethoscope. Anna Ivanovna moved her head to indicate that it was unnecessary. Yura realized that she needed something else from him. Gathering her strength, Anna Ivanovna began to speak:

  “See, they wanted to confess me … Death is hanging over me … Any moment it may … You’re afraid to h
ave a tooth pulled, it hurts, you prepare yourself … But here it’s not a tooth, it’s all, all of you, all your life … snap, and it’s gone, as if with pincers … And what is it? Nobody knows … And I’m anxious and frightened.”

  Anna Ivanovna fell silent. Tears ran down her cheeks. Yura said nothing. After a moment Anna Ivanovna went on.

  “You’re talented … And talent is … not like everybody else … You must know something … Tell me something … Reassure me.”

  “Well, what can I say?” Yura said, fidgeted uneasily on the chair, got up, paced the room, and sat down again. “First, tomorrow you’ll get better—there are signs, I’ll stake my life on it. And then—death, consciousness, faith in resurrection … You want to know my opinion as a natural scientist? Maybe some other time? No? Right now? Well, you know best. Only it’s hard to do it like this, straight off.”

  And he gave her a whole impromptu lecture, surprised himself at the way it came out of him.

  “Resurrection. The crude form in which it is affirmed for the comfort of the weakest is foreign to me. And I’ve always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different way. Where will you find room for all these hordes gathered over thousands of years? The universe won’t suffice for them, and God, the good, and meaning will have to take themselves out of the world. They’ll be crushed in this greedy animal stampede.

  “But all the time one and the same boundlessly identical life fills the universe and is renewed every hour in countless combinations and transformations. Here you have fears about whether you will resurrect, yet you already resurrected when you were born, and you didn’t notice it.

  “Will it be painful for you, does tissue feel its own disintegration? That is, in other words, what will become of your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let’s look into it. To wish consciously to sleep means sure insomnia, the conscious attempt to feel the working of one’s own digestion means the sure upsetting of its nervous regulation. Consciousness is poison, a means of self-poisoning for the subject who applies it to himself. Consciousness is a light directed outwards, consciousness lights the way before us so that we don’t stumble. Consciousness is the lit headlights at the front of a moving locomotive. Turn their light inwards and there will be a catastrophe.

  “And so, what will become of your consciousness? Yours. Yours. But what are you? There’s the whole hitch. Let’s sort it out. What do you remember about yourself, what part of your constitution have you been aware of? Your kidneys, liver, blood vessels? No, as far as you can remember, you’ve always found yourself in an external, active manifestation, in the work of your hands, in your family, in others. And now more attentively. Man in other people is man’s soul. That is what you are, that is what your conscience breathed, relished, was nourished by all your life. Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what then? You have been in others and you will remain in others. And what difference does it make to you that later it will be called memory? It will be you, having entered into the composition of the future.

  “Finally, one last thing. There’s nothing to worry about. There is no death. Death is not in our line. But you just said ‘talent,’ and that’s another thing, that is ours, that is open to us. And talent, in the highest, broadest sense, is the gift of life.

  “There shall be no more death, says John the Theologian,2 and just listen to the simplicity of his argumentation. There shall be no more death, because the former things have passed. It’s almost the same as: there shall be no more death, because we’ve already seen all that, it’s old and we’re tired of it, and now we need something new, and this new thing is eternal life.”

  He paced up and down the room while he spoke. “Sleep,” he said, going to the bed and putting his hands on Anna Ivanovna’s head. Several minutes went by. Anna Ivanovna began to fall asleep.

  Yura quietly left the room and told Egorovna to send the nurse to the bedroom. “Devil knows,” he thought, “I’m turning into some sort of quack. Casting spells, healing by the laying on of hands.”

  The next day Anna Ivanovna felt better.

  4

  Anna Ivanovna contrived to improve. In the middle of December she tried getting up, but was still very weak. She was advised to have a good long stay in bed.

  She often sent for Yura and Tonya and for hours told them about her childhood, spent on her grandfather’s estate, Varykino, on the river Rynva in the Urals. Neither Yura nor Tonya had ever been there, but from Anna Ivanovna’s words, Yura could easily imagine those fifteen thousand acres of age-old, impenetrable forest, dark as night, pierced in two or three places, as if stabbing it with the knife of its meanders, by the swift river with its stony bottom and steep banks on the Krügers’ side.

