his hiding place and return to Marina and the children.
He told Gordon in his letter that he had transferred money for Marina to his name. He asked him to hire a nanny for the children, so as to free Marina to go back to work. He explained that he was wary of sending money directly to her address, for fear that the sum showing on the notice would expose her to the danger of being robbed.
The money soon came, far exceeding the doctor’s scale and the standards of his friends. A nanny was hired for the children. Marina was taken back at the telegraph. For a long time she could not calm down, but, being accustomed to Yuri Andreevich’s past oddities, she finally reconciled herself to this new escapade as well. Despite Yuri Andreevich’s pleas and warnings, his friends and Marina continued to search for him, and his prediction kept being confirmed. They did not find him.
9
And meanwhile he was living a few steps away from them, right under their noses and in full view, within the narrow circle of their search.
When he left Gordon’s on the day of his disappearance, it was still light. He went down Bronnaya, heading for his home in Spiridonovka, and at once, before going a hundred steps, ran into his half brother, Evgraf Zhivago, coming in the opposite direction. Yuri Andreevich had not seen him for more than three years and knew nothing about him. As it turned out, Evgraf was in Moscow by chance, having arrived quite recently. As usual, he dropped from the sky and was impervious to questions, getting off with silent little smiles and jokes. Instead, passing over petty everyday details, after two or three questions to Yuri Andreevich, he straightaway entered into all his sorrows and quandaries, and right there, at the narrow turns of the crooked lane, amidst the jostling of passersby going in both directions, he came up with a practical plan of how to help his brother and save him. Yuri Andreevich’s disappearance and remaining in hiding were Evgraf’s idea, his invention.
He rented a room for Yuri Andreevich in a lane that was then still called Kamergersky, next to the Art Theater. He provided him with money and took steps to have the doctor accepted at some hospital, in a good position that would open prospects for scientific work. He protected his brother in every way in all the aspects of his life. Finally, he gave his brother his word that his family’s unsettled position in Paris would be resolved in one way or another. Either Yuri Andreevich would go to them, or they would come to him. Evgraf promised to take all these matters upon himself and arrange everything. His brother’s support inspired Yuri Andreevich. As always before, the riddle of his power remained unexplained. Yuri Andreevich did not even try to penetrate this mystery.
10
The room faced south. Its two windows looked onto the roofs opposite the theater, beyond which, high above the Okhotny Ryad, stood the summer sun, leaving the pavement of the lane in shadow.
The room was more than a place of work for Yuri Andreevich, more than his study. In this period of devouring activity, when his plans and projects could not find enough room in the notes piled on his desk, and the images of his thoughts and visions hung in the air on all sides, as an artist’s studio is encumbered with a multitude of started works turned face to the wall, the doctor’s living room was a banquet hall of the spirit, a storeroom of ravings, a larder of revelations.
Fortunately, negotiations with the hospital authorities were taking a long time; the moment of starting work kept being put off to an indefinite future. He could take advantage of this opportune delay and write.
Yuri Andreevich began putting in order what had already been written, fragments he remembered, or what Evgraf found somewhere and brought to him, part of them in Yuri Andreevich’s own manuscripts, part in someone else’s typewritten copies. The chaotic state of the material made Yuri Andreevich squander his energy even more than his own nature predisposed him to do. He soon abandoned this work and, instead of reconstructing the unfinished, went on to writing new things, carried away by fresh sketches.
He composed rough drafts of articles, like those fleeting notes from the time of his first stay in Varykino, and wrote down separate pieces of poems that came to him, beginnings, ends, and middles all mixed up, unsorted. Sometimes he could barely manage his rushing thoughts; the first letters of words and the abbreviations of his swift handwriting could not keep up with them.
He hurried. When his imagination grew weary and the work began to lag, he speeded it and whipped it up with drawings in the margins. They represented forest clearings and city intersections with the billboard “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers” standing in the middle of them.
The articles and poems were on one theme. Their subject was the city.
11
Afterwards this note was found among his papers:
“In the year ’22, when I returned to Moscow, I found her emptied and half ruined. As she came out of the ordeals of the first years of the revolution, so she has remained to this day. Her population has thinned out, new houses are not built, the old ones are not renovated.
“But even in that state, she remains a big modern city, the only inspiration of a new, truly contemporary art.
“The disorderly listing of things and notions, which look incompatible and are placed side by side as if arbitrarily, in the symbolists, Blok, Verhaeren, Whitman, is not at all a stylistic caprice. It is a new order of impressions observed in life and copied from nature.
“Just as they drive sequences of images through their lines, so a busy city street of the end of the nineteenth century sails along and draws past us its crowds, coaches, and carriages, and then, at the beginning of the next century, the cars of its electric trams and subways.
“Pastoral simplicity has no source in these conditions. Its false artlessness is a literary counterfeit, an unnatural mannerism, a phenomenon of a bookish order, picked up not in the countryside, but from the bookshelves of academic libraries. The living language, live-formed and answering naturally to the spirit of today, is the language of urbanism.
“I live on a crowded city intersection. Summer Moscow, blinded by the sun, her asphalt courtyards scorching, the windows of the upper floors scattering reflections and breathing in the flowering of clouds and boulevards, whirls around me and makes my head spin and wants me, for her glory, to make the heads of others spin. To that end she has brought me up and given art into my hands.
“Constantly noisy, day and night, the street outside my wall is as closely connected with the contemporary soul as the opening overture is with the theater curtain, filled with darkness and mystery, still lowered, but already set aglow by the flames of the footlights. Ceaselessly stirring and murmuring outside the doors and windows, the city is a vastly enormous introduction to the life of each of us. It is just along these lines that I would like to write about the city.”
In the notebook of Zhivago’s poems that has been preserved, no such poems are to be found. Perhaps the poem “Hamlet” belonged to that category?
12
