Now, passing by the study, Yuri Andreevich again noted enviously the window with its panoramic view, the size and position of the table, and the spaciousness of the well-furnished room, and this was the first thing that escaped him in the form of an exclamation to his host, when he and Alexander Alexandrovich, on entering the dining room, went to the tea table.
“What a wonderful spot you have here. And what an excellent study, conducive to work, inspiring.”
“In a glass or in a cup? And how do you like it, weak or strong?”
“Look, Yurochka, what a stereoscope Averky Stepanovich’s son made for himself when he was little.”
“He still hasn’t grown up, hasn’t settled down, though he wins over district after district for Soviet power from the Komuch.”
“The what?”
“The Komuch.”
“What is that?”
“It’s the army of the Siberian government, which is for the restoration of power to the Constituent Assembly.”
“All day we’ve heard ceaseless praise of your son. You have every right to be proud of him.”
“These are views of the Urals, double, stereoscopic, also made by him and taken by a camera he made himself.”
“Are these cookies made with saccharine? They’re excellent.”
“Oh, come now! Such a backwoods and saccharine? Hardly! Real, honest sugar. I put some in your tea from the sugar bowl. Didn’t you notice?”
“Yes, in fact. I was looking at the photographs. And it seems the tea is also natural?”
“With flower petals. It goes without saying.”
“From where?”
“The magic tablecloth. An acquaintance. A modern-day activist. Of very leftist convictions. An official representative of the local economic council. He hauls our timber to town, and through acquaintances gets grain, butter, and flour for us. Siverka.” (So she called her Averky.) “Siverka, move the biscuit plate closer to me. And now I wonder if you can answer, what was the year of Griboedov’s death?”10
“He was born, I think, in 1795. I don’t remember exactly when he was killed.”
“More tea?”
“No, thank you.”
“And now something else. Tell me when and between what countries was the peace of Nimwegen concluded?”
“Don’t torment them, Lenochka. Let the people recover from the trip.”
“Now here’s what interests me. List for me, please, the kinds of magnifying glasses and what images they produce in each case: actual, inverted, direct, or imaginary.”
“Where did you get such a knowledge of physics?”
“We had an excellent mathematician here in Yuriatin. He taught in two schools, the boys’ and ours. How he explained things, oh, how he explained things! Like a god! He’d chew it all and put it in your mouth. Antipov. He was married to a teacher here. The girls lost their minds over him, they were all in love with him. He went to war as a volunteer and never came back. He was killed. It’s alleged that our scourge of God and punishment from heaven, Commissar Strelnikov, is Antipov come back to life. A legend, of course. And it’s not like him. Who knows, though. Anything’s possible. Another little cup?”
Part Nine
VARYKINO
1
In the winter, when there was more time, Yuri Andreevich began to take various kinds of notes. He noted for himself:
“How often during the summer I wanted to say together with Tyutchev:1
What a summer, ah, what a summer!
In truth it’s something magical.
And how, I ask, was it given to us,
Just so, for no reason at all?
“What happiness to work for yourself and your family, from dawn to dusk, to construct a shelter, to till the soil for the sake of subsistence, to create your own world like Robinson Crusoe, imitating our Maker in creating the universe, following your own mother in bringing yourself again and again into the world!
“So many thoughts go through your consciousness, you think so much that is new, while your hands are busy with the muscular, corporeal work of digging or carpentry; while you set yourself reasonable, physically solvable tasks, which reward you at their completion with joy and success; while for six hours in a row you trim something with an axe or dig the earth under the open sky, which scorches you with its beneficent breath. And that these thoughts, surmises, and juxtapositions are not set down on paper, but are forgotten in all their passing transience, is not a loss, but a gain. You city recluse, whipping up your sagging nerves and imagination with strong black coffee or tobacco, you don’t know the most powerful drug, which consists in unfeigned need and sound health.
“I go no further than what I’ve said, I do not preach Tolstoyan simplification and return to the earth, I do not invent my own amendment to socialism on agrarian questions. I merely establish the fact and do not erect our accidentally befallen fate into a system. Our example is questionable and not suitable for drawing conclusions. Our housekeeping is of too heterogeneous a composition. We owe only a small part of it—the store of vegetables and potatoes—to the work of our hands. All the rest comes from another source.
“Our use of the land is illegal. It is arbitrarily concealed from the accounting established by the state authorities. Our cutting of wood is theft, not excusable by the fact that we are stealing from the state pocket—formerly Krüger’s. We are protected by the connivance of Mikulitsyn, who lives by approximately the same means; we are saved by the distances, by being far from the city, where for now, fortunately, they know nothing of our tricks.
“I have given up medicine and keep quiet about being a doctor, so as not to trammel my freedom. But some good soul from the back of beyond always finds out that a doctor has settled in Varykino, and drags himself from twenty miles away for advice, one with a chicken, another with eggs, another with a bit of butter or something else. No matter how I dodge the honoraria, it’s impossible to fend them off, because people don’t believe in the effectiveness of unpaid-for, freely given advice. And so my medical practice brings me something. But our main support, and Mikulitsyn’s, is Samdevyatov.
“It is inconceivable what opposites this man unites in himself. He is sincerely for the revolution and fully deserves the trust that the Yuriatin City Council has vested in him. With his almighty powers, he could requisition and transport the entire forest of Varykino without even telling us and the Mikulitsyns, and we wouldn’t bat an eye. On the other hand, if he wished to steal from the state, he could most calmly pocket whatever and however much he wanted, and nobody would make a peep. He has no one to divide with and no one to butter up. What, then, induces him to look after us, help the Mikulitsyns, and support everybody around, such as, for example, the stationmaster in Torfyanaya? He’s on the go all the time, fetching and bringing things, and he analyzes and interprets Dostoevsky’s Demons and the Communist Manifesto2 with equal enthusiasm, and it seems to me that if he didn’t needlessly complicate his life so wastefully and obviously, he would die of boredom.”
2
A little later the doctor noted:
“We’re settled in the back part of the old manor house, in the two rooms of the wooden extension, which in Anna Ivanovna’s childhood years was intended for the select among Krüger’s servants—the live-in seamstress, the housekeeper, and the retired nanny.
“This corner was fairly decrepit. We repaired it rather quickly. With the help of knowledgeable people, we relaid the stove that heats the two rooms in a new way. With the present position of the flue, it gives more heat.
“In this part of the park, the traces of the former layout had disappeared under the new growth that filled everything. Now, in winter, when everything around is dormant and the living does not obscure the dead, the snow-covered outlines of former things stand out more clearly.
“We’ve been lucky. The autumn happened to be dry and warm. We managed to dig the potatoes before the rain and cold set in. Minus what we owed and returned to the Mikulitsyns, w
e have up to twenty sacks, and it is all in the main bin of the cellar, covered above, over the floor, with straw and old, torn blankets. Down there, under the floor, we also put two barrels of Tonya’s salted cucumbers and another two of cabbage she has pickled. The fresh cabbage is hung from the crossbeams, head to head, tied in pairs. The supply of carrots is buried in dry sand. As is a sufficient amount of harvested black radishes, beets, and turnips, and upstairs in the house there is a quantity of peas and beans. The firewood stored up in the shed will last till spring. I like the warm smell of the underground in winter, which hits your nose with roots, earth, and snow as soon as you lift the trapdoor of the cellar, at an early hour, before the winter dawn, with a weak, ready to go out, barely luminous light in your hand.
“You come out of the shed, day has not broken yet. The door creaks, or you sneeze unexpectedly, or the snow simply crunches under your foot, and from the far-off vegetable patch, where cabbage stumps stick up from under the snow, hares pop up and go pelting off, scrawling tracks that furrow the snow around far and wide. And in the neighborhood, one after another, the dogs set up a long barking. The last cocks already crowed earlier, they will not start now. And it begins to grow light.
