Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

  12. Katerina’s in The Storm: The Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–1886) wrote and staged his play The Storm in 1859. The heroine Katerina says, in a famous monologue in act 5, scene 4, “Where to go now? Home? No, whether home or the grave, it’s all the same to me.”

  13. The psalm: Psalm 103, which opens with the words quoted here, is sung as the first of three antiphons at the start of the Orthodox liturgy.

  14. the nine beatitudes: The beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–12) are sung as the third antiphon of the Orthodox liturgy.

  15. Presnya days: The armed riots of workers in the Presnya district of Moscow during December were the last incidents of the 1905 revolution.

  16. bashlyks: A bashlyk is a hood of Tartar origin with long tails that can be tied around the neck like a scarf.

  17. The Woman or the Vase: The title of a painting by G. I. Semiradsky (1843–1902), which depicts a market in ancient Rome, where a customer is trying to decide whether to buy a slave woman or a costly vase.

  18. dacha: The word dacha, in its broadest sense, refers to a country dwelling, which can be anything from a rented room in a cottage, to a privately owned country house, to a complex of buildings as significant as the Krüger estate referred to here.

  19. Theosophist: The spiritual teaching known as Theosophy (“God-wisdom”), first propounded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), is an esoteric doctrine of human perfectibility through communion with a “Spiritual Hierarchy” drawn from all of the world’s religions. It was especially popular in intellectual circles during the later nineteenth century, in Russia, Europe, and the United States.

  20. Cui’s nephew: César Cui (1835–1918), Russian composer, was one of a group of composers known as “the Five” or “the Mighty Little Bunch” (Moguchaya Kuchka), the other four being Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin.

  PART THREE

  1. “Askold’s grave” … Oleg’s steed: The actual grave is said to be the burial place of the Kievan prince Askold, still to be seen on the steep bank of the river Dnieper. Askold was killed in 882 by Oleg, the successor to Rurik, founder of the first dynasty of Russian rulers. These events were the subject of an opera composed by Alexei Verstovsky (1799–1862). It was predicted that Oleg’s death would be caused by his favorite horse. As it turned out, he died from the bite of a snake that hid in the skull of his horse long after its death.

  2. John the Theologian: St. John, the author of the fourth Gospel, known as John the Theologian in Orthodox tradition, was also the author of the book of Revelation, from which Zhivago quotes (“and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more,” Revelation 21:4).

  3. vodka and pancakes …: In the week before the beginning of the Great Lent, the forty-day fast period preceding Holy Week and Easter, it is the Russian custom to eat pancakes (bliny) with all sorts of fish and cream toppings, accompanied by vodka.

  4. Egyptian expedition … Fréjus: The ultimately unsuccessful expedition of the French army in Egypt lasted from 1798 to 1801, but Napoleon led it only until August of 1799, when news of unrest in Paris drew him back to the capital. He landed at the port of Fréjus in the south of France on October 9, 1799, and a month later led a bloodless coup against the then-ruling Directoire and set up the Consulat, with himself as first consul.

  5. Blok: Alexander Blok (1880–1921), one of the greatest Russian poets, was a leader of the symbolist movement. In an autobiographical sketch written near the end of his life, Pasternak noted: “A number of writers of my age as well as myself went through the years of our youth with Blok as our guide” (I Remember, translated by David Magarshack, New York, 1959). Blok is an important presence in Doctor Zhivago, where he is referred to a number of times.

  6. panikhidas: See part 1, note 1. During the prayers over a dead person before burial, the panikhida may be repeated several times.

  7. “Holy God … have mercy on us”: This prayer, known as the trisagion, is sung repeatedly after the funeral service as the coffin is carried out.

  PART FOUR

  1. Erfurt Program … Plekhanov: The Erfurt Program was a plan of action adopted by the German Social Democratic Party at its conference in Erfurt in 1891, based on a simplified or “vulgar” Marxist analysis. Presented a year later in The Class Struggle, by Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), one of the authors of the program, it became widely influential in the years before the 1917 revolution. Georgi Plekhanov (1857–1918), revolutionary activist and Marxist theorist, was one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. At the second party conference in 1903, Plekhanov broke with Lenin, who headed the Bolsheviks (“Majority”), and joined the Mensheviks (“Minority”), who tended to be more moderate.

  2. mad Gretchen: In the first part of Goethe’s Faust (see part 2, note 11), Faust sees the young Gretchen (Margarete) in the street and asks Mephistopheles to procure her for him. Gretchen’s purity makes the task difficult, but Faust succeeds in the end. Gretchen becomes pregnant, drowns her baby, is condemned to death, and awaits execution in prison, where Faust sees her for a last time.

  3. Eruslan Lazarevich: A hero of so-called lubok literature. A lubok is a folk woodcut or steel engraving, a form of broadside combining illustrations and text, produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and later.

  4. the Gypsy Panina: Varya Panina (1872–1911) was a famous Gypsy singer, whose voice had great depth and musicality. She began singing in Moscow restaurants and gave her first public concert, which was a huge success, in 1902, at the Hall of the Nobility in Petersburg. Alexander Blok called her “the celestial Varya Panina.” The words “led under the golden crown” refer to the Orthodox wedding service, during which the bride and groom stand under crowns held by their attendants.

