Doctor Zhivago

6. A Final Talk

    The Manege is a large, rectangular, neoclassical building in the center of Moscow, near Red Square, built in the early nineteenth century, which originally served as a riding academy and later became a concert and exhibition space.

9. Hops

The Russian word for hops, khmel, also means intoxication.

11. A Wedding

A chastushka is a form of Russian folk poetry, usually quatrains in trochaic meter with alternating four and three stress lines, rhyming ABCB, often racy, political, or nonsensical, sung to the accompaniment of the accordion or balalaika.

14. August

The Feast of the Transfiguration (see Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36) is celebrated on August 6/19, when there are already signs of autumn in Russia. It is popularly referred to as the “Second Savior.”

20. Miracle

See Matthew 21:18–22, Mark 11:12–23.

23. and 24. Magdalene

See part 13, note 9.

25. The Garden of Gethsemane

See Matthew 26:36–46, Mark 14:32–42, Luke 22:39–48.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Boris Pasternak, poet, translator, and novelist, was born in Moscow in 1890. The son of the celebrated painter Leonid Pasternak and the concert pianist Rosa Kaufman, Pasternak was greatly influenced by the composer Alexander Scriabin and by Leo Tolstoy, both family friends. Pasternak was quickly recognized as one of the major poets of the post-revolutionary period, but during the purges of the 1930s, he came under severe critical attack and, unable to publish his own poetry, devoted himself to translating classic works by Goethe, Shakespeare, and others. After the war, Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago, his masterpiece in the great tradition of the Russian epic. The life of the physician and poet Yuri Zhivago, like Pasternak’s own, is closely identified with the upheavals of twentieth-century Russia, but the novel’s forthright portrayal of those events contradicted the official view of them, and it was denied publication. Despite serious efforts to repress it, the novel was first published in Italy in 1957 and soon became the object of international acclaim, spending twenty-six weeks at the top of The New York Times best-seller list. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but, facing threats from Soviet authorities, refused the prize. He died a year and a half later, on May 31, 1960.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Gogol. They were twice awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for their version of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), and their translation of Dostoevsky’s Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France, where Pevear is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris.