Zhivago — Life ('zhizn'): Poems and Elements (1945–1955. "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak)
I was born on the night of the second and third
Of January in the unreliable year
Of ninety-one, and the centuries
Encircle me with fire.
Osip Mandelstam, 1938 (*the English translation by Ian Probstein)
Let us imagine something that is hard to imagine (though today it is not so hard). A certain simplehearted yet unmalevolent reader ("ignorant-to-be") opens a book without a legend. He does not know anything either of the author or of its fate (as to me, I won't ever forget that fourth blind blue typewritten copy I read at my friends' place — it was prohibited to take it out — as well as my own astonishment: why have this been under arrest for twenty years?!).
"Doctor Zhivago". The title is quite a personage one: books are often named after the main character.
A doctor has been an enduring character in the late realistic and Soviet literature, starting from
Chekhov's Astrov, Dorn, Dymov and Startsev and ending with Bulgakov's autobiographic young doctor as well as the characters created by A. Koptyaeva and Yu. German.
The surname offers another sequence of associations. Old Russian surnames: Mertvago, Veselago.
Tolkovy slovar zhivago velikorusskogo yazyka ("The Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Living Russian
Language") by V. Dal. "The Living Life" is a book written by V. Veresaev about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
That means that the author offers us a biography of a certain doctor with a strange surname. A book of life. This life is written in two books and in seventeen parts, in prose and in verse.
It was not at once that Pasternak came to this obviously simple yet semantically rich and multidimensional title. Its variants during the decade of work accentuated various aspects of his conception. "There Will Be No Death" — highlighted the philosophical and religious idea immediately.
"Boys and Girls" — hinted at A. Blok's poem "Little White Willows" and simultaneously defined not only the characters but also the generality and contrasting effect of the topic (cf. "War and Peace", "Crime and Punishment", "Fathers and Sons").
There were also the following variants: "Rynva" (pointing at the place: Yuri's town, Yryatin, is located by this river); "The Russian Faust's Experience", "From the Unpublished Papers by Yuri Zhivago" (these

three are pointing at the form); "The Norms of New Nobility", "The Living, the Dead, the Resurrecting",
"The Earthly Air" (these ones also accentuate the symbolism of the whole); and finally — "A Candle
Burned" until in the end (1948) the simplest and most unpretentious title came to life — and with this very name the novel grew into a book for everyone.
The main prose of Pasternak started, as it can be found out, in the very beginning of his creative life.
When he was ten or eleven years old (he started writing poems at that time, too) Pasternak made some sketches where we can come across the name of Pourvit with the same French inner form that Zhivago has. In one of the extracts the character, renamed into Reliquimini, seemed to have died in a tram.
Then the motifs, episodes, observations for the future "Doctor Zhivago" took shape and were being collected in "The Childhood of Luvers" (1921, the beginning of an unfinished novel "Three Names"), "The
Tale" (1929, also a part of a greater conception connected with "Spektorsky"; "The Revolution" was one of the variants of the title), in "Patrick's Notes" (1936, the variants of the title: "When the Boys Grew up" and "Zhivult's Notes") and finally, the unfinished drama "This World" (1942) where Tanka
Bezocheredeva's monologue comes from, practically unchanged, into the epilogue of "Zhivago" (she had the surname Druzyakina in the play).
The actual work on the book (the winter of 1945-1946) started in the atmosphere of the quickly vanishing social hopes and literary stagnation. Pasternak's father's death, the arrest of the beloved woman, Stalin's death, the heart attack, the return of the Soviet convicts, the information of the death of people that had been shot dead long before — all that fitted in the decade of work on the novel.
Judging by the numerous mentions in the letters (where the creative history of the book manifested itself quite well), searching for the genre became one of the main problems for the famous poet and the emerging novelist (none of his big conceptions had then been brought to an end so far).
Pasternak himself called "Doctor Zhivago" "a prose novel" most often (as if he turned Pushkin's definition of "Eugene Onegin" upside down: "a verse novel" as a "devilish difference" with the prose novel). More indefinite and individual definitions appear: big prose, a big narration in prose, prose of our whole life, a long big letter in two books; my epic (O. M. Freidenberg, October 5, 1946).
We should take a particularly close look at the latter. It is, in effect, an aesthetic oxymoron. An epic in the usual sense cannot be someone's personal property. It is objectively impersonal and expresses the point of view of the common, of an ethnic group, of a nation. The epic character of his conception will be confirmed by Pasternak twelve years after finishing his book: "I began writing my novel, at least in intention, on a world-wide scale" (to Vyach. Vs. Ivanov, July 1, 1958).

By accentuating an individual affiliation, ownership of the genre (my epic), Pasternak turns it into something else. "Just a novel" turns into big prose with a subjective dominant, a lyrical epic (devilish difference!), wherein the common, the historical is not a subject but an excuse and is described not from the point of view of the imagination but from the evaluation perspective. Therefore, in the letter to Freidenberg, cited above, the author motivates his appeal to prose by his need to express himself personally and most sincerely, and this is usually manifested (especially for a poet) through verse: "I am old and soon I may be dead, so I cannot indefinitely postpone the free expression of my true thoughts."
Thus, the understood idea of the book turns out to date back to the 1920s. It manifests an unexpected structural analogy.
On November 23, 1927, after reading the first chapters of "The Life of Klim Samgin", Pasternak wrote to
Gorky a large and enthusiastic, and at the same time analytical, letter, especially highlighting the
"enormous Chapter 5, that powerful and thematic center of the whole story... The characteristics of the empire provided in this piece could have given the new Leontiev a cause for envy, i. e. it is so aesthetically complete and so enormously bright and excitingly located in distant times and places that the whole image seems irresistibly majestic and therefore beautiful. Yet, the more of this inevitable visibility there is, the sooner it will turn, with every line of it, right before your eyes, into a spectacle of horror, a motivated tragic element and well-deserved impending doom".
Despite its majestic beauty, that imperial world was doomed. Then, Pasternak notes the paradoxality of the author's point of view: "It is strange to realise that the epoch that you are considering there needs any excavation like some new Atlantis. It is strange not only because most of us still remember it but in particular because at the time of its existence it was portrayed by you, as well as by the authors of the school of thought that is close to yours, right from nature, as something usual and contemporary. Yet it is more virginal and more unexplored in its new present state, as the lost and forgotten basis of the present world, or, in other words, as a pre-revolutionary prologue under a post-revolutionary pen. In this sense, this epoch has not been described by anyone yet."
The people who survived the revolution are the first historians and archaeologists of the sunken
Atlantis. Their task is difficult and almost unique. "Following some strange instinct, I sought to see and scrutinise "Samgin" even more than just to read it. For I knew that the gap of a still unpopulated historical background can at first be only pelted with some moving paint or at least that is how its occupation is perceived by the contemporaries. Until its uninhabited space is filled with crowding details, we cannot speak of any linear story line, because there is still nothing to lie this thread upon.
Only such a recording, from many ends at once, can win over an obsessive viewpoint of the epoch as the unified and broad recollection of something still wandering in and knocking on the heads of all — and this has never been attached to fiction so far." Pasternak also points out another property of Gorky's book, by calling it "the poetic background of prose".

Two years later, in a letter to P. N. Medvedev (November 6, 1929), Pasternak will look through the prism of the same categories (a personal story line, a historical narrative, the terms of an artistic problem solutions) on the causes of the failure of "Spektorsky", his "novel in verse": "I was looking not only back but also forward. I was waiting for some common and social transformations that could result in the restoration of a possibility of an individual story, that meaning a fable of individuals which could be representatively exemplary and understandable to everyone in its personal narrowness and not applied broadness... I started in a state of some hopes that the exploded uniformity of life and its plastic evidence would recover in a few years, not decades, pro vita, and not in the historic divination. And no matter how small I was, such a course would give me strength — and its growth, accompanied by a rapid growth of general moral forces is the only story line of the lyric poet. For even death can be described in a completely colourful manner only when it has already been overcome by the society and it is again in a state of growth."
The idea of dependence a novel's story line on social change could have been picked up by Pasternak from Mandelstam ("The End of the Novel"), although, on the other hand, in its vulgar version it became common for Marxist literary studies of the 1920s.
The Patriotic War was yet another milestone of the Russian history. Not only the pre-revolutionary decades but also the first Soviet ones turn into an Atlantis, a collective ghostly recollection wandering about in the heads of the contemporaries, attached to the false story lines. It is in this situation, feeling a rapid growth of general moral forces ("The victory is coming. Life is about to come to life again. It is an unprecedented historical epoch! It is about time!") which coincided with his personal attitudes ("It is for the first time that I want to write something truly real... There is no hernia, no incarceration in my life any more. I have become enormously free all at once. Everything around me is just so very mine"), that
Pasternak begins writing his novel — "a recording from many ends at once", his struggle with the persistent (and dictated) viewpoint of the present epoch concerning the bygone one.
There are some other curious coincidences between Pasternak's analysis and evaluation of Gorky's book at the end of the 1920s and his own conception that he developed a quarter of a century later.
By opposing "Samgin" to "The Artamonovs' Case", Pasternak gives the new work a higher rating: "The height and weight of a thing lie in the fact that its destiny and composition are subject rather to the wider and basic laws of the spirit than undeniable fiction." And, upon finishing his novel, the author will warn K. Paustovsky who suggested, on behalf of the editorial board, to publish "Doctor Zhivago" in the anthology "Literaturnaya Moskva": "All of you will be stopped by the unacceptability of the novel, I think. Meanwhile, it is the unacceptable that should be printed only. All the acceptable works were written and published long ago."
By predicting the "aberration" of the contemporaries' perception, burdened by their own "memorable involvement" into the epoch, Pasternak appeals to "the offspring", "the next generation" who will see in

