Doctor Zhivago (46 page)

“But as soon as the young man, after his imitations of Ossian or Parny or the ‘Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,’ hit upon the short lines of ‘The Little Town’ or ‘Epistle to My Sister,’ or ‘To My Inkstand’ from the later Kishinev period, or upon the rhythms of the ‘Letter to Yudin,’ the whole future Pushkin awakened in the adolescent.
⁴

“Light and air, the noise of life, things, essences burst from outside into the poem as into a room through an open window. Objects from the external world, everyday objects, nouns, thronging and pressing, took over the lines, ousting the less definite parts of speech. Objects, objects, objects lined up in a rhymed column along the edge of the poem.

“As if this later celebrated Pushkinian tetrameter was a sort of metrical unit of Russian life, its yardstick, as if it was a measure taken from the whole of Russian existence, as when the form of a foot is outlined to make the pattern for a shoe, or when you give the size so as to find a glove to fit your hand.

“So later the rhythms of talking Russia, the chant of her colloquial speech, were expressed metrically in Nekrasov’s trimeters and dactylic rhymes.”
⁵

“How I would like, along with having a job, working the earth, or practicing medicine, to nurture something lasting, fundamental, to write some scholarly work or something artistic.

“Everyone is born a Faust, to embrace everything, experience everything, express everything. The fact that Faust was a scientist was seen to by the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. A step forward in science is made by the law of repulsion, with the refutation of reigning errors and false theories.

“That Faust was an artist was seen to by the infectious example of his teachers. A step forward in art is made by the law of attraction, with the imitation, following, and veneration of beloved predecessors.

“What then prevents me from working, treating, and writing? I think it is
not privations and wanderings, not instability and frequent change, but the reigning spirit of bombastic phrases so widespread in our day—such as: the dawn of the future, the building of the new world, the lights of mankind. You hear that and at first you think—what breadth of imagination, what wealth! But in reality it is pompous precisely in its lack of talent.

“Only the ordinary is fantastic, once the hand of genius touches it. The best lesson in this respect is Pushkin. What a glorification of honest labor, duty, habitual everyday things! With us ‘bourgeois’ and ‘philistine’ have now come to sound reproachful. That reproof was forestalled by lines from ‘Genealogy’:

“And from ‘Onegin’s Journey’:

“Of all things Russian I now love most the Russian childlikeness of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such resounding things as the ultimate goals of mankind and their own salvation. They, too, understood all these things, but such immodesties were far from them—not their business, not on their level! Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky prepared for death, were anxious, sought meaning, summed things up, but these two till the end were distracted by the current particulars of their artistic calling, and in their succession lived their lives inconspicuously, as one such particular, personal, of no concern to anyone, and now that particular has become common property and, like still unripe apples picked from the tree, is ripening in posterity, filling more and more with sweetness and meaning.”

“The first heralds of spring, a thaw. The air smells of pancakes and vodka, as during the week before Lent, when nature herself seems to rhyme with the calendar. Somnolent, the sun in the forest narrows its buttery eyes; somnolent, the forest squints through its needles like eyelashes; the puddles at noontime have a buttery gleam. Nature yawns, stretches herself, rolls over on the other side, and falls asleep again.

“In the seventh chapter of
Evgeny Onegin
—spring, the manor house empty after Onegin’s departure, Lensky’s grave down by the water, under the hill.

“Why ‘lover’? Generally speaking, the epithet is natural, appropriate. Indeed he is a lover. Besides that, it’s needed for the rhyme. But in terms of sound, do we not also have here the epic Nightingale the Robber?
⁷

“In the folk epic he is called Nightingale the Robber, son of Odikhmanty. How well it speaks of him!

“We arrived at Varykino in early spring. Soon everything began to turn green, especially in Shutma, as the ravine under Mikulitsyn’s house is called—bird cherry, alder, hazel. Several nights later the nightingales began to trill.

“And again, as if hearing them for the first time, I was amazed at how this song stands out from the calls of all other birds, what a leap, without gradual change, nature performs to the richness and singularity of this trilling. So much variety in changing figures and such force of distinct, far-reaching sound! In Turgenev somewhere
⁸
there is a description of these whistlings, the wood demon’s piping, the larklike drumming. Two turns stood out particularly. The quick, greedy, and luxurious ‘tiokh, tiokh, tiokh,’ sometimes with three beats, sometimes countless, in response to which the thicket, all in dew, shook itself, preened itself, flinching as if it had been tickled. And another falling into two syllables, calling out, soul-felt, entreating, like a plea or an exhortation: ‘A-wake! A-wake! A-wake!’ ”

“Spring. We’re getting ready for farmwork. So no more diary. But it has been pleasant to take these notes. I’ll have to set them aside till winter.

“The other day, this time indeed during the week before Lent, the season of bad roads, a sick peasant drives his sled into the yard over water and mud. Naturally, I refuse to receive him. ‘Forgive me, my dear fellow, I’ve stopped doing that—I have neither a real choice of medicines, nor the necessary
equipment.’ But there was no getting rid of him. ‘Help me. My skin’s going scant. Have mercy. A bodily ailment.’

“What to do? I don’t have a heart of stone. I decided to receive him. ‘Get undressed.’ I examined him. ‘You’ve got lupus.’ I busy myself with him, glancing sidelong towards the windowsill, at the bottle of carbolic acid. (Good God, don’t ask me where I got it, and another thing or two, the most necessary! It’s all from Samdevyatov.) I look—another sled drives into the yard, with a new patient, as it seems to me at first. And my brother Evgraf drops as if from the clouds. For a while he is at the disposal of the household, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich. Afterwards, when I’m free, I join the others. Questions begin—how, from where? As usual, he dodges, evades, not one direct answer, smiles, wonders, riddles.

“He was our guest for about two weeks, often going by himself to Yuriatin, and suddenly he vanished as if he’d fallen through the earth. During that time I was able to notice that he was still more influential than Samdevyatov, yet his doings and connections were still less explicable. Where does he come from? Where does his power come from? What is he engaged in? Before his disappearance, he promised to lighten our farmwork, so that Tonya would have free time to bring up Shura, and I for medical and literary pursuits. We asked curiously what he intended to do towards that end. Again silence and smiles. But he did not deceive us. There are signs that the conditions of our life will indeed change.

“Astonishing thing! He is my half brother. He has the same last name. And yet, strictly speaking, I know him least of all.

“This is already the second time that he has irrupted into my life as a good genius, a deliverer who resolves all difficulties. Perhaps the composition of every biography, along with the cast of characters acting in it, also calls for the participation of a mysterious unknown power, an almost symbolic person, appearing to help without being called, and the role of this beneficent and hidden mainspring is played in my life by my brother Evgraf?”

With that the notes of Yuri Andreevich ended. He never continued them.

Yuri Andreevich was looking over the books he had ordered in the Yuriatin city reading room. The many-windowed reading room for a hundred persons was set with several rows of long tables, their narrow ends towards the windows. The reading room closed with the coming of darkness. In springtime the city was not lighted in the evening. But Yuri Andreevich never sat
until dusk anyway, and did not stay in the city past dinnertime. He would leave the horse that the Mikulitsyns gave him at Samdevyatov’s inn, spend the whole morning reading, and at midday return home on horseback to Varykino.

Before these raids on the library, Yuri Andreevich had rarely been to Yuriatin. He had no particular business in the city. He knew it poorly. And when the room gradually filled before his eyes with Yuriatin’s citizens, who would seat themselves now far from him, now right next to him, Yuri Andreevich felt as if he was becoming acquainted with the city, standing at one of its populous intersections, and as if what poured into the room were not Yuriatin’s readers, but the houses and streets they lived in.

However, the actual Yuriatin, real and not imagined, could be seen through the windows of the room. Near the middle window, the biggest of them, stood a tank of boiled water. Readers, by way of taking a break, went out to the stairway to smoke, surrounded the tank, drank water, pouring what was left into a basin, and crowded by the window, admiring the view of the city.

There were two kinds of readers: old-timers from the local intelligentsia—they were the majority—and those from simple people.

The first, most of whom were women, poorly dressed, neglectful of themselves and gone to seed, had unhealthy, drawn faces, puffy for various reasons—hunger, biliousness, dropsy. These were the habitués of the reading room, personally acquainted with the library workers and feeling themselves at home there.

Those from the people, with beautiful, healthy faces, dressed neatly, festively, came into the room embarrassed and timid, as into church, and made their appearance more noisily than was customary, not from ignorance of the rules, but owing to their wish to enter perfectly noiselessly and their inability to adjust their healthy steps and voices.

Opposite the windows there was a recess in the wall. In this niche, on a podium, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter, the reading room staff, the senior librarian and his two female assistants, were busy with their tasks. One of them, angry, wearing a woollen shawl, constantly took off her pince-nez and then perched it back on her nose, guided, apparently, not by the needs of vision, but by the changes of her inner state. The other, in a black silk blouse, was probably suffering from chest congestion, because she almost never took the handkerchief from her mouth and nose, and talked and breathed into it.

The library staff had the same swollen faces, elongated and puffy, as half the readers, the same slack skin, sallow shot with green, the color of a
pickle covered with gray mold, and the three of them took turns doing one and the same thing, explaining in a whisper to novices the rules for using books, sorting out order slips, handing over books, and receiving the returned ones, and in between worked on putting together some sort of annual report.

And, strangely, by some incomprehensible coupling of ideas, in the faces of the real city outside the window and the imaginary one in the room, and also by some likeness caused by the general deathly puffiness, as if they were all sick with goiter, Yuri Andreevich recalled the displeased switchwoman on the tracks of Yuriatin the morning of their arrival, and the general panorama of the city in the distance, and Samdevyatov beside him on the floor of the car, and his explanations. And Yuri Andreevich wanted to connect those explanations, given far outside the limits of the place, at a great distance, with everything he now saw close up, in the heart of the picture. But he did not remember Samdevyatov’s designations, and nothing came of it.

Yuri Andreevich was sitting at the far end of the room, surrounded by books. Before him lay periodicals on local zemstvo statistics and several works on the ethnography of the region. He tried to request two more works on the history of Pugachev, but the librarian in the black silk blouse, whispering through the handkerchief pressed to her lips, observed to him that they did not give out so many books at once into the same hands, and that to obtain the works that interested him, he would have to return some of the reference books and periodicals he had taken.

Therefore Yuri Andreevich began more assiduously and hurriedly to acquaint himself with the as yet unsorted books, so as to select and keep the most necessary out of the pile and exchange the rest for the historical works that interested him. He quickly leafed through the collections and ran his eyes over the tables of contents, undistracted by anything and not looking to either side. The many people in the room did not disturb or divert him. He had studied his neighbors well and saw them with his mental gaze to right and left of him without raising his eyes from the book, with the feeling that their complement would not change before he left, any more than the churches and buildings of the city seen through the window would move from their place.

Meanwhile the sun did not stand still. It moved all the while around the eastern corner of the library. Now it was shining through the windows on
the southern side, blinding those who sat close to them and preventing them from reading.

The librarian with a cold came down from her fenced-off elevation and headed for the windows. They had festoon curtains of white fabric, which pleasantly softened the light. The librarian lowered them on all the windows but one. That one, at the end, in the shade, she left uncurtained. Pulling the cord, she opened the vent pane and went into a fit of sneezing.