Doctor Zhivago

Doctor

Zhivago

BORIS PASTERNAK

A SIGNET BOOK

Published by THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

© 1957 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, Italy

©
 
1958 in the English translation

Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., London

© 1958 in authorized revisions to the English translation

by Pantheon Books, Inc., New York, New York.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reproduced without permission. For information address

Pantheon Books, Inc., 22 East 51st Street,

New York, New York 10022.

This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition

published by Pantheon Books, Inc.

TWENTY-FIRST PRINTING

Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and

Manya Harari;
"
The Poems of Yurii Zhivago,
"

translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney.

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,
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.,

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,

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,
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The Principal Characters in This Book

Yurii Andreievich Zhivago
(as a child, called
Yura
;
affectionately,
Yurochka
)
is the son of Andrei Zhivago, a profligate, and Maria Nikolaievna Zhivago.
Evgraf Andreievich Zhivago
,
his half-brother, is the son of his father and Princess Stolbunova-Enrici.
Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin
(
Uncle Kolia
)
is his maternal uncle.

Antonina Alexandrovna Gromeko
(
Tonia
)
is the daughter of
Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko
,
a professor of chemistry, and his wife,
Anna Ivanovna
,
whose father was the landowner and ironmaster Ivan Ernestovich Krueger. As young people, Yurii Andreievich Zhivago and
Misha Gordon
,
son of a lawyer, live with the Gromekos.

Larisa Feodorovna Guishar
(
Lara
)
is the daughter of a Russianized, widowed Frenchwoman, Amalia Karlovna Guishar. Rodion (Rodia) is her younger brother.

Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky
was Andrei Zhivago
'
s lawyer and is Madame Guishar
'
s lover and adviser.

Lavrentii Mikhailovich Kologrivov
is a rich industrialist; his wife, Serafima Filippovna; their daughters, Nadia and Lipa.

Pavel Pavlovich Antipov
(
Pasha
,
Pashenka
)
is the son of a railway worker, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov. After his father
'
s exile to Siberia, he lives with the Tiverzins (Kuprian Savelievich and his mother, Marfa Gavrilovna), another revolutionary family of railway workers.

Osip Gimazetdinovich Galiullin
(
Yusupka
),
son of Gimazetdin, the janitor at the Tiverzins
'
tenement; he is a Moslem.

Innokentii Dudorov
(
Nika
),
son of Dementii Dudorov, a revolutionary terrorist, and a Georgian princess.

Markel Shchapov
,
porter at the Gromekos
'
house, and his daughter
Marina
(
Marinka
).

On they went, singing
"
Rest Eternal,
"
and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.

Passers-by made way for the procession, counted the wreaths, and crossed themselves. Some joined in out of curiosity and asked:
"
Who is being buried?
"
—
"
Zhivago,
"
they were told.—
"
Oh, I see. That
'
s what it is.
"
—
"
It isn
'
t him. It
'
s his wife.
"
—
"
Well, it comes to the same thing. May her soul rest in peace. It
'
s a fine funeral.
"

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
"
The earth is the Lord
'
s and the fullness thereof, the earth and everything that dwells therein.
"
The priest, with the gesture of a cross, scattered earth over the body of Maria Nikolaievna. They sang
"
The souls of the righteous.
"
Then a fearful bustle began. The coffin was closed, nailed, and lowered into the ground. Clods of earth rained on the lid as the grave was hurriedly filled by four spades. A little mound formed. A ten-year-old boy climbed on it. Only the state of stupor and insensibility which is gradually induced by all big funerals could have created the impression that he intended to speak over his mother
'
s grave.

He raised his head and from his vantage point absently glanced about the bare autumn landscape and the domes of the monastery. His snub-nosed face became contorted and he stretched out his neck. If a wolf cub had done this, everyone would have thought that it was about to howl. The boy covered his face with his hands and burst into sobs. The wind bearing down on him lashed his hands and face with cold gusts of rain. A man in black with tightly fitting sleeves went up to the grave. This was Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin, the dead woman
'
s brother and the uncle of the weeping boy; a former priest, he had been unfrocked at his own request. He went up to the boy and led him out of the graveyard.

They spent the night at the monastery, where Uncle Nikolai was given a room for old times
'
sake. It was on the eve of the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin. The next day they were supposed to travel south to a provincial town on the Volga where Uncle Nikolai worked for the publisher of the local progressive newspaper. They had bought their tickets and their things stood packed in the cell. The station was near by, and they could hear the plaintive hooting of engines shunting in the distance.

It grew very cold that evening. The two windows of the cell were at ground level and looked out on a corner of the neglected kitchen garden, a stretch of the main road with frozen puddles on it, and the part of the churchyard where Maria Nikolaievna had been buried earlier in the day. There was nothing in the kitchen garden except acacia bushes around the walls and a few beds of cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold. With each blast of wind the leafless acacias danced as if possessed and then lay flat on the path.

During the night the boy, Yura, was wakened by a knocking at the window. The dark cell was mysteriously lit up by a flickering whiteness. With nothing on but his shirt, he ran to the window and pressed his face against the cold glass.

Outside there was no trace of the road, the graveyard, or the kitchen garden, nothing but the blizzard, the air smoking with snow. It was almost as if the snowstorm had caught sight of Yura and, conscious of its power to terrify, roared and howled, doing everything possible to impress him. Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it. The blizzard was alone in the world; it had no rival.

When he climbed down from the window sill Yura
'
s first impulse was to dress, run outside, and start doing something. He was afraid that the cabbage patch would be buried so that no one could dig it out and that his mother would helplessly sink deeper and deeper away from him into the ground.

Once more it ended in tears. His uncle woke up, spoke to him of Christ, and tried to comfort him, then yawned and stood thoughtfully by the window. Day was breaking. They began to dress.

While his mother was alive Yura did not know that his father had abandoned them long ago, leading a dissolute life in Siberia and abroad and squandering the family millions. He was always told that his father was away on business in Petersburg or at one of the big fairs, usually at Irbit.

His mother had always been sickly. When she was found to have consumption she began to go to southern France and northern Italy for treatment. On two occasions Yura went with her. He was often left with strangers, different ones each time. He became accustomed to such changes, and against this untidy background, surrounded with continual mysteries, he took his father
'
s absence for granted.

He could remember a time in his early childhood when a large number of things were still known by his family name. There was a Zhivago factory, a Zhivago bank, Zhivago buildings, a Zhivago necktie pin, even a Zhivago cake which was a kind of
baba au rhum
,
and at one time if you said
"
Zhivago
"
to your sleigh driver in Moscow, it was as if you had said:
"
Take me to Timbuctoo!
"
and he carried you off to a fairy-tale kingdom. You would find yourself transported to a vast, quiet park. Crows settled on the heavy branches of firs, scattering the hoarfrost; their cawing echoed and reechoed like crackling wood. Pure-bred dogs came running across the road out of the clearing from the recently constructed house. Farther on, lights appeared in the gathering dusk.

And then suddenly all that was gone. They were poor.

One day in the summer of 1903, Yura was driving across fields in a two-horse open carriage with his Uncle Nikolai. They were on their way to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, a teacher and author of popular textbooks, who lived at Duplyanka, the estate of Kologrivov, a silk manufacturer, and a great patron of the arts.

It was the Feast of the Virgin of Kazan. The harvest was in full swing but, whether because of the feast or because of the midday break, there was not a soul in sight. The half-reaped fields under the glaring sun looked like the half-shorn heads of convicts. Birds were circling overhead. In the hot stillness the heavy-eared wheat stood straight. Neat sheaves rose above the stubble in the distance; if you stared at them long enough they seemed to move, walking along on the horizon like land surveyors taking notes.

"
Whose fields are these?
"
Nikolai Nikolaievich asked Pavel, the publisher
'
s odd-job man who sat sideways on the box, shoulders hunched and legs crossed to show that driving was not his regular job.
"
The landlord
'
s or the peasants
'
?
"

"
These are the master
'
s.
"
Pavel, who was smoking, after a long silence jabbed with the end of his whip in another direction:
"
And those are the peasants
'
!—Get along,
"
he shouted at the horses, keeping an eye on their tails and haunches like an engineer watching his pressure gauge. The horses were like horses the world over: the shaft horse pulled with the innate honesty of a simple soul while the off horse arched its neck like a swan and seemed to the uninitiated to be an inveterate idler who thought only of prancing in time to the jangling bells.