this book "a closed end in itself, a spatial root of the narrative". A quarter of a century later, during one of the preliminary readings of "Zhivago", his fourteen-year-old son's opinion will be very important for
Pasternak himself: "And so, I really cared how a today's pioneer and tomorrow's Komsomolets will treat my depiction of certain things. They will grow up with another understanding of certain historical sequences and with a different manner of describing nature, reality and everything in the world — will they understand me? For me it would be a great joy if he overcame his usual shyness and said, blushing:
"That is really very, very good!" if I asked him whether he liked it or not." (N. A. Tabidze, June 3, 1952).
As we know, the subtitle of the unfinished "The Life of Klim Samgin" is "forty years".
Paternal also followed such a correlation of a personal title and a newsreel-style subtitle for a long time.
The subtitle "scenes of the half-century ways" disappeared only in 1955, at the last stage of the work.
The notion of a chronological coverage of "my epic" remained all the time while Pasternak was working on it. "I want to write the prose of all of our life, from Blok to the present war, consisting no more than ten or twelve chapters, as far as it is possible." (N. Ya. Mandelstam, January 26, 1946). "And starting from the month of July, I have been writing a novel in prose called "Boys and Girls" consisting of ten chapters, which should cover the forty years between 1902 and 1946." (O. M. Freidenberg, October 5,
1946). "The time span embraced by the novel is 1903-1945." (Z. F. Ruoff, March 16, 1947). "Probably, this first book was written just for the second one, which will cover the time from 1917 to 1945 " (O. M.
Freudenberg, mid-October 1948).
Yet, depending on the addressees and the circumstances, its cultural context was constantly changing, as well as its system of literary landmarks.
In one of the first evidences, a letter to his sisters (December 1945), not yet mentioning the work he had started, Pasternak argues that the recent creative subjects after the Symbolists "were Rilkes and
Prousts". "I would like to manifest in me all that I have of their breed, so I, as their continuation, would fill in the gap that have formed in the two decades after them. I would then finish the unsaid and eliminate the omissions. And, which is the most important, I would like to act, as they would have, if they were me, I would like to make it a bit more realistic. And acting from that common identity, I would retell the main scenes, especially those we have here, in prose, much simpler and more open than I have done so far. "
In his letter to Z. F. Ruoff (March 16, 1947) the author considers the spirit of his novel as "something in between the Karamazovs and Wilhelm Meister. "In another letter to the same addressee (December 10,
1955), the idea of the spirit of the novel is again given "in the German units of measurement ": "This is the world of Malte Brigge or Jacobsen's prose subordinate, if it is thinkable at all, to the strict storyline seriousness and fabulous ordinariness of Gottfried Keller. What is more, it is, in quite a Russian manner,

close to the land and poverty, to distress, to grief. It is a very sad, full of lyrics, and yet a very simple thing that covers so much. "
Thus, his creative guides, intricately connected in Pasternak's conscious, were Goethe, Dostoevsky, and
Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke with his novel "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge", a Swiss author
Gottfried Keller (1819-1890) and a Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847 - 1885).
We can find the most complete coverage of all the aspects of the author's conception in the letter to O.
M. Freudenberg as of October 13, 1946: "I have already told you that I started to write a big novel in prose. Actually, this is my first real work. I want to present in it a historical image of Russia during the recent forty-five years and at the same time, with all the aspects of its plot, heavy, sad, containing
Dickens- or Dostoevsky-like details, this thing will be an expression of my views on art, on the Gospel, on a person's life in history and much more. Here I settle my accounts with the Jewishness, with all kinds of nationalism (and in internationalism), with all shades of anti-Christianity and its assumptions as if there are, after the fall of the Roman Empire, any peoples and there is an opportunity to build a culture upon their crude national identity.
The atmosphere of this work is my Christianity. In its width it is a little different from the Quakers' or
Tolstoy's Christianity, which is coming from other sides of the Gospel, in addition to the moral ones."
The lyrical epic "Zhivago" was being written as another 20th century Gospel, the Gospel of Boris.
When the novel was finished, the author perceived his work as his last word, his value, his will, an epitaph for the epoch. "I finished the novel, performed my duty bequeathed by God." ""Zhivago " is a very important step, it is a great happiness and good fortune, which I have never ever dreamed of. Yet, this is done together with the period that this book is manifesting more than anything written by others; this book and its author are fading now and in front of me, while I am still alive, there is a free space and
I must first understand and then fill in the blankness and purity of this space with what I have understood." "This book is the second after the Bible all over the world, as I can hear more and more frequently."
The feeling that his work is inspired by God and its independence from the individual will makes us understand the logic of Pasternak's reaction to criticism even from those readers who were the closest to the author and welcomed him the most. He readily agreed with them, yet leaved everything as it was.
The shortcomings of the novel's structure visible from an objective, external perspective were perceived by Pasternak as its inherent properties. Deviating from poetic speech which was more organic for him
("...to write them [poems] is much easier than prose, but only prose brings me to this idea of the unconditioned that supports me and includes both my life and norms of behaviour, and so forth, and creates that internal construction, one of whose tiers may provide place for the senseless and the shameful without this poem-writing. I cannot wait to get rid of this prosaic yoke as soon as possible in order to realise myself in the field which is more available to me and expresses me much fuller"), he was

writing the novel as poems, as a lyrical utterance, hanging on even to his delusions. Such a dual perspective should be taken into account in the interpretation of Pasternak's book. In the "unity and narrowness" of the prosaic sequence, the recordings from all ends at once certain fundamentally different structural elements are connected.
The main character, as it has been mentioned above, is brought into the center of the novel's construction by the title itself. We are naturally tempted to see in him a lyrical counterpart, a mirror of the author. "Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is the lyrical hero of Pasternak who remains a lyricist even when writing in prose... The author and his character are the same person with the same thoughts, the same line of reasoning and attitude to the world. Zhivago is the innermost Pasternak's spokesman" (D. S.
Likhachev). Further on, we can find even the complete identification: Zhivago-Pasternak.
It seems, however, that in the definition of "lyrical (my) epic" the emphasis should be laid on both words. The innermost Pasternak is not only Doctor Zhivago but also "Doctor Zhivago". While growing up on the lyrical ground, the image of Pasternak's doctor has been absorbing many people. In a letter to M.
P. Gromov (April 6, 1948), once and again talking about the subject, chronology and structure of the conceived novel, Pasternak touches upon the issue of the prototypes: " It describes the life of one of the
Muscovite circles (the Urals is also described). The first book will embrace the period starting from 1903 till the end of the 1914 war. The second one, which I hope to bring up to the Great Patriotic War, will feature the death of the protagonist, a doctor by profession, in, say, 1929. He will have a very strong second creative plane, just like a doctor in Anton Chekhov's works... This character will have to be something in between me, Blok, Yesenin and Mayakovsky, and now, when I write poetry, I always write them down into a notebook belonging to this man, Yuri Zhivago". Pasternak wrote still more details to another addressee: "The protagonist is like Chekhov was or could be." Thus, it was not lyrical egocentrism that was the author's initial line (Zhivago is me) but an attempt to synthesise a variety of aesthetic and historical ideologems in the central character.
Pasternak's character is also both an image of a poet (something between...) and a symbol of the
Russian intelligentsia (Anton Chekhov, a physician and a writer), and a continued literary tradition (an ideological hero, "a fifth wheel"), and a figure of a particular historical epoch, a sign of the generation.
Following the usual definitions of the Sixtiers and Eightiers, A. Amfiteatrov coined the term "Ninetiers"
(that was the title of his novel belonging to the dimensionless "Zola style" cycle "Ends and Beginnings").
The history of the generation, whose fate is being described by Pasternak, starts at the turn of the
1890s. The central characters of "Doctor Zhivago" are the Ninetiers by birth.
Yuri's birth year is 1891 (in Anna Ivanovna's funeral scene, belonging to December 1911, his mother's funeral is mentioned as having taken place "ten years ago" when Yura was, as it is stated on the first page, "a boy of ten") or 1892 (if you start from the fact mentioned in the fourth chapter of the first part where Nika Dudorov was thirteen in the summer of 1903 and he was "some two years older" than Yura).

The first date is preferable for "some two years" can be understood presumably, counting from the same thirteen.
Thus, Dudorov was born in 1890, Misha Gordon — in 1892 (in 1903 he is eleven - Part 1, Ch. 7), Lara — in 1889 (in 1905 she is "a little more than sixteen" - Part 2, Ch. 4). Pasha Antipov "who was a little younger than Lara " (Part 3, Ch. 7) is therefore of the same age with Dudorov or Zhivago. Pasternak's
"boys and girls" are thus a grassroots projection and artistic transformation of his literary generation; they are peers of Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. (Only the mysterious halfbrother Evgraf is a figure of quite another time period, in 1911 he is ten years old (Part 3, Ch. 4) and he is therefore a decade younger than Yuri and other central characters...)
They are thirteen to fifteen in 1905 ("I'm fourteen... The lamps have been triumphant since December.
Port Arthur is already lost But the cruisers go out into the ocean" — "The Year Nine Hundred and Five"), twenty-two to twenty-four in the fourteenth, about thirty during the October Revolution and the Civil
War.
There was a chapter called "The Fathers" in the poem "The Year Nine Hundred and Five". In the novel,
Pasternak writes the history of a fatherless generation (among other things, that was the title of
Chekhov's first drama). Lara has no father, Dudorov's and Antipov's fathers are convicts and Yuri's dad commits suicide. Boys and girls are grown up not only by the family but more by the environment. The usual conflict between fathers and children at the turn of the century is transformed into a clash between children and time. "The water teaches them, the time sharpens them" (O. Mandelstam).
The first three books, however, are being built in accordance with Tolstoy's pattern, as periods of development, the movement of individual destinies. An orphan boy — a girl from another circle. The first meeting (at the hotel) — the second meeting (at the Christmas ball). The first tragedies: facing death or human meanness. Awakening of the sex and the creativity instinct. Childhood — adolescence
— youth.
Until the time comes, the big history does not whirl the characters like a tornado, smashing their fate; it is blowing streams of warm summer air upon them. "Separately, all the movements of the world were calculatedly sober, but as a sum total they were unconsciously drunk with the general current of life that united them. People toiled and bustled, set in motion by the mechanism of their own cares. But the mechanisms would not have worked if their chief regulator had not been a sense of supreme and fundamental carefreeness. This carefreeness came from a sense of the cohesion of human existences, a confidence in their passing from one into another, a sense of happiness owing to the fact that everything that happens takes place not only on earth, in which the dead are buried, but somewhere else, in what some call the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others something else again"(Part 1,
Ch. 7). (*Here and below quotes from the novel are from the English translation by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky.)

The collision of personal concerns and the flow of life in which the Providence, history, anything else implement their general goals invisible to people dates back to Tolstoy ("War and Peace"). Yet, such a state of hidden harmony is unstable and may soon bring commotion.
By passing through their periods of development, the protagonist comprehends, tames and pacifies death. "Ten years before then, when his mother was being buried, Yura had been quite little. He could still remember how inconsolably he had wept, struck by grief and horror… It was quite a different matter now. All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy. Now he was afraid of nothing, neither life nor death; everything in the world, all things were words of his vocabulary. He felt himself on an equal footing with the universe, and he stood through the panikhidas for Anna Ivanovna quite differently than in time past for his mother."
Yet, he cannot do anything to history. There is "this world of baseness and falsity, where a well-fed little lady dares to look like that at witless working people" — and this world is fiercely hated by Tiverzin. The dishonoured Lara also sees Komarovsky's main strength in his baseness and summarises: "And the base and weak rule over the strong." Even Kologrivov (his historical projections are people like Savva
Morozov) "hated the moribund order with the double hatred of a fabulously wealthy man able to buy out the state treasury, and of a man from simple folk who had gone amazingly far."
That is why 1905 and the December events in Moscow are perceived as a regular retaliation — not for
Komarovsky only but for that whole world. “The boys are shooting,” thought Lara. She thought it not of
Nika and Patulya, but of the whole shooting city. “Good, honest boys,” she thought. “They’re good, that’s why they’re shooting...” “Oh, how perkily the gunshots crack,” she thought. “Blessed are the violated, blessed are the ensnared. God give you good health, gunshots! Gunshots, gunshots, you’re of the same opinion!”
Pasternak is most accurate. The attitude of the generation has been confirmed by Mandelstam many years earlier and even using a similar image of a boys' game: "The 1905 boys were marching in the revolution with the same feeling as Nikolenka Rostov had when he was going to the Hussars: it was a matter of love and honor. They all thought it impossible to live unwarmed by the glory of their epoch and they all found it impossible to breathe without valor."(O. Mandelstam."The Noise of Time").
The very first parts of "Zhivago" feature the poetics of Pasternak dramatically violating the canons of a
"well-made novel", either turning it into a bad novel or into another novel (my epic).

The protagonist's monocracy underlined by the title has disappeared. Yura's fate does not stand out and is not emphasised against the background of the other characters. "I have read 200 pages of the novel read — and where is Dr. Zhivago? This is a novel about Larissa," wondered V. Shalamov. Upon reading the next two hundred pages, he could have changed his mind. After disappearing in the middle of the fifth part, Larissa Fyodorovna reappears only in the middle of the ninth.
Instead of clear storyline threads the narrator offers to the reader an intricately tangled plot, a
"recording from all the ends at once", a life stream where, until the time comes, it is not clear who will be the main character. "The tightness is terrible," that was how A. Efron, Marina Tsvetaeva's daughter, described his impressions: "These 150 typewritten pages include so many fates, epochs, cities, years, events, passions, depriving them of the most indispensable volume, the necessary space and freedom and air!.. It turns out that all of these people, Lara and Yuri, and Tonya, and Pavel, they all live on another planet, where time is subject to different laws and our 365 days are equal to their one."
This property of "Zhivago" noted by A. Efron, when the characters "are literally collide with their heads in this crowded space", can be called a plot density of the text. Yura prays for his mother and faints at the very moment a train kills his father. Master Khudoleev who beats the son of a janitor will become his subordinate at the front. Vasya Brykin, Zhivago's neighbour on the train on the way to Yuryatin, will face him again and will be his companion on the way back to Moscow. And the most important coincidence: Yuri sees the Christmas candle that Pasha lighted for Larissa from the street and this
"launched his life's mission"; later on, his coffin will be standing in the same room and there — again by chance — Larissa will come, when visiting the ruins of her past.
There are tens of such "plot clots" in "Zhivago" compressing the narrative and making the world of the novel look like habitable rooms. Analogies are found by him both in the mass fiction (random encounters and recognitions are there in the order of things, in the convention of the genre) and, say, in
Tolstoy's epic (the former rivals Andrey and Anatole on the adjacent operating tables, the wounded
Andrey in the Rostovs' house). In "Zhivago" they become a subject of the writer's reflection.
By tying the four destinies into a tight knot in one battlefield scene (Part 4, Ch. 10), the narrator concludes: "The mutilated man who had just died was Reserve Private Gimazetdin; the officer shouting in the wood was his son, Lieutenant Galiullin; the nurse was Lara; Gordon and Zhivago were the witnesses. They were all there, all side by side, and some did not recognise each other, while others had never known each other, and some things remained forever unascertained, while others waited till the next occasion, till a new meeting, to be revealed."
"The crossed destiny" is defined in "Doctor Zhivago" by "the chance, the god of invention" (Pushkin).

Another feature of the world, quite opposite to the density and tightness, it is openness. Some characters are constantly colliding, like chips in a whirlpool, others are drowning, disappearing forever without any justifications and explanations. "Generally speaking, you have a problem with children here.
Where is the child of Yura and Tonya?" asked A. Efron. "After a wonderfully described Tonya's delivery... the boy completely vanishes. And no trace of any kind of parenthood... Where have you hidden Nikolai
Nikolaevich Vedenyapin whom you first turned into a significant character and then he disappeared without a trace, where are Lara's mother and brother, where is the wonderfully sketched Olya Demina?
Lara's mother and Rodya could not but appear from time to time in Lara's life: however alien and tiresome, they were relatives anyway."
Life is random and life is fatal: both of these patterns seem to work in the novel.
When Pasternak was working on his book, the young writers of the Literary Institute set two poetics against each other just for fun: the "red Stendhal" and the "red Detail" (Yu. Trifonov's memories). The
"red Detail" implied depicting a character in action, in colourful detail, it was considered preferable to and generally more modern than the "red Stendhal" who was characterised by the character's psychology recreated in the author's speech.
The narrator in "Zhivago" is a "red Stendhal". In the key points of the plot the narration dominates over the show, the direct response — over the objective image. "She was a little over sixteen, but she was a fully formed young girl. They gave her eighteen or more. She had a clear mind and an easy character.
She was very good-looking. She and Rodya understood that they would have to get everything in life the hard way. In contrast to the idle and secure, they had no time to indulge in premature finagling and sniff out in theory things that in practice had not yet touched them. Only the superfluous is dirty. Lara was the purest being in the world." — "This was a meeting of two creative characters, bound by family ties, and, though the past arose and began to live a second life, memories came in a flood, and circumstances surfaced that had occurred during their time of separation; still, as soon as the talk turned to what was most important, to things known to people of a creative cast, all ties disappeared except that single one, there was neither uncle nor nephew, nor any difference in age, and there remained only the closeness of element to element, energy to energy, principle to principle." — "From an early age Strelnikov had striven for the highest and brightest. He considered life an enormous arena in which people, honorably observing the rules, compete in the attainment of perfection. When it turned out that this was not so, it never entered his head that he was wrong in simplifying the world order. Having driven the offense inside for a long time, he began to cherish the thought of one day becoming an arbiter between life and the dark principles that distort it, of stepping forth to its defense and avenging it. Disappointment embittered him. The revolution armed him."
V. Shalamov, one of the first readers of the novel, started with ultimate praise, by including "Zhivago" into the largest and most authoritative "prophetic" tradition of the Russian literature: "The first question is about the nature of the Russian literature. People learn how to live from writes. The writers show us what is good and what is bad, frighten us, prevent our souls from getting stuck in the dark corners of life. The moral richness is a distinctive feature of the Russian literature... I have not read anything

Russian in the Russian language for a long time, anything adequate to the literature of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. "Doctor Zhivago" is, of course, lying in this great plane... Two more novels of this kind
— and the Russian literature is saved" (a letter to Pasternak, January 1954).
A decade later, when the principles of his own prose were defined (the reliability of a protocol, an essay; prose experienced as a document), this evaluation was replaced by quite an opposite one: ""Doctor
Zhivago" is the last Russian novel. "Doctor Zhivago" is a ruin of the classical novel, a ruin of Tolstoy's writer's commandments. "Doctor Zhivago" was being written in accordance with Tolstoy's writer's prescriptions, yet finally it is a monologue novel without any "character traits" and other attributes of the 19th century novel" ("On the Prose", 1965). Later on, the author of "The Kolyma Tales" will treat this tradition and this genre quite dismissively: "An artistic collapse of "Doctor Zhivago" is the collapse of the genre. The genre itself is dead" ("On My Prose", 1971).
The monologue novel is in fact an exact definition thereof, similar to the meaning of Pasternak's "my epic". It can be perceived beyond the dismissive sense attributed to it by Shalamov.
In his initial evaluation, Shalamov uses another unexpected parallel, by mentioning the recognised
Soviet analogue of Pasternak's book (the "Soviet" context of the novel is usually rarely taken into consideration). "There is such a novel in Russian, covering the same time period and the same events as
"D. Zh.". The author thereof, although he has written a lot of different articles about his homeland, is not a Russian writer. The problematicity, the second distinctive feature of the Russian literature, is completely alien to the author of "Hyperboloid" and "Aelita". In "The Road to Calvary" one can wonder at the smoothness and easiness of the language, the smoothness and easiness of the plot, yet the same qualities disappoint the reader when they characterise the thought. "The Road to Calvary" is a novel to be read in a tram, a very necessary and respected genre. But what has the Russian literature to do with that?"
The point, however, is in the fact that the dismissive definition of the "novel to be read in a tram" could be taken by the late Pasternak for a compliment. "Once Vsevolod (the writer Vs. Ivanov. — I. S.) reproached Boris Pasternak that, after his stylistically flawless works such as "The Childhood of
Luvers","The Safeguard" and others, he allows himself to write in such a careless style. Boris Leonidovich objected that he "deliberately writes almost like Charskaya" and it was "clarity" and not the stylistic search that was his interest in that case; he wanted his novel to be read "greedily" by any person"(T.
Ivanova's memories).
His neglecting of the "stylistics" in the novel goes so far that at times it is perceived as a sophisticated literary game.

"Again a day went by in quiet madness." The commentators clearly recognise in this phrase "a hidden quote from A. Blok's poem "As usual, the day was going by in quiet madness..." (from "The Life of a
Friend of Mine" cycle). However, for some reason, a much more famous quote stays uncommented. On the same page, in the next paragraph (Part 14, Ch. 9), a landscape description begins with the phrase: "It was freezing cold and getting noticeably colder". The same piece is included into another, earlier, landscape fragment: "It was dry after the recent thaw. Turning cold. The frost was noticeably hardening." (Part 13. Ch. 10).
After Chekhov's "Ionych" where an innocent, yet served at a closeup, phrase "The frost was hardening" becomes a stylistic sign of an incompetent "ideological" novel of the female writer-dilettante ("Vera losifovna was reading about a young beautiful countess that founded schools, hospitals and libraries at her village and fell in love with a wandering artist — she was reading about what had never happened in the real life..."), it could appear in serious literature only in a context of burlesque. But for the reader of
Charskaya (as, indeed, for the reader of "The Road to Calvary"), this cultural code does not exist. During the excited tram reading, such details should remain outside the scope of perception.
As we can see, Pasternak dreamed of such a reader. Just like the late period Tolstoy, he tries to combine the highly problematic character of the old classics with the utmost availability and thrill. Searching for it, he starts from the same Tolstoy with his "dialectics of the soul" backwards to the total psychologism, clear types, Karamzin, and downwards to the novel of mystery, melodrama, Charskaya. The author of
"Doctor Zhivago" tries to fully smooth the boundary between the high, elite literature and fiction (this issue will start being considered and solved by the culture much later). However, at times his efforts resemble those of Einstein (according to an anecdote), to simplify his theory for the public by using formulas of etiquette: "As you can clearly see now, my dear readers..." The dear readers still did not see anything and did not understand these formulas.
It is not only the theme but also the means of communication between the big history and the small history are the things that bring together "Doctor Zhivago" and other novels, contemporary to
Pasternak's one, "about the Revolution and the Civil War" (the same "The Road to Calvary"). The calendar time and the characters' time are more and more clearly marked by tremendous historical events. The relationship of Lara and Komarovsky develop against the background of the first Russian revolution ("Those were the Presnya days"). The World War breaks the painful relationship of Antipov and Lara ("...It was a military train, throwing puffs of yellow, flame-shot smoke into the sky, going through the crossing to the west, as countless numbers had done day and night for the last year. Pavel
Pavlovich smiled, got up from the boat, and went to bed. The desired way out had been found.").
Personal events coincide on the same day of Zhivago's life (the birth of his baby, the correct diagnosis) and the call to the same war ("Ah, yes, Zhivago, imagine—it was echinococcus! We were wrong.
Congratulations. And another thing—rather unpleasant. They’ve reviewed your category again. This time we won’t be able to keep you from it. There’s a terrible lack of medical personnel at the front.
You’ll be getting a whiff of powder." — Part 4, Ch. 5). The war collides Zhivago and Lara for one more, third, time.

And the second, February, revolution in accordance with the canons of Soviet prose is accentuated as a decisive turning point — by a phrase in the end of the fourth part. "Rapping with their canes and crutches, invalids and non-bedridden patients from other wards came, ran, and hobbled into the room, and started shouting at the same time:
“An event of extraordinary importance. Disorder in the streets of Petersburg. The troops of the
Petersburg garrison have gone over to the side of the insurgents. Revolution.”
It is from this point that the ways of the author of "Doctor Zhivago" and the official interpretation of
Soviet history start diverging.
"The February" is represented by Pasternak not as a natural historical event but rather as a cosmic one, a long-awaited natural disaster, a cultural wreck that can only be compared to the first centuries of
Christianity.
"Everything around fermented, grew, and rose on the magic yeast of being. The rapture of life, like a gentle wind, went in a broad wave, not noticing where, over the earth and the town, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh, seizing everything with trembling on its way", — that is how the world seems to the doctor on his way to the meeting in Meliuzeevo.
“Just think what a time it is now! And you and I are living in these days! Only once in eternity do such unprecedented things happen. Think: the roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off, and we and all the people find ourselves under the open sky. And there’s nobody to spy on us. Freedom! Real, not just in words and demands, but fallen from the sky, beyond all expectation. Freedom by inadvertence, by misunderstanding", — this is his confession to Lara later on. “I watched a meeting last night. An astounding spectacle. Mother Russia has begun to move, she won’t stay put, she walks and never tires of walking, she talks and can’t talk enough. And it’s not as if only people are talking. Stars and trees come together and converse, night flowers philosophise, and stone buildings hold meetings. Something gospel-like, isn’t it? As in the time of the apostles. Remember, in Paul? ‘Speak in tongues and prophesy.
Pray for the gift of interpretation.’ ” (Part 5, Ch. 8).
It is noteworthy that the thoughts about revolution take place in midsummer and not in winter, when it all happened. This Pasternak's view of the February was formed very early. The pathos of the recently
(1989) published poem "The Russian Revolution" (1918) is very similar: "And the warm thaw that early in the morning Penetrates the sand, and the rooks, and the ringing of the warmth — They all were singing about you, about the fact that being A foreign girl you have found shelter here in Russia now.
That this is the most glorious of all the revolutions, The most majestic one, and it will shed no blood; It loves the Kremlin, too, and their way of drinking tea. How fine it was to breathe you outstanding beauty!.. And the Socialism of Christ was taking a deep breath".

Inspired by the name of Christ, Pasternak's revolution rises on the magic yeast of utopia. The Zybushino republic, "a new thousandyear kingdom in Zybushino" proclaimed by the Tolstoyan miller Blazheiko.
Wonders are being worked: even the dumb start talking (the Pogorevshikh story). Trees and stars are rallying together with the people. The night seems to be "a bright, scintillating fairy tale".
Pasternak's protagonist is talking of the future of the world in a panting manner and his words are approximate and similar to those recited in the beginning of the century by the characters of Gorky's
"The Mother". "The revolution broke out involuntarily, like breath held for too long. Everyone revived, was reborn, in everyone there are transformations, upheavals. You might say that everyone went through two revolutions, one his own, personal, the other general. It seems to me that socialism is a sea into which all these personal, separate revolutions should flow, the sea of life, the sea of originality. The sea of life, I said, the life that can be seen in paintings, life touched by genius, life creatively enriched.
But now people have decided to test it, not in books, but in themselves, not in abstraction, but in practice" (Part 5, Ch. 8).
Pictured in quite a Tolstoyan manner (the tsar is the slave of history), yet with an unmistakable sympathy, the last emperor seems a child, a pygmy against this background. "The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose. “He should have pronounced something on the order of ‘I, my sword, and my people,’ like Wilhelm, or something in that spirit. But certainly about the people, that’s indispensable. But, you understand, he was natural in a Russian way and tragically above such banality. In Russia this theatricality is unthinkable" (Part 4, Ch. 12).
Only the death of commissar Gintz becomes a frightful reminder of another face of the revolution. The raging crowd kills him easily, laughing at him and finishing him off even when he is already dead.
The revolutionary October is described by Pasternak in quite an openly contrasting pictorial and emotional manner. It is accompanied by another element: not the summer tumult of nature
("Everywhere there were noisy crowds. Everywhere there were blossoming lindens") but a winter blizzard on an enchanted crossroad, a reminiscence of "The Twelve" by Blok.
Zhivago's first reaction on "the official communiqué from Petersburg about the forming of the Soviet of
People’s Commissars, the establishment of soviet power in Russia, and the introduction of the dictatorship of the proletariat" is still good-minded and even enthusiastic. “What magnificent surgery!
To take and at one stroke artistically cut out the old, stinking sores! Simply, without beating around the bush, to sentence age-old injustice, which was used to having people bow and scrape and curtsey before it. “The fact that it was so fearlessly carried out has something nationally intimate, long familiar about it. Something of Pushkin’s unconditional luminosity, of Tolstoy’s unswerving faithfulness to facts...

This unprecedented thing, this miracle of history, this revelation comes bang in the very thick of the ongoing everydayness, with no heed to its course. It begins not from the beginning but from the middle, without choosing the dates beforehand, on the first weekday to come along, at the very peak of tramways plying the city. (Is this is a bow to Mayakovsky with his October "trams" in "Fine!"? — I. S.)
That’s real genius. Only what is greatest can be so inappropriate and untimely" (Part 6, Ch. 8).
Yet, immediately after this conversation of the protagonist with himself, another characteristic of the epoch is given, this time on behalf of the narrator: "Winter came, precisely as had been predicted. It was not yet as scary as the two that followed it, but was already of their kind, dark, hungry, and cold, all a breaking up of the habitual and a rebuilding of the foundations of existence, all an inhuman effort to hold on to life as it slipped away (Part 6, Ch. 9).
A personal revolution, the seas of life and identity, and other wonderful things have to be forgotten. The further intervention of the big history, "the young order" into the life of the doctor and his family is unambiguous. Zhivago leaves, hides, runs, tries to escape, while it, "the young order" captures all more and more space, penetrates into the taiga wilderness, destroys families, pursues them, depriving them of any possibility of personal freedom and individual choice.
Yuri's father-in-law is the first to feel the logic of this new life. "Do you remember the night when you brought the leaflet with the first decrees, in winter, during a blizzard? Do you remember how incredibly unconditional it was? That straightforwardness was winning. But these things live in their original purity only in the heads of their creators, and then only on the first day of their proclamation. The very next day the Jesuitism of politics turns them inside out.
What can I say to you? This philosophy is alien to me. This power is against us."
A bit later, it is Zhivago's turn to reconsider his former fascinations. "I used to be in a very revolutionary mood, but now I think that we’ll gain nothing by violence. People must be drawn to the good by the good" (Part 8, Ch. 5). — "Before, your judgment of the revolution wasn’t so sharp, so irritated.” —
“That’s just the point, Larissa Fyodorovna, that there are limits to everything. There’s been time enough for them to arrive at something. But it turns out that for the inspirers of the revolution the turmoil of changes and rearrangements is their only native element, that they won’t settle for less than something on a global scale. The building of worlds, transitional periods—for them this is an end in itself. They haven’t studied anything else, they don’t know how to do anything. And do you know where this bustle of eternal preparations comes from? From the lack of definite, ready abilities, from giftlessness. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. And life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so thrillingly serious! Why then substitute for it a childish harlequinade of immature inventions, these escapes of
Chekhovian schoolboys to America?" (Part 9, Ch. 14).

Once again, standing after fleeing from the partisans by the newspaper stands with harsh new speeches and decrees on them, the doctor recalls his former enthusiasm and is ashamed of it. "At one time in his life he had admired the unconditional quality of this language and the directness of this thinking. Could it be that he had to pay for this imprudent admiration by never seeing anything else in his life but these frenzied cries and demands, unchanging in the course of long years, becoming ever more impractical, incomprehensible, and unfeasible? Could it be that for a moment of too-broad sympathy he had enslaved himself forever?" (Part 13, Ch. 3).
People try to read Pasternak's book as a "mystery novel". Even when the author, in a straightforward manner, denies the underlying mysterious meaning of a motif or a character, appealing to reality, the stern researcher catches him on certain "intertextual clues": "Statements made by writers like Pasternak are only a device of protection, designed to ensure long-term informational value of the text, its invulnerability to deciphering. They depreciate in advance any attempt to unmask the meaning hidden by the author in accordance with the principle of "there is nothing to understand about it" (I. Smirnov).
The results of the investigation: the deaf-mute hunter Pogorevshikh in "an intertextual retrospective... is equivalent to the entire insurgent Russia" (and what is left to the share of other revolutionaries,
Strelnikov, for example?); in addition, this "collective antagonist" (why, by the way, is he an antagonist?) is "Pasternak's self-caricature", his settlement of accounts "with his own anarchist and futurist past".
In "Doctor Zhivago" the author does not hide anything but reveals many things: he writes about the mysteries of life and death, man, history, Christianity, art, Jewishness and other things with the ultimate sincerity and in plain text (although this text is a fiction). His attitude towards the revolution is also not a mystery and not a secret.
"Upon reading it, Kazakevich said: "It turns out, according to the novel, that the October Revolution was a mistake and it could have been better not to organise it at all""(K. Chukovsky's diary, September 1,
1956). The editorial board of the "Novy Mir" (K. Fedin, K. Simonov, etc.) was of the same opinion in their famous reviewing letter containing the refusal to publish the novel in the magazine: "The spirit of your novel is the spirit of rejection of the Socialist revolution. The pathos of your novel is the pathos of stating that the October Revolution, the Civil War and related subsequent social changes have not brought anything but misery to the people and the Russian intelligentsia has been eliminated either physically or morally. The system of views on the past of our country that one can obviously see in the novel... is limited to the fact that the October Revolution was a mistake, and the participation in it of the supporting intelligentsia was a real disaster, and everything that happened afterwards was evil"
(September 1956).
Such an interpretation, however prophetic it may look — with a change of signs — in the post-Soviet epoch, seems not to coincide with the author's point. Many scenes in the first part of the novel, the fate of Lara are a reproach for the former order of things; they reveal its Achilles' heel. All this logic is once again reproduced in Strelnikov's deathbed delirium monologue: "There was the world of the city’s outskirts, a world of railroad tracks and workmen’s barracks. Filth, overcrowding, destitution, the degradation of man in the laborer, the degradation of women. There was the gleeful, unpunished

impudence of depravity, of mama’s boys, well-heeled students, and little merchants. The tears and complaints of the robbed, the injured, the seduced were dismissed with a joke or an outburst of scornful vexation." Quite logically and quite in a Soviet and Marxist manner, he infers, in his lengthy rhetorical period, the October Revolution and Lenin from "the development of the revolutionary ideas in Russia".
"So, you see, all this nineteenth century, with all its revolutions in Paris, several generations of Russian emigration, starting with Herzen, all the plotted regicides, realised and unrealised, all the workers’ movements of the world, all the Marxism in the parliaments and universities of Europe, all the new system of ideas, the novelty and hastiness of its conclusions, the mockery, all the additional pitilessness developed in the name of pity, all this was absorbed and in a generalised way expressed by Lenin, so as to fall upon the old in a personified retribution for what had been done.
Beside him rose the unforgettably immense image of Russia, which suddenly blazed up in the eyes of all the world like a candle of atonement (the key "personal" image of the novel is manifested here, too. —
I. S.) for all the woes and adversities of mankind" (Part 14, Ch. 17).
The revolution was inevitable — that is what the author of "Doctor Zhivago" has no doubt of. Yet he doubted whether those who became the new authority had the right to speak on its behalf. His revolution, unlike their revolution, is organised at a festive night square by the protesting people who are making their dream come true and in a spiritual impulse are going to transform life in accordance with the Christian principles, to implement "the Socialism of Christ".
Pasternak's revolution needed Vedenyapin's philosophy and Zhivago's poetry. Yet, the revolution of those who came into power welcomed Strelnikov, punishable by death and betraying himself, as well as the hype of the unrealistic decrees.
The second book of the novel is based on the motif of escape from this new triumphant history and power. The doctor considers Yuryatin, Varykino, the chronotopos of the province a temporary way out, a refuge from the Moscow disasters. "The newcomers were struck by the silence at the station, the emptiness, the tidiness. It seemed unusual to them that there was no crowding around, no swearing.
Life was delayed in this out-of-the-way place, it lagged behind history. It had yet to catch up with the savagery of the capital" (Part 8, Ch. 7).
Yet, after having been captured by the forest host for eighteen months coinciding in time with the
"triumphal march of the Soviet power", the doctor returns to the world of the new history, the world of hunger and cold, smoking potbelly stove, insane cries, unrealistic demands, the domination of a phrase and the loss of one's own opinion. "As far as I’ve noticed, each time this young power installs itself, it goes through several stages. In the beginning it’s the triumph of reason, the critical spirit, the struggle against prejudices. “Then comes the second period. The dark forces of the ‘hangers-on,’ the sham sympathisers, gain the majority. Suspiciousness springs up, denunciations, intrigues, hatred. And you’re right, we’re at the beginning of the second phase" — that is Lara's opinion about it (Part 13, Ch. 16). The

evaluation thereof in the author's speech is more large-scale and hopeless: "This time justified the old saying: Man is a wolf to man. A wayfarer turned aside at the sight of another wayfarer; a man would kill the man he met, so as not to be killed himself. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The human laws of civilization ended. Those of beasts were in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the caveman" (Part 13, Ch. 2).
In the second, "provincial" book (Ch. 8-14) Pasternak dramatically changes the optics of art. The direct correlation between the protagonist's fate and the big history is replaced by a generalised integrating one. A historical novel turns into a legend, a novel of adventure, a horror story. "Now I think that the first book is a prologue to the second one, which is less usual", the author explained in a letter. "Its great unusualness, as it seems to me, lies in the fact that I place reality, that is the total of what is happening, even farther off from the conventional plane than I do in the first book; it is almost on the brink of a fairy tale." Similar definitions have remained in the drafts of the novel. "My partisan captivity lasting more than a year, the exile of the family abroad forever — all of that belongs to an adventure novel and what can be more fabulous and improbable." — "It seemed that in the person of Lara he cheated on his wife with the whole town, with all the distressed Russian life get lost in the wilds of the forest in some horror story."
Many characters of the second book come from the fairy tale and folklore background: these are the fortune-teller Kubarikha, the ignorant murderer Palykh, the father and son Mikulitsyns. Zhivago's way to
Moscow through the overgrown, deserted forests and unharvested fields full of mice looks like an adventure in some faraway kingdom or in the afterlife. "The doctor thought he saw the fields after falling dangerously ill and delirious while the forest was being manifested to him in an enlightened state of recovery, that God dwelled in the forest and the mocking smile of the devil crept across the field."
The tale penetrates the first book, proving to be one of the invisible genre landmarks of Pasternak's epic. Some characters develop features that prove to be completely fairy-tale ones. In a poem by
Zhivago, Lara turns into a princess or a knyazhna led to the slaughter. Komarovsky is a "pest" towards her. At the right moment of her life a "benefactor" appears with his money (Kologrivov). Evgraf, on the other hand, is a permanent "wondrous assistant" to Zhivago. Antipov-Strelnikov in this context can be seen as a werewolf character.
The opposite side of the same principle is an apparent neglect of the big history. In the first book there are numerous and consistent chronological landmarks: in the summer of 1903 Yura and his uncle were going across the fields in a chaise; Anna Ivanovna had been lying in bed throughout November 1911; in
April of the same year Zhivago and his whole family went to the distant Urals, etc. The second book has a blurred chronology and even the calendar (an internal communication of events in the novel), in the first book, which has been so clear, now changes, as it should be in a fairy tale, along with the protagonist's movement and his psychological state.

"The doctor and Vasya arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1922, at the beginning of the NEP" (Part 15,
Ch. 5). The chronological connection between the story line and the big history seems to be just as accurate as it were in the first part. Yet, a bit earlier, (Part 15, Ch. 2) it is stated that the characters are going to Moscow across the mouse fields and beautiful forests "in the end of summer, in the warm dry autumn... two or three days in the end of September" — that is the same year for Zhivago parts with
Lara in December 1921 (Part 14, Ch. 2). Thus, Zhivago and his companion were moving backwards on the calendar, from autumn to spring.
Zhivago never sees his wife in Moscow, she has been sent abroad together with "Melgunov,
Kiesewetter, Kuskova, some others" (Part 13, Ch. 18). Yet, in fact, "the philosophers' ships" with the
Russian intelligentsia left Russia for Germany only in September 1922. If he had returned to Moscow in the said time, the doctor could have see Tonya and the children. Following the author's will, the novel's chronology reflects the reality.
The artistic principle of the novel, which lays foundation to its concept, becomes more obvious when the novel progresses: the big history accompanies the protagonist's fate but does not define it. On the background of historical disasters, in the midst of the rampant "personified principles" "the rule of the phrase", "the revolutionary madness", "the Red's and White's bigotry", Zhivago tries to live his life, following his vocation, feeling "the presence of a mystery", listening to "the voice of the mystery" without succumbing to the magic of universal simplification. "The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of nakedness—that, yes, if you please, that we understood.
But petty worldly squabbles like recarving the globe—sorry, we pass, it’s not in our line", the big and the small is interchanged by Lara at Yuri's wake.
From this perspective Pasternak's lyrical epic can be read primarily as a pure romance, a love story. The composition frame of this story are five "accidental" meetings of the protagonist and Lara: in January
1906, in Moscow hotel room when Lara's mother attempts suicide (Part 1, Ch. 21); on Christmas 1911, at the Sventitskys' Christmas party when Lara shoots Komarovsky (Part 2, Ch. 14); in the 1917 revolutionary summer in Meliuzeevo when the enthusiastic doctor, while the heroine is casually ironing the linen, talks about the protesting trees and almost declares his love for her (Part 5, Ch. 8) — this meeting is preceded by "the unmeeting" in the frontline forest (Part 4, Ch. 10); in the spring of 1919 in
Yuryatin when the explanation, the closeness and an attempt to separate finally occur (Part 9, Ch. 11-
16); in the winter of 1920, after an eighteen-months wandering of the doctor in the partisan forests, in the same locations of Yuryatin and Varykino, where Yuri and Lara realise that they were made for each other but have to part forever (Part 13, Ch. 9-18; Part 14, Ch. 1-13). The weeping Lara at Yuri's wake is the epilogue of the personal story line (Part 15, Ch. 15).
The characters' love is mystically predetermined. Like Plato's separated souls, they are looking for each other and finally find each other. Both Zhivago and the author are lost for epithets, hyperboles and metaphors to express the love for Lara: "He was murmuring, not realizing what he was saying, and unaware of himself: “I shall see you, my beauty, my princess, my dearest rowan tree, my own heart’s blood" (Part 12, Ch. 9). — "Let’s say once more to each other our secret night words, great and pacific as

the name of the Asian ocean. It’s not for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my secret, my forbidden angel, under a sky of wars and rebellions, just as you once rose up under the peaceful sky of childhood at its beginning... Often, later in life, I tried to define and name that light of enchantment that you poured into me then, that gradually dimming ray and fading sound that suffused my whole existence ever after and became, owing to you, the key for perceiving everything else in the world" — and so forth for the length of one page, with the protagonist's remark "How I’d like to talk to you without this foolish pathos!" (Part 14, Ch. 3). "My unforgettable delight! As long as the crooks of my arms remember you, as long as you’re still on my hands and lips, I’ll be with you. I’ll shed tears about you in something worthy, abiding. I’ll write down my memory of you in a tender, tender, achingly sorrowful portrayal" (Part 14, Ch. 13).
Zhivago identifies his beloved with Russia, too (in the spirit of Blok's "Oh, my Rus, my wife!") and even
— in complete accordance with V. I. Solovyov — with nature, Sophia, the soul of the world in general.
"Since childhood Yuri Andreevich had loved the evening forest shot through with the fire of sunset. In such moments it was as if he, too, let these shafts of light pass through him. As if the gift of the living spirit streamed into his breast, crossed through his whole being, and came out under his shoulder blades as a pair of wings. That youthful archetype, which is formed in every young man for the whole of life and serves him forever after and seems to him to be his inner face, his personality, awakened in him with its full primary force, and transformed nature, the forest, the evening glow, and all visible things into an equally primary and all-embracing likeness of a girl. “Lara!”—closing his eyes, he half whispered or mentally addressed his whole life, the whole of God’s earth, the whole sunlit expanse spread out before him" (Part 11, Ch. 7).
The heroine is equal to Yuri in her devotion and eloquence. "The gift of love is like any other gift. It may be great, but without a blessing it will not manifest itself. And with us it’s as if we were taught to kiss in heaven and then sent as children to live in the same time, so as to test this ability on each other. A crown of concord, no sides, no degrees, no high, no low, equivalence of the whole being, everything gives joy, everything becomes soul" (Part 14, Ch. 7).
The ideologem of heavenly, angelic, paradisal love ("you and I are like Adam and Eve, the first human beings") not only wins over history but also "removes" particular common circumstances, ignoring them. The seduction of Lara by a family friend, an experience lovelace (this line resembles Bunin's "Easy
Breath"), her "Dostoyevsky-style" relationship with her first husband, her "brokenness", household business, maternity, the "betrayal" of her daughter do not go quite well with the symbolic meaning of the image. Yet, even here, Pasternak explodes the conventional believability and sharply changes the artistic code. He tries to write his own "Song of Songs" above the historical and psychological novel, from time to time proceeding to verse from the rhythmic prose. "It’s not for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my secret, my forbidden angel..." — this is a pure anapaest.
Within the story line, the relationships between Zhivago and Lara are formally being built against the background of a novel-like "love polygon": Tonya — Yuri — Lara — Komarovsky — Antipov — Marina.

This "human, way too human" (novel, way too novel) side of love, jealousy and revenge attempts are depicted by Pasternak in several episodes. Yet, the novel component eventually dissolves in the structure of the lyrical epic; the human is smelted into the superhuman — whether angelic, or hagiographic, or utopian. The sharp corners disappear in the atmosphere of selflessness and sacrifice.
The "exemplary" Tonya is opposed to the "rebellious" Larissa ("I was born into this world to simplify life and seek the right way through, and she in order to complicate and confuse it") and eventually leaves her husband to her. Marina, Tonya's counterpart at the grassroots, vulgar level, serves him with the same submissiveness and self-sacrifice. Zhivago, after hearing Lara's confession about her life with
Antipov, enthusiastically exclaims: "How incredibly purely and deeply you love him! Go on, go on loving him. I’m not jealous of him, I won’t hinder you" — which does not hinder the continuation of their relationship which is not platonic at all. Antipov-Strelnikov peacefully, too, without any jealousy, discusses with Zhivago his wife's merits and listens to him reciting Lara's confession ("She called you an exemplary man, whose equal she had never seen, of a uniquely high authenticity, and said that if the vision of the home she once shared with you glimmered again on the far horizon, she would crawl to its doorstep on her knees from anywhere at all, even the ends of the earth"), then adding: "You’re close and dear to her. Maybe you’ll see her someday". Even Komarovsky is able to rise above his selfishness of the sole possession of a woman trying to save not only the girl he once seduced — someone else's wife now, but her current beloved person who is formally her another lover.
However, these very definitions — lover, betrayal, adultery — are represented in the novel from an outside and unfriendly point of view, only in someone else's speech and not in that of the protagonist.
"But for him mama is—what’s it called … He’s mama’s … whatever … They’re bad words, I don’t want to repeat them." — "Now she’s—what is it called?—now she’s—a fallen woman. She’s a woman from a
French novel..."
Zhivago is able to simultaneously (just like Dostoevsky's "idiot" with his love both for Nastassia
Filippovna and Aglaya) love both Larissa and Tonya — living with Marina at the same time ("I’m glad,
Gordon, that you defend Marina, as before you were always Tonya’s defender. But I have no dispute with them, I don’t make war on them or anybody else"). And his children from each of the women are born not in bed but in heaven, where he and Lara learned how to kiss.
In its novel-like story line, Pasternak's novel is not an erotic but a spiritualistic one. "Shadows of crossed arms,of crossed legs- Of crossed destiny. Two tiny shoes fell to the floor And thudded..." "A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow..." — this is the border of the narrative openness and we find it not in the prosaic but in the poetic part of the novel. "The prose" is more poetic and objectless than "the poetry".

The novel's philosophy is quite peculiar, not only thematically but also structurally. Christianity, history, death, people, Russia, Jewishness, revolution, woman, art — almost all of the novel's themes and motifs
— become the subject of reflection for Vedenyapin, Zhivago, Strelnikov, Komarovsky, Gordon, Serafima
Tuntsova.
Many of such "thinking" pieces are clearly marked in the text, representing either a long, quite conditional monologue of a character ("A talk was going on between the two that bore the character of a lecture read by the guest to the hostess"), or imitation of inner speech, or a diary entry (Zhivago). They merge into a meaningful unity, belonging not to the characters nominally claimed as the subjects speech, with their personal style of thinking, but to the world of the novel as a whole, ultimately — to the author.
"I plan to insert a large, consisting of 5-6 records, fragment from Y. A.'s diary or his collection of thoughts into the passages depicting the year of peaceful diligence at Varykino," Pasternak mentions.
"To create a collection of world-view pieces about the revolutionaries, the people, Christ, life, etc. that initially were in the draft manuscript but were not included into the dialogues or descriptions of the final version of the novel." This plan was implemented (Part 9, Ch. 1 -9), but the subjects of Zhivago's records are significantly different. It is Strelnikov that talks in detail about the revolutionaries and the revolution in the second book, while Serafima Tuntsova talks about Christ. Apparently, the relevant fragments were eventually readdressed to them. The philosophy of Vedenyapin, the principal philosopher of the novel, was simply authorised by Pasternak, according to L. K. Chukovskaya's diary entry: "There was no such movement at that time to which Nikolai Nikolaevich belongs, so I simply delegated him my own thoughts". It is the idea that is important for the author, and not that on whose behalf it is expressed.
Therefore, "the world-view pieces " of the novel are easily developing into a consistent system.
What is history? This is centuries-old work on unraveling and future overcoming of death (a bow from
Pasternak-Vedenyapin to the creator of the "philosophy of common cause" N. Fedorov). This is the second universe that the humanity erected in response to the phenomenon of death with the help of the phenomena of time and memory.
History did not exist for a long time. There was old loosely-populated earth where mammoths were roaming. Then there was the Ancient World, Rome with its flea market of borrowed gods, bestiality, illiterate emperors and feeding the fish with the meat of educated slaves.
True history began when Christ came into this world, light-weighted and dressed in a glow. He was openly human-like and deliberately provincial. Since then, Rome had come to an end, the leaders and the people had become a thing of the past. The personality, the preaching of freedom came to replace them. An individual human life became the story of God. The mystery of personality started unveiling.

What is personality? It consists of God and the work carried out by the successive generations. Such works were Egypt, Greece, the Biblical prophets' knowledge of God, and finally — Christianity.
The main parts of a modern Christian person are the idea of freedom and the idea of sacrifice. Therefore the personality is hostile to the type, on the one hand, and to the genius, on the other hand.
One of the manifestations of the national is the typical, in particular, Jewish. Consequently, in the
Christian epoch the general concept of the people should disappear, therefore, Jewishness must also vanish.
For an individual, history is not moving, its course is similar to the growth of grass, it cannot be seen, it is elusive in its transformations. Revolution are the fermenting yeast of history. It is in this epoch that unilateral fanatics appear and geniuses of self-restraint, who, in just a few hours, overturn the old order, making people worship the spirit of limitations as a relic for decades and centuries.
Woman's task in this life is clearly defined, the idea of sacrifice is derived from her nature, of her destination. She gives birth to her offspring herself, nurtures and teaches them in silent humility.
Science and art remain man's share.
What is art? It is not either a category or a field, or a form, it is a mysterious and hidden part of the content, a certain thought, a statement about life. Art has always been occupied by the two things: it is relentlessly thinking about death and relentlessly creates life by doing this. The big genuine art is what is called the Revelation of John, and what is painting it in. Art has always served beauty, and beauty is the happiness of possessing the form; the form, in its turn, is the organic key of existence; to exist, all the living beings must have the form, and thus, the art, including tragic art, is a story about the happiness of existence.
The philosophical Issues of "Doctor Zhivago" do not define, however, the structure of the whole, as in
Voltaire's philosophical novelettes or Dostoevsky's ideological novels. It is hardly fair to call Pasternak's novel a philosophical one. "I don’t like works devoted entirely to philosophy," Lara confesses. "I think philosophy should be used sparingly as a seasoning for art and life. To be occupied with it alone is the same as eating horseradish by itself."
Pasternak does not test his ideas, he voices them out. "The world-view pieces" are included into
Pasternak's lyrical epic as another layer of paint, important yet not dominant. Their function is not logical persuasiveness but the "irresistibly unarmed truth, the appeal of its example". It is spoken about in the novel in connection with the New Testament parables.