  In those days Yura and Tonya were having evening dress made for them for the first time in their lives—for Yura a two-piece black suit, and for Tonya an evening gown of light satin with a slightly open neck. They were going to wear these outfits for the first time on the twenty-seventh, at the traditional annual Christmas party at the Sventitskys’.

  The orders from the men’s shop and the dressmaker were delivered on the same day. Yura and Tonya tried the new things on, remained pleased, and had no time to take them off again before Egorovna came from Anna Ivanovna and said that she was sending for them. As they were, in their new clothes, Yura and Tonya went to Anna Ivanovna.

  When they appeared, she propped herself on her elbow, looked at them from the side, told them to turn around, and said:

  “Very nice. Simply ravishing. I didn’t know they were ready. Now, Tonya, once more. No, never mind. It seemed to me that the basque was slightly puckered. Do you know why I sent for you? But first a few words about you, Yura.”

  “I know, Anna Ivanovna. I myself asked them to show you that letter. You, like Nikolai Nikolaevich, think that I shouldn’t have renounced it. A moment’s patience. It’s bad for you to talk. I’ll explain everything to you at once. Though you know it all very well.

  “And so, first. The case to do with the Zhivago inheritance exists for the sake of feeding lawyers and collecting court costs, but in reality there is no inheritance, there’s nothing but debts and entanglements, and the filth that floats to the surface along with it all. If it were possible to turn anything into money, do you think I would give it to the court and not make use of it myself? But the thing is that the case has been trumped up, and rather than rummage through it all, it was better to renounce my rights to the nonexistent property and yield it to several false rivals and envious impostors. Of the claims of a certain Madame Alice, who lives in Paris under the name Zhivago, I heard long ago. But new claimants have been added, and, I don’t know about you, but I discovered it all quite recently.

  “It turns out that, while mama was still alive, father became enamored of a certain dreamer and madcap, Princess Stolbunova-Enrizzi. This person has a son by my father, he is now ten years old, his name is Evgraf.

  “The princess is a recluse. She and her son live on unknown means without ever quitting her private house on the outskirts of Omsk. I was shown a photograph of the house. A handsome place with a five-window façade, single-pane windows, and stucco medallions along the cornice. And all the while recently I’ve been feeling as if this house is looking at me unkindly with its five windows across the thousands of miles separating European Russia from Siberia, and sooner or later will give me the evil eye. So what is it all to me: fictitious capital, artificially created rivals, their ill will and envy? Plus the lawyers.”

  “All the same, you shouldn’t have renounced it,” Anna Ivanovna objected. “Do you know why I sent for you?” she repeated and at once went on: “I remembered his name. Remember, yesterday I told you about a forester. His name was Vakkh. Splendid, isn’t it? A dark forest horror, overgrown with beard up to his eyebrows, and—Vakkh! His face was disfigured, a bear mauled him, but he fought him off. They’re all like that there. With names like that. One syllable. So that it’s sonorous an
d vivid. Vakkh. Or Lupp. Or, say, Faust. Listen, listen. Sometimes they’d come and report something. There’d be some Avkt or Frol there, like a blast from grandfather’s double-barreled shotgun, and in a moment the herd of us would dart from the nursery to the kitchen. And there, if you can picture it, there would be a charcoal burner from the forest with a live bear cub or a prospector from a far-off border with a mineral sample. And grandfather would give each of them a little note. For the office. Money for one, grain for another, ammunition for a third. And the forest just outside the windows. And the snow, the snow! Higher than the house!” Anna Ivanovna began to cough.

  “Stop, mama, it’s not good for you,” Tonya warned. Yura seconded her.

  “It’s nothing. Trifles. Yes, by the way, Egorovna let on that you’re not sure whether you should go to the Christmas party the day after tomorrow. I don’t want to hear any more of that foolishness! Shame on you. What kind of doctor are you after that, Yura? So, it’s settled. You’re going, with no further discussion. But let’s go back to Vakkh. This Vakkh was a blacksmith in his youth. He had his guts busted up in a fight. So he made himself new ones out of iron. What an odd fellow you are, Yura. As if I don’t understand. Of course, not literally. But that’s what people said.”

  Anna Ivanovna coughed again, this time for much longer. The fit would not pass. She could not catch her breath.

  Yura and Tonya rushed to her at the same moment. They stood shoulder to shoulder by her bed. Still coughing, Anna Ivanovna seized their touching hands in hers and held them united for a time. Then, regaining control of her voice and breath, she said: