Doctor Zhivago (3 page)

Pasternak found it impossible to continue work on the
Notes
in the face of the intensification of Stalin’s terror in the later thirties, particularly the great purges that began in 1937. As Lazar Fleishman has written:

Pasternak always had a double view of the revolution. He saw it, on the one hand, as a justified expression of the need of the people, and, on the other, as a program imposed by “professional revolutionaries” that was leading to a deadly uniformity and mediocrity. His doubts began as early as 1918 and increased as time went on.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, there was a power struggle within the Communist Party leadership, essentially between Stalin and Trotsky, which ended with Trotsky being removed from the Central Committee in 1927, exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and finally expelled from Russia in 1929. Stalin became the undisputed head of state and ruled with dictatorial powers. In 1928, he abolished the New Economic Policy (NEP), which Lenin had introduced to allow for private enterprise on a small scale, and instituted the first Five-Year Plan for the development of heavy industry and the collectivization of agriculture. On April 23, 1932, a decree on “The Restructuring of Literary Organizations” was published, aimed at ending “stagnation” in literature by putting a stop to rivalries among literary factions. This led to the creation of the Soviet Writers’ Union, a single body governing all literary affairs, of which every practicing writer was required to be a member. And in October 1932, Stalin defined “socialist realism” as the single artistic method acceptable for Soviet literature. The Writers’ Union drew up a statute at its first congress in 1934 defining socialist realism as a method that “demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover,
the truthfulness and historical concreteness of reality must be linked with the task of the ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of communism.” The historical theory behind socialist realism was the dialectical materialism of Marx; its necessary representative was the positive hero.

Pasternak made two trips to the Urals during that period. In 1931 he was sent as a member of a “writers’ brigade” to observe the Five-Year Plan in action and report on its successes—in other words, to be “re-educated.” He was curious to see what changes had occurred since his last trip there fifteen years earlier. What he found disturbed him very much—not the scale of the construction, but the depersonalization of the people. He quit the brigade early and returned home. In the summer of 1932, the official attitude towards Pasternak improved and a collection of his poems, entitled
Second Birth
, was published. He was rewarded with a new trip to the Urals, this time for a month’s vacation with his second wife, Zinaida Neuhaus, and her two sons. Here for the first time he saw the results of the forced collectivization of agriculture, which had led to the breakdown of farming on a vast scale and a famine that cost millions of peasant lives. These disastrous effects of Stalin’s policy went entirely unreported in the Soviet press. He wrote a letter to the directors of the Writers’ Union detailing what he had seen, but it was ignored.

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:

After the appearance of
Second Birth
, Pasternak entered a more or less silent period, in terms of publication, which lasted until 1941. But he did address congresses of the Writers’ Union several times during those years. In
an important speech to a plenum session of the union, held in Minsk in February 1936, he said:

He went on to describe the inner change he was undergoing:

To earn his living during this time, Pasternak turned to translation. In 1939, the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold invited him to make a new version of
Hamlet.
Other commissions for Shakespeare plays followed during the war years, but the work on
Hamlet
had a profound effect on Pasternak (twelve versions of the play were found among his papers). During the war years, there was a spirit of genuine unity among the Russian people in the opposition to a real enemy, after the nightmarish conditions of the terror—a spirit reflected in the epilogue to
Doctor Zhivago.
Pasternak believed then that the changes brought about by necessity would lead to the final liberation that had been the promise of the revolution from the beginning. What came instead, starting in August 1946, was a new series of purges, an ideological constriction signaled by virulent denunciations of the poet Anna Akhmatova and the prose writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, new restrictions on film and theater directors, and the “bringing into line” of the composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev. And a campaign also began against Pasternak, who was effectively silenced as a writer until after Stalin’s death.

Pasternak lived through a profound spiritual crisis at this time, what might be called his “Hamlet moment.” 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:

The second, written in late 1946, consists of four stanzas:

This second version, adding the figure of Christ to those of Hamlet and the poet, gives great depth and extension to the notion of reluctant acceptance of the Father’s stubborn intent. Pasternak draws the same parallel in the commentary on
Hamlet
in his
Notes on Translating Shakespeare
, written in the summer of 1946: “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.”

Early in his career, Pasternak had likened poetry to a sponge left on a wet garden bench, which he would wring out at night “to the health of the greedy paper.” 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.

RICHARD PEVEAR

Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father’s first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of the first name and patronymic; diminutives are commonly used among family and friends; the family name alone can also be used familiarly, and on occasion only the patronymic is used, usually among the lower classes.

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. Sometimes the most mundane moment suddenly acquires another dimension, as when the narrator, describing the end of a farewell party, says: “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 true outcome—what remains, what endures. 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 a specific passage or event in the novel. 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 keep the tone and terseness of the originals, which are often intentionally prosaic.

They walked and walked and sang “Memory Eternal,”
¹
and whenever they stopped, the singing seemed to be carried on by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind.

Passersby made way for the cortège, counted the wreaths, crossed themselves. The curious joined the procession, asked: “Who’s being buried?” “Zhivago,” came the answer. “So that’s it. Now I see.” “Not him. Her.” “It’s all the same. God rest her soul. A rich funeral.”

The last minutes flashed by, numbered, irrevocable. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and those who dwell therein.” The priest, tracing a cross, threw a handful of earth onto Marya Nikolaevna. They sang “With the souls of the righteous.” A terrible bustle began. The coffin was closed, nailed shut, lowered in. A rain of clods drummed down as four shovels hastily filled the grave. Over it a small mound rose. A ten-year-old boy climbed onto it.

Only in the state of torpor and insensibility that usually comes at the end of a big funeral could it have seemed that the boy wanted to speak over his mother’s grave.