Doctor Zhivago (51 page)

"
But as soon as he stopped imitating Ossian and Parny and changed from
'
Recollections of Tsarskoie Selo
'
to
'
A Small Town
'
or
'
Letter to My Sister
'
or
'
To My Inkwell
'
(written later in Kishinev), or
'
To Yudin,
'
the future Pushkin was already there.

"
Air, light, the noise of life, reality burst into his poetry from the street as through an open window. The outside world, everyday things, nouns, crowded in and took possession of his lines, driving out the vaguer parts of speech. Things and more things lined up in rhymed columns on the page.

"
As if this, Pushkin
'
s tetrameter, which later became so famous, were a measuring unit of Russian life, a yardstick, as if it had been patterned after the whole of Russia
'
s existence, as you draw the outline of a foot or give the size of a hand to make sure that the glove or the shoe will fit.

"
Later in much the same way, the rhythm of spoken Russian, the intonations of ordinary speech were expressed in Nekrassov
'
s trimeters and dactyls.
"

"
I should like to be of use as a doctor or a farmer and at the same time to be gestating something lasting, something fundamental, to be writing some scientific paper or a literary work.

"
Every man is born a Faust, with a longing to grasp and experience and express everything in the world. Faust became a scientist thanks to the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Faust was an artist thanks to the inspiring example of his teachers. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of the imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.

"
What is it that prevents me from being a doctor and a writer? I think it is not our privations or our wanderings or our unsettled lives, but the prevalent spirit of high-flown rhetoric, which has spread everywhere—phrases such as
'
the dawn of the future,
'
'
the building of a new world,
'
'
the torch-bearers of mankind.
'
The first time you hear such talk you think
'
What breadth of imagination, what richness!
'
But in fact it
'
s so pompous just because it is so unimaginative and second-rate.

"
Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great. The best object lesson in this is Pushkin. His works are one great hymn to honest labor, duty, everyday life! Today,
'
bourgeois
'
and
'
petty bourgeois
'
have become terms of abuse, but Pushkin forestalled the implied criticism in his
'
Family Tree,
'
where he says proudly that he belongs to the middle class, and in
'
Onegin
'
s Travels
'
we read:

'
Now my ideal is the housewife,

My greatest wish, a quiet life

And a big bowl of cabbage soup.
'

"
What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their modest reticence in such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation. It isn
'
t that they didn
'
t think about these things, and to good effect, but to talk about such things seemed to them pretentious, presumptuous. Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky looked restlessly for the meaning of life, and prepared for death and balanced accounts. Pushkin and Chekhov, right up to the end of their lives, were absorbed in the current, specific tasks imposed on them by their vocation as writers, and in the course of fulfilling these tasks they lived their lives, quietly, treating both their lives and their work as private, individual matters, of no concern to anyone else. And these individual things have since become of concern to all, and their works, like apples picked while they are green, have ripened of themselves, mellowing gradually and growing richer in meaning.
"

"
First signs of spring. Thaw. The air smells of buttered pancakes and vodka, as at Shrovetide. A sleepy, oily sun blinking in the forest, sleepy pines blinking their needles like eyelashes, oily puddles glistening at noon. The countryside yawns, stretches, turns over, and goes back to sleep.

"
Chapter Seven of
Evgenii Onegin
describes the spring, Onegin
'
s house deserted in his absence, Lensky
'
s grave by the stream at the foot of the hill.

'
The nightingale, spring
'
s lover,

Sings all night. The wild rose blooms.
'

Why
'
lover
'
? The fact is, the epithet is natural, apt: the nightingale
is
spring
'
s lover. Moreover, he needed it for the rhyme. I wonder whether the nickname Nightingale, for the brigand son of Odikmantii, in the well-known Russian folk epic, is not a metaphor based on similarity of sound. How well the song characterizes him!

'
At his nightingale whistle,

At his wild forest call,

The grass is all a-tremble,

The flowers shed their petals,

The dark forest bows down to the ground,

And all good people fall down dead.
'

We came to Varykino in early spring. Soon the trees grew green—alder and nut trees and wild cherry—especially in the Shutma, the ravine below Mikulitsyn
'
s house. And soon after that the nightingales began to sing.

"
Once again, as though hearing them for the first time, I wondered at the difference between their song and that of all other birds, at the sudden jump, without transitions, that nature makes to the richness and uniqueness of their trills. Such variety and power and resonance! Turgenev somewhere describes these whistling, fluting modulations. There were two phrases that stood out particularly. One was a luxurious, greedily repetitive tiokh-tiokh-tiokh, in response to which the vegetation, all covered with dew, trembled with delight. The other was in two syllables, grave, imploring, an appeal or a warning:
'
Wake up! Wake up!
'
"

"
Spring. We are preparing for the spring sowing. No time for a diary. It was pleasant to write. I
'
ll have to stop until next winter.

"
The other day—and now it really was Shrovetide—right in the middle of the spring floods, a sick peasant drove his sleigh into the yard through the mud and slush. I refused to examine him.
'
I
'
ve given up practicing,
'
I said.
'
I have neither medicines nor equipment.
'
But he persisted.
'
Help me. My skin is bad. Have pity on me. I
'
m sick.
'
What could I do? I don
'
t have a heart of stone. I told him to undress. He had lupus. As I was examining him I glanced at the bottle of carbolic acid on the window sill (don
'
t ask me where it comes from—that and a few other things I couldn
'
t do without—everything comes from Samdeviatov). Then I saw there was another sleigh in the yard. I thought at first it was another patient. But it was my brother, Evgraf, who had dropped in on us out of the blue. The family took charge of him—Tonia, Sashenka, Alexander Alexandrovich. Later I went out and joined them. We showered him with questions. Where had he come from? How had he come? As usual, he was evasive, he smiled, shrugged, spoke in riddles.

"
He stayed about two weeks, went often to Yuriatin, and then vanished suddenly as if the earth had swallowed him. I realized while he was staying with us that he had even more influence than Samdeviatov and that his work and his connections were even more mysterious. What is he? What does he do? Why is he so powerful? He promised to make things easier for us so that Tonia should have more time for Sashenka and I for practicing medicine and writing. We asked him how he proposed to do this. He merely smiled. But he has been as good as his word. There are signs that our living conditions are really going to change.

"
It is truly extraordinary. He is my half brother. We bear the same name. And yet I know virtually nothing about him.

"
For the second time he has burst into my life as my good genius, my rescuer, resolving all my difficulties. Perhaps in every life there has to be, in addition to the other protagonists, a secret, unknown force, an almost symbolic figure who comes unsummoned to the rescue, and perhaps in mine Evgraf, my brother, plays the part of this hidden benefactor?
"

At this point Yurii Andreievich
'
s diary breaks off. He never went on with it.

Yurii Andreievich looked through the books he had ordered at the reading room of the Yuriatin public library. The reading room had several windows and could seat about a hundred people. Long tables stood in rows that ended by the windows. The library closed at sunset; in the spring the town had no lighting. Zhivago always left before dark, however, and never stayed in town later than the dinner hour. He would leave the horse that Mikulitsyn lent him at Samdeviatov
'
s inn, read all morning, and ride back to Varykino in the afternoon.

Before he began visiting the library Yurii Andreievich had only rarely been to Yuriatin; he had nothing in particular to do there, and he hardly knew it. Now, as the reading room gradually filled with local people, some sitting down near to him and others farther away, he felt as if he were getting to know the town by standing at one of its bustling intersections, and as if not only the people but also the houses and the streets in which they lived were coming into the room.

However, from the windows one could also see the actual Yuriatin, real and not imagined. In front of the central, largest window was a tank of boiled water. Readers who wanted a break went out to the landing to smoke or gathered around the tank for a drink and, after emptying the cup into the basin, stood at the window, admiring the view over the town.

The readers were of two kinds. The majority were elderly members of the local intelligentsia; the rest were of more humble origin.

The former, mostly women, were poorly dressed and had a neglected, hangdog look and long, sickly faces which for one reason or another—whether through hunger, jaundice, or dropsy—were puffy. They were habitués of the library, and knew the attendants personally and felt at home here.

The common people looked well and handsome and were neatly dressed in their best clothes; they came in timidly as though they were entering a church; they made more noise than the others, not because they did not know the rules but because in their anxiety not to make a sound they could not control their vigorous steps and voices.

The librarian and his two assistants sat on a dais in a recess in the wall opposite the window, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter. One of the assistants was a cross-looking woman who wore a woollen shawl and kept putting on her pince-nez and taking it off, apparently in accordance with mood rather than need. The other, in a black silk blouse, seemed to have a weak chest, for she breathed and spoke through her handkerchief and never took it away from her nose and mouth.

The staff had the same long, puffy, flabby faces as most of the readers, and the same loose skin, earthy and greenish like pickled cucumbers or gray mold. The three of them took turns explaining the rules in whispers to new readers, sorted the order slips, handed out books and took them back, and in the intervals worked on some report or other.

Through an unaccountable association of ideas started by the sight of the real town outside the window and the imagined one inside the room, as well as by the swollen faces around him, which made it seem as though everyone had goiter and somehow recalled the face of the sulky woman in charge of the Yuriatin railway switch on the morning of his arrival, Yurii Andreievich remembered the distant panorama of the town and Samdeviatov beside him on the floor of the car, and his comments and explanations. He tried to connect these explanations, given him so far outside the town, with his immediate surroundings now that he was at the center of the picture. But he did not remember what Samdeviatov had told him, and he did not get anywhere.