“Besides hare tracks, the vast snowy plain is crossed by lynx tracks, hole after hole, strung neatly on a drawn-out thread. A lynx walks like a cat, one paw in front of the other, covering many miles a night, as people maintain.
“They set snares for them, ‘sloptsy,’ as they call them here. Instead of lynxes, poor hares fall into the traps, and are taken out frozen stiff and half covered with snow.
“At first, in spring and summer, it was very hard. We were exhausted. Now, in the winter evenings, we rest. We gather around the lamp, thanks to Anfim, who provides us with kerosene. The women sew or knit, I or Alexander Alexandrovich reads aloud. The stove is burning, I, as the long-recognized stoker, keep an eye on it, so as to close the damper in time and not lose any heat. If a smoldering log hampers the heating, I take it out all smoky, run outside with it, and throw it far off into the snow. Scattering sparks, it flies through the air like a burning torch, lighting up the edge of the black, sleeping park with its white quadrangles of lawn, lands in a snowdrift, hisses, and goes out.
“We endlessly reread War and Peace, Evgeny Onegin and all the poems, we read The Red and the Black by Stendhal, A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and the short stories of Kleist.”
3
Closer to spring, the doctor wrote:
“I think Tonya is expecting. I told her so. She does not share my supposition, but I am sure of it. Until more unquestionable signs appear, I cannot be deceived by the preceding, less perceptible ones.
“A woman’s face changes. It cannot be said that she loses her good looks. But her appearance, which before was entirely under her supervision, now escapes her control. She is at the disposal of the future, which will come out of her and is no longer her. This escape of her appearance from under her surveillance wears a look of physical perplexity, in which her face becomes dull, her skin more coarse, and her eyes begin to shine differently, not as she would like, as if she could not manage it all and let it go.
“Tonya and I have never had any distance from each other. But this year of work has brought us closer still. I’ve noticed how efficient, strong, and untiring she is, how quick-witted in lining up tasks, so that in moving from one to the other she loses as little time as possible.
“It has always seemed to me that every conception is immaculate, that this dogma concerning the Mother of God expresses the general idea of motherhood.
“On every woman giving birth there lies the same reflection of solitude, of being abandoned, left to her own resources. The man is excluded from things to such a degree now, at this most essential of moments, that it is as if he had never been there and everything had fallen from the sky.
“A woman herself brings her progeny into the world, herself retires with him into the background of existence, where it is more quiet and where she can put the cradle without fear. She herself, in silent humility, nurses him and rears him.
“People ask the Mother of God: ‘Pray fervently to your Son and your God!’ They put fragments of a psalm into her mouth: ‘And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.’ She says this about her infant, he will exalt her (‘For he who is mighty has done great things for me’), he is her glory.3 Every woman can say the same. Her god is in her child. Mothers of great people should be familiar with that feeling. But decidedly all mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.”
4
“We endlessly reread Evgeny Onegin and the poems. Anfim was here yesterday and brought presents. We regale ourselves, we have light. Endless conversations about art.
“My long-standing thought that art is not the name of a category or sphere that embraces a vast multitude of notions and ramified phenomena, but, on the contrary, is something narrow and concentrated, the designation of a principle that enters into the composition of an artistic work, the name of the force applied or the truth worked out in it. And to me art has never seemed a subject or an aspect of form, but rather a mysterious and hidden part of content. To me it is clear as day, I feel it with my every fiber, but how express and formulate this thought?
“Works speak through many things: themes, situations, plots, heroes. But most of all they speak through the art contained in them. The presence of art in the pages of Crime and Punishment is more astounding than Raskolnikov’s crime.