  5. second autumn … action: The Eighth Army under General Alexei Brusilov (1853–1926) had occupied Galicia in 1914, but had been forced to withdraw during a general retreat. In 1915, the Eighth Army entered the Carpathians and moved towards Hungary, but again was forced to withdraw due to circumstances elsewhere.

  6. the Lutsk operation: Also known as the “Brusilov Offensive,” this was the liberation of the city of Lutsk, in northwest Ukraine, by four Russian armies under the command of General Brusilov on June 4–7, 1916.

  7. Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital: The hospital is named for the feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross (Krestovozdvizhenie), which falls on September 14/27 and commemorates the finding of the true cross in Jerusalem by the empress Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, in AD 326. Hospitals in Russia before the revolution were often named for church feasts.

  8. friend Horatio: Cf. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, lines 165–66: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” After an abandoned earlier attempt in 1923–24, Pasternak translated Hamlet in 1939 at the request of the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold was arrested and shot before he could produce the play. A production in 1943 at the Moscow Art Theater was canceled owing to the death of the director, the venerable Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the first performance finally took place in 1954, at the Pushkin Theater in Leningrad. Pasternak’s work on the play over the years (there were twelve versions among his papers) left a deep mark on Doctor Zhivago. In his essay “Translating Shakespeare,” Pasternak wrote: “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” (translated by Manya Harari, in I Remember, New York, 1959).

  9. Brusilov … on the offensive: See note 6 above.

  10. St. Tatiana’s committee: A benevolent association formed at the beginning of the war, under the honorary chairmanship of the grand duchess Tatiana Konstantinovna Romanova, to aid those at the front and the families of the woun
ded or dead.

  11. Wilhelm: Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) ruled as the last German emperor and king of Prussia from 1888 to 1918, when he was forced to abdicate.

  12. Dahl: Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801–1872) was an eminent Russian lexicographer, compiler of the four-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Russian Language (1863–1866). He was a proponent of native as opposed to imported vocabulary.

  13. equal before God: A reference to Paul’s epistle to the Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

  PART FIVE

  1. black earth region: The region of rich black soil (chernozem) extending from the northeast Ukraine across southern Russia.

  2. Provisional Government: When the February revolution of 1917 (February 23–27/March 8–12) brought about the abdication of Nicholas II and the end of imperial Russia, a provisional government was created, composed of an alliance of non-Communist liberal and socialist parties headed by Prince Georgi Lvov (1861–1925), who was a Constitutional Democrat. In July 1917, Prince Lvov was replaced by the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970). The intent of the Provisional Government was to create a democratically elected executive and assembly, but its program was opposed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and in October 1917 the Provisional Government was brought down by the Bolshevik revolution.

  3. the Time of Troubles: The period in Russian history from the death of the last representative of Rurik’s dynasty, the tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, in 1598, to the election in 1613 of the tsar Mikhail Romanov (1596–1645), founder of the new dynasty. The government was taken over by Boris Godunov (1551–1605), brother-in-law and chief adviser to the late tsar. His rule, from 1598 to 1603, was a time of great unrest, famine, factional struggles, international conspiracies, and false claims to the throne.

  4. Raspou … Trease: As the author has just said, Mlle Fleury swallows the endings of Russian words, including in this case the name of Grigory Rasputin (1869–1916), a bizarre holy man who attached himself to the imperial family, and the word “treason.”

  5. death penalty was reinstated: Among the first acts of the Provisional Government (see note 2 above) was the abolition of the death penalty. But in July 1917, owing to difficulties in the continuing war with Germany and the problem of mass desertions, special military courts were established and the death penalty was reinstated. It was abolished again by the Bolsheviks, and again quickly reinstated.

  6. Pechorin-like: Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, the protagonist of the novel A Hero of Our Time (1839–1841), by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), is a world-weary, cynical, coldhearted, but also courageous, sensitive, and melancholic army officer.

  7. State Duma: See part 2, note 1. The Fourth Duma sat from 1912 to 1917. During the February revolution, it sent a commission of representatives to replace the imperial ministers, leading to the creation of the Provisional Government (see note 2 above).

  8. People’s Will Schlüsselburgers: People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) was a revolutionary terrorist organization of the later nineteenth century, responsible among other things for the assassination of the emperor Alexander II in 1881. Their program was non-Marxist, aimed at a peasant revolution bypassing capitalism. Some of its members, released from prison in the early twentieth century, helped to form the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party. The Schlüsselburg Fortress, on the Neva near Lake Ladoga, was used as a political prison.

  9. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks: See part 4, note 1.

  10. Balaam: The story of Balaam and his ass is told in Numbers 22:21–35. The Moabite prophet Balaam fails to see the angel of God barring his way, but his she-ass does see the angel and finally cries out to warn him.

  11. Lot’s wife: Ustinya has confused the story of Balaam with the story of Lot, who was saved by the Lord when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, but whose wife was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at the cities (Genesis 19:1–26).

