ALSO TRANSLATED BY
RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Eternal Husband and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Stories by Anton Chekhov
The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Double and The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Translation, Translators’ Notes, and end notes copyright © 2010 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Richard Pevear
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
This Russian-language work was originally published in Italian by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, in 1957. Copyright © 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, Italy.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of parts two and three, along with the poems “A Winter Night,” “The Star of the Nativity” and “Magdalene,” were originally published in The Hudson Review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 1890–1960.
[Doktor Zhivago. English]
Doctor Zhivago / Boris Pasternak; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37996-2
1. Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Fiction. I. Pevear, Richard, 1943– II. Volokhonsky, Larissa. III. Title.
PG3476.P27d63 2010
891.73′42—dc22
2010000163
www.pantheonbooks.com
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Also Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Translators’ Notes
Book One
Part One THE FIVE O’CLOCK EXPRESS
Part Two A GIRL FROM A DIFFERENT CIRCLE
Part Three THE CHRISTMAS PARTY AT THE SVENTITSKYS’
Part Four IMMINENT INEVITABILITIES
Part Five FAREWELL TO THE OLD
Part Six THE MOSCOW ENCAMPMENT
Part Seven ON THE WAY
Book Two
Part Eight ARRIVAL
Part Nine VARYKINO
Part Ten ON THE HIGH ROAD
Part Eleven THE FOREST ARMY
Part Twelve THE FROSTED ROWAN
Part Thirteen OPPOSITE THE HOUSE WITH FIGURES
Part Fourteen IN VARYKINO AGAIN
Part Fifteen THE ENDING
Part Sixteen EPILOGUE
Part Seventeen THE POEMS OF YURI ZHIVAGO
A Note About the Author
A Note About the Translators
Notes
INTRODUCTION
I would pretend (metaphorically) to have seen nature and universe themselves not as a picture made or fastened on an immovable wall, but as a sort of painted canvas roof or curtain in the air, incessantly pulled and blown and flapped by a something of an immaterial unknown and unknowable wind.
—BORIS PASTERNAK
Letter (in English) to Stephen Spender, August 22, 1959
1
The first edition of Doctor Zhivago, the major work of one of the most important Russian writers of the twentieth century, was an Italian translation published in 1957. The next year translations of the novel into English and a number of other languages appeared and Russian-language editions were published in Italy and the United States. But it would take another thirty years and the reforms of perestroika before the novel could be published in Russia. Those circumstances and all that determined them made the reception of the book highly problematical at the time of its appearance.
Pasternak had spent ten years, from 1946 to 1955, writing Doctor Zhivago. He considered it the work that justified his life and his survival, when so many of his fellow Russians had perished during the first decades of the century from war, revolution, famine, forced labor, and political terror. After Stalin’s death in 1953 came a period known as the Thaw, when there was a general easing of the mechanisms of repression and ideological control. The ban then in place on Pasternak’s work (he had been in and out of favor time and again over the years) was lifted, and in 1954 he was able to publish ten poems from Doctor Zhivago in the journal Znamya (“The Banner”), where the title of the novel was mentioned for the first time. In January 1956, he sent the completed work to Novy Mir (“New World”), the most liberal of Moscow literary magazines, and it was also under consideration by Goslitizdat, the state publishing house.
In March 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party and virtual head of the government, made a “secret speech” to the twentieth party congress denouncing the crimes of Stalin. This speech, which immediately became known all over the world, seemed to herald a further opening up of Soviet society. But in fact the thaw was brief. Stirrings of liberation following Khrushchev’s speech, especially in such satellite countries as Hungary and Poland, worried the party leadership and caused them to tighten the controls again. The Poznan protests at the end of June were crushed by military force, as were the Polish and Hungarian uprisings later that same year.
The chill made itself felt in literary circles as well. In September 1956, the editors of Novy Mir returned the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to Pasternak with a detailed letter explaining that the spirit of the novel, its emotional content, and the author’s point of view were incompatible with the spirit of the revolution and the Marxist ideology that was the theoretical foundation of the Soviet state.
Pasternak was not surprised by the rejection. He had anticipated it, and in anticipation had even taken an extraordinary step, which surprised and outraged the Soviet authorities when they learned of it. In May 1956, an Italian Communist journalist by the name of Sergio d’Angelo visited Pasternak at his country house in Peredelkino, a writers’ village near Moscow. He had heard about the existence of Doctor Zhivago and offered to place it with the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (also a Communist) for publication in Italian translation. According to d’Angelo’s account, Pasternak, after hesitating for a moment, went to his study, brought out a copy of the novel, and handed it to him with the words: “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.” Since 1929, when Evgeny Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak were vilified in the press for publishing their works abroad, no Soviet writers had had direct dealings with foreign publishers. Zamyatin had been forced to emigrate, and Pilnyak had eventually been shot. Pasternak knew that very well, of course, but he was intent on seeing Zhivago published abroad, if it could not be published at home, and was prepared to face the wrath of the authorities.
When publication of the Italian translation was announced for the fall of 1957, the news caused great uneasiness in the Soviet literary bureaucracy. Pr
essure was put on Pasternak to make Feltrinelli return the manuscript for revision, telegrams were sent to Milan, and finally, in October 1957, Alexei Surkov, the head of the Writers’ Union, went to Italy to speak with the publisher in person. But Feltrinelli refused to delay the novel’s release and had already licensed translation rights to publishers in other countries. As Lazar Fleishman wrote in Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics:
Nothing promoted the swift growth of interest in Doctor Zhivago more than these clumsy attempts to prevent its publication. The novel became an international sensation even before its release. Its first printing of 6,000 was sold out on the first day, November 22. Prospective publications in other European languages promised to become similar bestsellers. The release of the Italian translation was accompanied by a deluge of articles and notices in the European and American press … No work of Russian literature had received such publicity since the time of the revolution.
In the spring of 1958, rumors began to circulate that Pasternak was a likely candidate for that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. In fact, his name had been mentioned for the prize a number of times before. The Nobel Committee’s attention was not drawn to him solely because of Doctor Zhivago. But the novel, and the politics of the Cold War, certainly had much to do with his nomination this time. On October 23, 1958, it was announced that the prize had indeed been awarded to Pasternak. The Swedish Academy’s telegram cited him “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyric poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.”
The next day the head of the Moscow section of the Writers’ Union, Konstantin Fedin, who was Pasternak’s friend and neighbor in Peredelkino, and who had spoken enthusiastically of Zhivago when he first read it in 1956, called on him and tried to persuade him not to accept the prize because of its political implications. But Pasternak refused to be persuaded. He sent a telegram of acceptance to the Swedish Academy that read simply: “Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” On October 25, the attacks on him began with an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta (“The Literary Gazette”) suggesting that the publication of the book and the award of the prize were merely a political provocation. On October 26, the campaign expanded to the national press with a vicious article in Pravda (“Truth”). On October 27, Pasternak was tried in absentia by the governing board of the Writers’ Union and expelled from the union, which meant losing his right to living quarters and all possibility of earning money by his work. His house in Peredelkino was surrounded by the secret police, and it was hinted that if he went to Sweden for the award ceremony, he might not be allowed to return. This last possibility, along with the danger in which he had put those closest to him, finally led him to refuse the prize. On October 29, he sent a second telegram to the Swedish Academy: “In view of the meaning attributed to this award in the society to which I belong, I must refuse the undeserved prize that has been bestowed on me. Do not take my voluntary rejection with any ill will.”
Though this second telegram might seem to be a capitulation on Pasternak’s part, it shows no repentance and clearly places the blame on Soviet society. In official circles this was taken as a still greater offense. The attacks on him continued. And the fact that very few of those who attacked him had read the book was no obstacle. At a meeting in Moscow on October 31, some eight hundred writers voted in favor of a resolution asking the government to “deprive the traitor B. Pasternak of Soviet citizenship.” The text of the resolution was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta the next day. In response, Pasternak’s close friends drew up a letter to Khrushchev in his name, asking that this extreme measure not be carried out. Pasternak contributed only two brief sentences to the letter: “I am bound to Russia by my birth, my life, and my work. I cannot imagine my fate separated from and outside Russia.” The letter was published in Pravda on November 1 and eased the tensions somewhat. A second public statement, also drawn up with very little participation from Pasternak, was published in Pravda on November 6 and more or less ended the “Nobel scandal.” Pasternak died a year and a half later. In December 1989, his son, Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, was finally able to go to Stockholm to receive his father’s Nobel medal and diploma.
Pasternak had maintained friendships with some of the best of the proscribed writers of his time—Boris Pilnyak, Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova—who are now acknowledged as among the major figures of twentieth-century Russian literature. He also befriended and encouraged younger dissident writers like Varlam Shalamov and Andrei Sinyavsky. But he was the first to oppose the Soviet regime and its ideology so openly and so effectively. And yet Pasternak was not at all a political man; the public realm and the conflict of ideologies did not interest him. Doctor Zhivago speaks in the name of something else entirely.