The central characters, tied into a tight knot (by the way, almost Solzhenitsyn's metaphoric images of
"the wheel of history" and "the knot" can be found in Pasternak's drafts), will have to stand dramatic and equally symbolic outcomes of life.
The expulsion of the first wife abroad, the forced emigration is rightly perceived by her as a farewell, an intravital death. "Farewell, I must end. They have come to take the letter and it is time to pack. Oh, Yura,
Yura, my dear, my darling, my husband, father of my children, what is all this? We will never, ever see each other again. There, I have written these words, do you clearly make out their meaning? Do you understand, do you understand? They are hurrying me, and it is a sure sign that they have come to take me to my execution. Yura! Yura!" (Part 13, Ch. 18).
The suicide of Strelnikov-Antipov, his "fit of self-exposure" is a historical revenge for the "sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch". "No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver. On the slightest pretext, a rage of selfcastigating imagination would play itself out to the uttermost limits. People fantasised, denounced themselves, not only under the effect of fear, but also drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped" (Part 14, Ch. 16). The drafts of the novel contain a more colourful and concrete description of the causes of "the madness", projecting Strelnikov's image to the later, Stalinist, times. "A terrible time, having entitled itself to the right of the final judgment, judged the living and the dead, incriminating them, sentencing to death and punishing. Repentance, revisions of the past and selfcondemnation were a most popular phenomenon in the cells of investigators and at working-through public meetings."
Zhivago's unexpected death in an overcrowded tram is the most symbolically rich element. Another
"plot clot", an occasional encounter with a long-forgotten and never recognised lady in purple,
Mademoiselle Fleury, demonstrates the repeatedly used in the novel principle of "crossed destiny".
Looking at the familiar stranger from Meliuzeevo where the doctor has experienced the best days of his life and has not yet parted with his hopes and illusions, Yuri makes his last lyrical and philosophical observation: "He thought about several existences developing side by side, moving next to each other at different speeds, and about one person’s fate getting ahead of another’s fate in life, and who outlives whom. He imagined something like a principle of relativity in the arena of life, but, getting thoroughly confused, he dropped these comparisons as well" (Part 15, Ch. 12). The doctor does not suppose that in a few minutes this principle will be realised in the life of his own: "And she went on, getting ahead of the tram for the tenth time and, without knowing it in the least, went ahead of Zhivago and outlived him."
The protagonist's death includes not only a metaphysical, but also a historical sign. "He was killed by the absence of air", says Block of Pushkin in his famous speech "On the Purpose of the Poet" (1921). The contemporaries will explain his sudden death in the same symbolic way: airless, stuffy time. "Blok was the manifestation of Christmas in all domains of Russian life," Zhivago thinks on the very night and

moment when he sees a burning candle and composes his first line, which gives way to his real poetic vocation. Zhivago is Blok's heir. His death in 1929 marks the beginning of the time, when airlessness is growing unbearable. "The sky of big wholesale deaths" is hanging all over Russia (O. Mandelstam).
Such a wholesale death (or disappearance) is waiting for the beautiful Lara. A perfect embodiment of woman, Russia, life becomes a human number somewhere in the vast GULAG. "One day Larissa
Fyodorovna left the house and did not come back again. Evidently she was arrested on the street in those days and died or vanished no one knew where, forgotten under some nameless number on subsequently lost lists, in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north."
An exile, a suicide, a sudden death, a disappearance... The generation of the "boys and girls" of the
1890s, the generation of Pasternak, has been swept away from the scene of history. It is being replaced by new fatherless people (Tanka Bezocheredeva's fate) and a new ordeal (the Patriotic War). By making a thrust from 1929 to 1943, Pasternak in the epilogue briefly sketches the war and the camps, and the exploits of youth, and a tear of a child, and seemingly finishes with Gordon's remark clashing those times and these times. And Blok is the starting point for him again. "Take Blok’s ‘We, the children of
Russia’s terrible years,’ and you’ll see the difference in epochs. When Blok said that, it was to be understood in a metaphorical sense, figuratively. The children were not children, but sons, offspring, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible, but providential, apocalyptic, and those are two different things. But now all that was metaphorical has become literal, and the children are children, and the terrors are terrifying—there lies the difference."
The genuine prosaic ending, however, is different. The final fifth chapter — an epilogue of the epilogue
— one more step up from history to tale, from reality to utopia. Here the historical time is blurred again: five or ten years have passed (therefore, it is either 1948 or 1953). No hint of the specific circumstances of any household details is provided. The time and space of the characters maximally approach to the narrator's chronotopos: one quiet summer evening they were sitting again, Gordon and Dudorov, somewhere high up by an open window over the boundless evening Moscow; and Moscow below and in the distance, the native city of the author and of half of what had befallen him... And this city, which
"had to suffer a lot" (Chekhov's historical premonition in his story "The Three Years"), becomes the embodiment of an utopia, where like a timeless eternity there were located the two "Horatios" of the departed Zhivago-Hamlet who were reading his "true manuscript", "the notebook of Yuri’s writings", which, just two paragraphs later, magically and unmotivatedly turns into "the book". "To the aging friends at the window it seemed that this freedom of the soul had come, that precisely on that evening the future had settled down tangibly in the streets below, that they themselves had entered into that future and henceforth found themselves in it. A happy, tender sense of peace about this holy city and about the whole earth, about the participants in this story who had lived till that evening and about their children, filled them and enveloped them in an inaudible music of happiness, which spread far around. And it was as if the book in their hands knew it all and lent their feelings support and confirmation."

On the border of the book the author moves the terrible years of Russia into the past and gives his native city enlightenment and liberation, an inaudible music of happiness. Yet few had lived until this evening... This book-notebook, "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago", remains the memory of the time for the future which is lying behind the window.
At the very beginning of the work, Pasternak, as it has already been mentioned, outlined that his epic would be completed with a book of poetry. The novel was perceived as a duty by him, while poetry was for him a desired return to the familiar form. At the same time, big prose was the goal of his many-year aspirations that had finally materialised. Subjectively, it was evaluated as something more significant and important than usual poetry. Such an understanding was given by Pasternak to his protagonist:
"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" (Part 3, Ch. 2).
Zhivago never wrote such a book, yet, it seems to have been written by the author of "Doctor Zhivago".
But the nature played strange joke on the author: it had realigned the conceived aesthetic reality. So the poems from the novel are a justification and genuine completion of the prosaic form.
In the prose text Zhivago is presented as the author of various literary experiments. Back in 1916 or early 1917, without his permission, Gordon and Dudorov have his book — apparently of those verses — published in Moscow. These are the poems discussed in the above quote (Part 4, Ch. 14). Then the following works are mentioned: "Playing at People", "a gloomy diary or journal of those days, consisting of prose, verse, and miscellanea, suggested by the awareness that half of the people had stopped being themselves and were acting out who knows what", relating to September 1917 (Part 6, Ch. 5); the poem
"Disarray", "not about the Resurrection and not about the Entombment, but about the days that passed between the one and the other", written (or conceived) during the typhoid delirium of the early 1918
(Part 6, Ch. 15) and finally, small one-sheet books on a variety of issues that the doctor, with Vasya
Brykin's help, publishes in the Moscow during the NEP period. "The books contained Yuri Andreevich’s philosophy, explanations of his medical views, his definitions of health and unhealth, his thoughts about transformism and evolution, about personality as the biological basis of the organism, his reflections on history and religion, close to his uncle’s and to Simushka’s, sketches of the Pugachev places he had visited, and his stories and poems"(Part 15, Ch. 5).
However, the reader does not discover anything about these works of his, apart from the most common characteristics. The writer Zhivago who have composed not so little is presented in the prose as merely an author of some diary entries (Part 9, Ch. 1-9) and the four lines of verse. "“A candle burned on the table. A candle burned …” Yura whispered to himself the beginning of something vague, unformed, in hopes that the continuation would come of itself, without forcing. It did not come" (Part 3, Ch. 10). —
"And two rhymed lines kept pursuing him: “Glad to take up” and “Have to wake up.” Hell, and decay, and decomposition, and death are glad to take up, and yet, together with them, spring, and Mary

Magdalene, and life are also glad to take up. And—have to wake up. He has to wake up and rise. He has to resurrect" (Part 6, Ch. 16).
A little more is explained about the circumstances of creating poems included into his book-will. Apart from "A Winter Night", the following three poems are mentioned with designation of the life context:
"The Star of the Nativity", "A Tale" and "Hamlet".
Pasternak usually prefers a generalised image of a creative impulse and a creative act, "which is often called inspiration", technological details. The creativity is described in the novel as admiringly and chastely as love. In essence, it is only once that the author tries to tell us "how to make poetry", in his description of the process of work on "A Tale". The commentators' striving to find in the novel an exact location for most texts by Zhivago, to show from which "rubbish" of the plot they are growing — this is quite curious but not at all necessary (especially since many author's guidances thereupon have remained in the drafts only).
"The Poems of Yuri Zhivago" are likely to grow not into the book but from it, fundamentally transforming both the nominal author's biography and the conditions of their origin. They relate to the crude "matter" of the novel life like wine relates to grape meat.
The mechanism of transformation of the internal novel "life" into the internal novel "art" is clearly visible turn to "A Tale" as an example thereof. The wintry solitude in Varykino, the howling wolves, the melancholy night in anticipation of the inevitable parting with Lara lead to an unexpected transformation. "The wolves he had been remembering all day were no longer wolves in the snow under the moon, but became the theme of wolves, the representation of a hostile power that had set itself the goal of destroying the doctor and Lara or driving them from Varykino. The idea of this hostility, developing, attained such force by evening as if the tracks of an antediluvian monster had been discovered in Shutma and a fairytale dragon of gigantic proportions, thirsting for the doctor’s blood and hungering for Lara, were lying in the ravine" (Part 14, Ch. 9). A real feeling and observation — the theme
— its generalised concept — the idea — a sudden irrational leap and its unexpected embodiment in another material, radically different from the original — technical work on the poem. This is the logic of
Pasternak's depiction of the creative process resulting in a ballad about a dragon, a knight and a saved beauty. The grapes have disappeared, died, dissolved in the taste of the wine. By proceeding from the plot of "A Tale", we can never recover the original circumstances. Night turned into day, winter — into summer, a house — into a cave, the characters — into mythological beings, Russia — into "fairy land",
1921 — into "olden times", a feeling of sadness and fear in anticipation of the separation from the beloved — into the sweet sadness and the hope of eternal union. "Yet their hearts keep beating. And now she, and now he Tries to awaken fully, And then falls back to sleep. Tightly shut eyelids. Lofty heights. Clouds. Waters. Fords. Rivers. Years and centuries."

According to Pasternak, is the process of composing other poems, after Yuri's and Lara' parting, is similar
"He drank and wrote things devoted to her, but the Lara of his verses and notes, as he struck out and replaced one word with another, kept moving further away from her true prototype, Katenka’s living mother, who was now traveling with Katya... Thus what was visceral, still pulsing and warm, was forced out of the poems, and instead of the bleeding and noxious, a serene breadth appeared in them, raising the particular case to a generality familiar to all" (Part 14, Ch. 14)..
So what is there left of all those years, of "the personally encountered and unimaginably bygone" in the thin notebook of "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago"?
We can find there neither war nor revolution, nor life, nor the Bolsheviks nor the partisans, nor any philosophy. The word "Russia" is not used in the poems at all. Neither lyrical situation has any direct parallels with the "special cases" of the text in prose. Even "A Winter Night" which is seemingly growing right out of the plot describes quite a different date, not the one of Lara and Antipov that took place on the Christmas Eve by the burning candle. Shoes dropping down on the floor, the heat of seduction and a
February blizzard instead of the December frost appeared following the same law of sudden associations by which a cave, a dragon and a knight appear in "A Tale ".
Only the three intertwined themes are brought into the field of the "generality familiar to all": nature, love and the passions of Christ.
Word painting was an important constituent element in the prosaic part, too. "The characters' life proceeds, the novel's plot develops together with nature, and the nature itself is part of the plot" (V.
Shalamov). In "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago" nature turns into almost the main heroine. the eleven poems provide an image of the annual cycle of nature: March — the Holy Week — a white night — bad roads in spring — summer in town — Indian summer — autumn — August — a winter night
— the dawn (winter) — the earth (spring). "Just like at an exhibition of paintings" ("Golden Autumn",
1956), the scenery is moving and the themes are resonating (summer in the countryside and in town, two nightingales), only occasionally including a thematic series (a love story in "A White Night ", "
Autumn" and "A Winter Night ") or by introducing a new motif (death in "August", and only this
"August" is not in place, outridden by the autumn poems).
These picturesque shots of the season correspond to the formula inferred a bit later, in "Unique Days"
(1956): "How I remember solstice days Through many winters long completed! Each unrepeatable, unique, And each one countless times repeated. Of all these days, these only days, When one rejoiced in the impression That time had stopped, there grew in years An unforgettable succession... Eternal, endless is the day..." Signs of different epochs (the daughter of a poor landowner living in the steppe, a lodge, local partisans' outposts, etc.) can rather be guessed in the poems. In general, the space and time

tend to a historical blur, but at the same time to the natural specificity and simultaneous universality. A season, another picture, is served as a state coloring the entire universe and being equal to a century and even to eternity. "The square lies like eternity From the crossroads to the corner, And the light and warmth dawn Are still a millennium away" ("The Holy Week"). "Petersburg spreading its panorama
Beyond the boundless river Neva" ("A White Night"). "And the usual solitude Fills all of nature and my heart" ("Autumn"). "It snowed, it snowed over all the world From end to end" ("A Winter Night").
The love cycle in Zhivago's notebook includes nine poems (if you include in it the three already mentioned "borderline" scenery texts). "The collection of Yura's poems must include either poems about the feeling or poems inspired by the feeling to an even greater extent than the rest of the verses"
(D. N. and V. P. Zhuravlev, October 1, 1953).
The poems about the feeling feature only two characters, I (he) and you (she). The woman is never the first person singular. Here a particular circular plot is being constructed: a meeting, a love date ("A
White Night", "Hops", "Autumn", "A Winter Night", "Meeting") — "A Wedding" (someone else's) — separation ("Wind", "Separation") — another meeting, a heart-to-heart talk with another cycle in mind
("But howsoever night may bind me With its anguished coil, Strongest of all is the pull away, The passion for a clean break").
"A Tale", with its role-playing, ballad-like manner, tells us about just the same things: an encounter, love and an attempt to meet again by waking up.
The barriers that the characters are facing are lyrically abstract in the poem: numerous obstacles, cruel light, a fabulous dragon. Again we can find neither war, nor jail, nor poverty, nor another female rival in love among the motifs splitting the protagonists apart.
The Gospel cycle consisting of six poems is located at the end of the notebook. It is connected to the love poems by the motif of female destiny (two poems about Magdalene) and connected to the natural cycle by "The Holy Week" where the gardens burying God are mentioned and an aphoristic ending takes place: "Death itself may be overcome By the effort of the Resurrection".
Its semantic center is the idea of sacrifice uniting it with the standing alone at the beginning of the notebook "Hamlet" (thus, a compositional ring occurs in each microcycle) and the Resurrection of Christ who gives a start to the new history.
The philosophical maxims of the text in prose are implemented in this poetic cycle.

The second epilogue of the novel, the lyrical one, is the direct speech of Jesus, his prophecy in the
Garden of Gethsemane:
I shall go to the grave, and on the third day rise,
And, just as rafts float down a river,
To me for judgment, like a caravan of barges,
The centuries will come floating from the darkness.
From this position of the unorthodox, grassroots Christianity, Pasternak pays off a score with hid century in his novel. He creates his own version of Russian history. At the same time, he principally rewrites the whole history of literature.
There is a new age in the world of "Zhivago", yet there is no Silver Age; there are numerous thoughts about art, yet there is no new art itself.
The names of Hegel, B. Croce, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, V. I. Solovyov occur in a lively debate and monologues, but of the contemporary poets only Blok and Mayakovsky are discussed, and there is an incidental allusion to Balmont. Neither the Symbolist vigil at the Tower, nor the Acmeist poetic workshops, nor the Futurist scandals seem to be familiar to the protagonist. His artist's life passes in the shadows, alone, away from the literary life of the century. The author of "The Twin in the Clouds" and "Above the Barriers" also does not exist for Zhivago the poet.
In the novel "Doctor Zhivago" the late Pasternak, among other things, settles his accounts with the earlier version of himself. In the letter to V. Shalamov (July 9, 1952), he argued that his "real element was... characterising the nature or reality, harmoniously developed from some of the happily observed and aptly named particularity, just like in the poetry of Innokenty Annensky and in the works of Leo
Tolstoy" and that these natural properties have been warped in a collision "with the literary nihilism of
Mayakovsky and then with the public nihilism of the revolution". The same letter features the mentioning of the beneficence "of dealing with the aesthetic whims of the licentious generation".
Pasternak was inspired by a praise from one of the first listeners of the poems from his novel: "You know, you have definitely removed the veil from "My Sister, Life"". By removing the veil from "My
Sister, Life", we will get "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago".
Zhivago is just the poet the early Pasternak would have liked to be at the end of his life (but he never was). He took a step back from Modernism to the 19th century and moved the "painting" of poetry —

from Vrubel to Levitan, the "music" thereof — from Scriabin to Tchaikovsky, the "feeling" thereof — from Blok, Mayakovsky and Lermontov as "the poet supermankind" (the interpretation of
Merezhkovsky) to the Fet, Chekhov and Lermontov from the anthologies: "The Autumn Twilight of
Chekhov, Tchaikovsky and Levitan" ("Winter is Coming", 1943).
If I. Ezhov and E. Shamurin, who compiled a famous anthology of the 20th century poetry, had an idea to include in it a poem by Yuri Zhivago, they would have found themselves somewhere in the section
"Poets Not Affiliated with Certain Groups" (Boris Pasternak is there accompanied by Futurists).
By making a poet, an artist the protagonist and judge of the time, Pasternak follows the living trace of two other authors of "the 20th century books", who were hardly known to him while working on
"Doctor Zhivago": these are Mikhail Bulgakov with "The Master and Margarita" and Vladimir Nabokov with "The Gift". Yet, his version of "the eternity's hostage captured by the time" differs from that of
Bulgakov's and Nabokov's.
The Master writes a novel about Yeshua that became his crucifixion, avoiding his own biography and running away from modernity taking revenge against him for his "untimely" theme and for his gift.
The poetry and prose of Godunov-Cherdyntsev grow out of his biography and become a story about the happiness of existence in spite of all the adverse circumstances.
Pasternak's antagonist paradoxically combines Bulgakov's and Nabokov's versions of the correlation between poetry and truth, biography and creativity. Hamlet-Zhivago, by his created poetic world, denies the historical world and in the end he is its victim (as Bulgakov's unnamed protagonist). Yet, his art becomes a poem about the happiness of existence, a thanksgiving to life, an apology of "the work of creation, and working miracles" (like Nabokov's Fedor). "For life is only an instant, too, Only the dissolving Of ourselves, like the giving of a gift, Into all the others. Only a wedding that bursts its way
Through an open window, Only a song, only a dream, Only a blue-gray pigeon."
"Farewell, the sweep of outspread wings, The willful stubbornness of flight, And the image of the world revealed in words, And the work of creation, and working miracles."
The contemporaries' dispute about the novel, in which Pasternak found himself in the role of the Master accused of the Pilate style (anti-Sovietism), was inevitable, yet it was based on a misunderstanding. "The politically unusual sharp words not only put the manuscript under threat. It is petty to settle your accounts with such attitudes of time. They do not even deserve to be mentioned politically. The novel is opposed to them with all of its tone and range of interests" (an entry in a draft).

Pasternak was writing not an anti-Soviet or a pro-Soviet novel, he was creating a Godly novel. Or a
Christian one, to put it in other words. In that free understanding of Christianity which he was speaking of when applying to Tolstoy. "And still the main and most exorbitant thing about Tolstoy is the one that is more than his preaching of the good and wider than his immortal artistic originality (and perhaps it is his true being), a new type of spiritualisation in the perception of the world and life; that new thing that
Tolstoy brought into the world and what he stepped forward in the history of Christianity with, was and still remains the foundation of my existence, of the whole my manner to live and see" (a letter to N.
Rodionov, March 27, 1950).
At the turn of the epoch, when much was destroyed in the literature, Pasternak tied the torn threads and joined times together; he reminded his contemporaries of the true purpose of life, art, poetry, was the living embodiment of the national tradition. All this was written to the author of "Doctor Zhivago" by the future author of "The Kolyma Tales" — over the judgment of the "weaknesses" of the text, and, contrary to the future belief in the collapse of the tradition of classical, psychological, Tolstoyan novel.
"I have never written to you that I have always thought you to be the conscience of our epoch — this is what Leo Tolstoy was for his time... Despite the baseness and cowardice of the writers' world, the forgetting of all that constitutes the proud and great name of a Russian writer... life in the depths of its own, in its underground flow, has been and will always be the same — with a thirst for the real truth, yearning for truth; the life, that, against all odds, has the right to real art... It is here that the issue of the honour of Russia can be solved, the issue of what is, after all, the Russian writer ? Is it not so? Is it not at this level that your responsibility lies? You took this responsibility with all the firmness and determination. And everything else is just shallow and worthless. You are the honour of the age, you are its pride. The future will excuse our time for the fact that you lived in it."
The future is unpredictable. Sometimes it judges both the innocent and the guilty, not listening to any excuses, or simply passing by with indifference. However, then it turns into past, and the judges are also subject to trial.
The vision of the Russian writer's role in the new reality has changed significantly. The evaluations similar to that of Shalamov today may seem lofty rhetoric. The story of the creation of Pasternak's novel and the fight for it may seem a part of a biographical myth in need of deconstruction. The text itself may seem a collection of more and less successful pieces and fragments, school copy-books, a conspiracy treatise (other versions are possible here). Whatever it was, there is such a book in our literature.
Faulkner evaluated the merits of a work by the scale of its conception and the extent of failure that befell the writer: both of them are inseparable.

"Doctor Zhivago" is perhaps not the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Yet, Boris
Pasternak, in the most hopeless of times, adequately answered the question of what is, in the end, the
Russian writer. Is it not so?