  12. the land question: One of the major questions facing the Provisional Government was the redistribution and continued cultivation of land seized from the former landowners, made especially urgent by the decline in farm production during the war years. In May 1917, Izvestia, the newspaper of the Petrograd Soviet, expressing Menshevik and SR views, published a lead article headlined “All land to the people.”

  13. the accursed questions: Dostoevsky coined this phrase (prokliatye voprosy) for the ultimate questions of human existence—the nature of man, the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of life, the riddle of death—“the great Russian questions,” as Nicolà Chiaromonte called them, which Pasternak raises again in Doctor Zhivago, “when it seemed that history … had suppressed them forever” (“Pasternak’s Message,” in Pasternak: Modern Judgements, edited by Donald Davie and Angela Livingstone, Nashville and London, 1970).

  14. in Paul … “interpretation”: The reference is to Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians 14:5 and 13: “Now I want you all to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy … Therefore, he who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret.”

  15. Petenka Verkhovensky … the Futurists: Pyotr (“Petenka”) Verkhovensky is the young radical organizer, theorist, and mystificator in Dostoevsky’s novel Demons (1872), who came to signify the empty babbler and demagogue. The Russian Futurists were a group of poets and artists who embraced the ideas of the Italian writer F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944) in his Futurist Manifesto of 1908 and shared his enthusiasm for dynamism, speed, and machines. In 1912, David Burlyuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others issued their own manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.

  16. mushroom rain: A warm rain with sunshine that is thought to encourage the growth of mushrooms.

  PART SIX

  1. annexates and contributses: “Annexations” and “contributions” were controversial terms in discussions of the Brest-Litovsk treaty of March 1918 between the new Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and Germany, Austria, and Turkey, ending Russia’s participation in World War I. The Russian negotiators, headed by Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein, 1879–1940), wanted no annexations of Russian territory and no payments of war reparations, but eventually agreed to both. The treaty was broken eight and a half months later.

  2. Saint-Just: Louis de Saint-Just (1767–1794) was a French revolutionary and a close associate of Robespierre, with whom he was executed on 9 Thermidor (July 17, 1794), bringing an end to the Reign of Terror.

  3. War and Peace … The Backbone Flute: These and Man, mentioned a little later, are titles of books of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) published during the years of the war and the revolution. Pasternak had great admiration for these early poems and for their author.

  4. Ippolit … The Adolescent: Ippolit is the consumptive rebel in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Raskolnikov is the hero of Crime and Punishment; the first-person narrator-hero of The Adolescent is Arkady Dolgoruky. They are all rootless young intellectuals in great inner turmoil.

  5. Mme Roland’s before the Convention: Manon Roland (1754–1793), an ardent republican and admirer of Plutarch, kept a salon in Paris that had considerable political influence and was frequented mainly by the party of the Girondins, who opposed the violent measures of the Montagnards. She was executed along with other Girondins on October 31, 1793. Her Memoirs are an important record of the time. The revolutionary National Convention governed France from September 1792 to October 1795.

  6. two left SR names: That is, the names of two left-leaning members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (see part 5, note 8). The pseudonyms themselves are absurd, as was often the case at that time.

  7. to a victorious conclusion: A watchword of Kerensky and the Provisional Government, who pledged to continue the war with Germany after the February revolution. The more radicalized workers and armed forces were aligned with the Bolsheviks in opposing the war. />
  8. Antaeus … an old Bestuzhevist: The mythological giant Antaeus kept his immense strength as long as he touched the earth. Hercules, who was unable to defeat him by throwing him to the ground, discovered his secret, held him up in the air, and crushed him to death. The historian Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin founded the St. Petersburg Higher Women’s Courses, which opened in 1878 and were named for their director. This was the first institution of higher education for women in Russia.

  9. the days following the Dormition: The feast of the Dormition (in the West the Assumption) of the Mother of God falls on August 15/28, which in Russia is already the beginning of autumn.

  10. Hegel and Benedetto Croce: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a philosophical idealist and the creator of an integral philosophical system that was of great influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) was an Italian philosopher and critic, an idealist deeply influenced by Hegel, and politically a liberal.

  11. the October fighting: That is, the outbreak of the October revolution of 1917 (see part 1, note 2, and part 5, note 2).

  12. the time of the civil war: The Russian Civil War (1918–1923) broke out after the Bolsheviks assumed power and withdrew from the alliance opposed to the Central Powers in World War I. The Red Army was confronted by various forces from the former empire, known collectively as the White Army, made up of army officers, cadets, landowners, and foreign forces opposed to the revolution. The main White leaders were Generals Yudenich, Denikin, and Wrangel and Admiral Kolchak. Their units fought not only with the Red Army, but also with the Ukrainian nationalist Green Army and the Ukrainian anarchist Black Army led by General Nestor Makhno. The Whites eventually lost on all fronts, and the major fighting ended in 1922 with the Red Army’s capture of Vladivostok, though the last pocket of White resistance in the Far East capitulated only in June 1923. The events of the civil war form the backdrop of most of book 2 of Doctor Zhivago.