That “something else” caused a certain confusion among readers and critics in the West when the novel first appeared. It was criticized for not being what it was never meant to be: a good, old-fashioned, nineteenth-century historical novel about the Russian revolution, an epic along the lines of War and Peace. It was also praised for being what it was not: a moving love story, or the lyrical biography of a poet, setting the sensitive individual against the grim realities of Soviet life. Western Marxists found that Pasternak failed to portray the major events and figures of the revolution—something he never set out to do. Others devised elaborate allegorical readings of the novel, though Pasternak stated explicitly, in a letter to Stephen Spender (August 9, 1959), that “a detailed allegorical interpretation of literature” was alien to him. Critics found that there was no real plot to the novel, that its chronology was confused, that the main characters were oddly effaced, that the author relied far too much on contrived coincidences.
These perplexities are understandable, but they come from a failure to pay attention to the specific composition of the novel, its way of representing reality, its way of making experience felt. Doctor Zhivago is a highly unusual book, an incomparable book in the most literal sense. Pasternak suggested its unique quality in his reply to a letter from an English schoolteacher:
The objective world in my habitual, natural grasping, is a vast infinite inspiration, that sketches, erases, chooses, compares and describes and composes itself … living, moving reality in such a rendering must have a touch of spontaneous subjectivity, even of arbitrariness, wavering, tarrying, doubting, joining and disjoining elements … Over and above the times, events and persons there is a nature, a spirit of their very succession. The frequent coincidences in the plot are (in this case) not the secret, trick expedients of the novelist. They are traits to characterize that somewhat willful, free, fanciful flow of reality. (Letter in English to John Harris, February 8, 1959; published in Scottish Slavonic Review, 1984)
To embody this “living, moving reality” required formal innovation, and therefore Doctor Zhivago had necessarily to be an experimental novel. But it is not experimental in a modernist or formalist way. Modernism is essentially defined by absence (Godot never comes). Pasternak’s vision is defined by real presence, by an intensity of physical sensation rendered in the abundance of natural description or translated into the voices of his many characters. Pasternak delights in the pathetic fallacy: in his world so-called inanimate nature constantly participates in the action. On the other hand, there is no historical or psychological analysis in his narrative, no commentary on the causes of events or the motives of characters. This gives a feeling of chaos, random movement, impulsiveness, chance encounters, sudden disruptions to the action of the novel. The trains and trams keep breaking down. But owing to the breakdowns, surprising new aspects of life appear. The Russia of three revolutions, two world wars, civil war, and political terror is portrayed in living detail, but from unexpected angles, and with no abstract ideological synthesis. Pasternak portrays happening as it happens, which is what Tolstoy also set out to do. But in Doctor Zhivago the seeming chaos of events will suddenly be pierced through by forces o
f a higher order, coming from a greater depth in time—folkloric, cultural, ultimately religious—which are also really present, which reassert their continuing presence, in the most ordinary everyday life. Now, fifty years after its first publication, when the circumstances of the Cold War are more or less behind us, we may be able to read the novel in a new way, to see more clearly the universality of the image that Pasternak held up against the deadly fiction of his time. As Viktor Frank wrote in his essay “Vodyanoi Znak” (“Watermark: The Poetic Worldview of Pasternak,” 1962): “Pasternak rolled the stone from the tomb.”
2
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890. His father, Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, was a painter and illustrator; his mother, Rozalia Isidorovna Kaufman, was a concert pianist. They belonged to the cultivated Jewish milieu of Odessa, and moved to Moscow only a few months before Boris, the eldest of their four children, was born. Leonid Pasternak had considerable success as an artist, taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and became an outstanding portraitist, which led to a close acquaintance with Leo Tolstoy, whose works he illustrated and of whom he painted several portraits, the last just after the writer’s death in November 1910 at the railway station in Astapovo. The twenty-year-old Boris accompanied his father to Astapovo on that occasion.
The young Pasternak showed considerable talent for drawing and might have become an artist himself, but in the summer of 1903, while the family was staying in the country, he chanced to meet the composer Alexander Scriabin, whom he overheard composing his Third Symphony at the piano in a neighboring house, and decided that his real calling was music. For the next six years, he devoted himself to a serious study of composition. But at a key moment in 1909, after playing some of his compositions for Scriabin, who encouraged him and gave him his blessing, he abandoned music. Meanwhile, he had discovered the poetry of Rilke and had joined a group of young admirers of the Symbolists that called itself Serdarda—“a name,” as he wrote later, “whose meaning no one knew.” And he had begun to write verse himself.
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