“Primitive art, Egyptian, Greek, our own, is surely one and the same art in the course of the millennia and always remains in the singular. It is some thought, some assertion about life, which, in its all-embracing breadth, cannot be broken down into separate words, and when a grain of that force enters into the composition of some more complex mixture, this admixture of art outweighs the significance of all the rest and turns out to be the essence, the soul, and the foundation of what is depicted.”
5
“A slight cold, a cough, and probably a small fever. All day I’ve been catching my breath somewhere at the level of the throat, as if there is a lump there. Things are bad for me. It’s the aorta. The first warnings of heredity from my poor mama’s side, a lifelong story of heart ailment. Can it be true? So early? In that case, I’m not long for this world.
“It is a bit fumy in the room. Smells of ironing. Someone’s ironing and keeps adding hot, flaming coals from the still-burning stove to the coal iron, which clacks its lid like teeth. It reminds me of something. I can’t remember what. A sick man’s forgetfulness.
“Overjoyed that Anfim brought some nut-oil soap, they flew into a general laundering, and Shurochka hasn’t been looked after for two days. When I write, he gets under the table, sits on the crossbar between the legs, and, imitating Anfim, who takes him for a sleigh ride each time he comes, pretends that he’s also driving me in a sledge.
“When I get better, I must go to town to read up on the ethnography of the region and its history. I’m assured there is an excellent town library, put together from several rich donations. I want to write. I must hurry. Before I turn around, spring will be here. Then there will be no bothering with reading and writing.
“My headache keeps getting worse. I didn’t sleep well. I had a confused dream, one of those that you forget on the spot when you wake up. The dream left my head, in my consciousness there remained only the cause of my waking up. I was awakened by a woman’s voice, which I heard in my sleep, which in my sleep resounded in the air. I remembered its sound and, reproducing it in my memory, mentally went through all the women I know, searching for which of them might be the owner of that chesty, moist voice, soft from heaviness. It did not belong to any. I thought that my excessive habituation to Tonya might stand between us and dull my hearing in relation to her. I tried to forget she was my wife and moved her i
mage further off, to a distance sufficient for clarifying the truth. No, it was not her voice either. So it remained unclarified.
“Incidentally, about dreams. It is an accepted notion that we tend to dream at night of something that has strongly impressed us in the daytime, when we were awake. My observations are the opposite.
“I’ve noticed more than once that it is precisely things we have barely noticed in the daytime, thoughts not brought to clarity, words spoken without feeling and left without attention, that return at night clothed in flesh and blood, and become the subjects of dreams, as if in compensation for our neglect of them in the daytime.”
6
“A clear, frosty night. Extraordinary brightness and wholeness of the visible. Earth, air, moon, stars, fettered together, riveted by frost. In the park, the distinct shadows of trees lie across the alleys, seeming carved in relief. It seems all the time as if some dark figures are ceaselessly crossing the path in various places. Big stars like blue mica lamps hang in the forest among the branches. The whole sky is strewn with little stars like a summer meadow with chamomile.
“Our evening talks about Pushkin continue. We discussed his lycée poems in the first volume. How much depended on the choice of meter!
“In the poems with long lines, his youthful ambition did not go beyond the limits of Arzamas, the wish not to fall behind his elders, to blow smoke in his uncle’s eyes with mythologisms, pomposity, affected depravity and epicureanism, and premature, feigned sober-mindedness.
“But as soon as the young man, after his imitations of Ossian or Parny or the ‘Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,’ hit upon the short lines of ‘The Little Town’ or ‘Epistle to My Sister,’ or ‘To My Inkstand’ from the later Kishinev period, or upon the rhythms of the ‘Letter to Yudin,’ the whole future Pushkin awakened in the adolescent.4
“Light and air, the noise of life, things, essences burst from outside into the poem as into a room through an open window. Objects from the external world, everyday objects, nouns, thronging and pressing, took over the lines, ousting the less definite parts of speech. Objects, objects, objects lined up in a rhymed column along the edge of the poem.
Doctor Zhivago Page 35
