9. Christ and Mary Magdalene … God and a woman: This entire passage is based on the traditional identification of Mary Magdalene with the woman taken in adultery in John 8:3–11, and with the unnamed woman who anoints Christ’s feet from an alabaster flask and wipes them with her hair in Matthew 26:6– 13, Mark 14:3–9, and Luke 7:36–50. In John’s version of this incident (12:1–8), the woman is Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who is neither a prostitute nor the Magdalene. Sima mentions this confusion herself. St. Mary of Egypt was indeed a repentant prostitute, but she lived in the fourth century. Sima goes on to quote hymns from the matins of Holy Wednesday, the middle of Holy Week, in which the woman with the alabaster vessel confesses to having been a harlot. The longest of these hymns, from which Sima quotes most fully, known as “The Hymn of Cassia,” is attributed to the Byzantine abbess and hymnographer Cassia (ca. 805–867). Zhivago’s two poems about Mary Magdalene follow the same tradition.
10. Several well-known social figures … deported from Russia: Tonya’s letter mixes real people with the fictional Gromeko family: S. P. Melgunov (1879–1956) was a historian, a Constitutional Democrat, and an outspoken opponent of the Bolsheviks; A. A. Kiesewetter was also a historian and a leader of the CD Party; and E. D. Kuskova was a journalist and member of the Committee to Aid the Hungry. Deportation became Lenin’s preferred way of dealing with prominent ideological opponents. In the fall of 1922 he loaded some 160 intellectuals, including the philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Sergei Bulgakov, Ivan Ilyin, and Fyodor Stepun, on the so-called “Philosophy Steamer” and shipped them to Europe.
PART FOURTEEN
1. In Primorye … the remaining time: Primorye, more fully the Primorsky Krai, or “Maritime Territory,” is the extreme southeast region of Russia, bordering on China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan, with its capital at Vladivostok. The remnants of Kappel’s forces (see part 11, note 1), with other White groups, set up a government there, known as the Provisional Primorye Government, which lasted from late May 1921 to October 1922, when the Red Army took Vladivostok and effectively ended the civil war.
2. Egory the Brave: The name for St. George in Russian oral epic tradition. The image of St. George slaying the dragon figures on both the Moscow and the Russian coats of arms, and in Zhivago’s poem, “A Tale.”
3. Tolstoy … generals: Zhivago is thinking of Tolstoy’s commentaries on the moving forces of history in War and Peace, particularly in the second epilogue to the novel.
4. Tverskaya-Yamskaya Streets: Four parallel streets north of the center of Moscow.
5. Herzen: Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner, was a pro-Western writer and publicist, often called “the father of Russian socialism.” In 1847, having inherited his father’s fortune, he left Russia and never returned. Abroad he edited the radical Russian-language newspaper Kolokol (“The Bell”) and wrote a number of books, the most important of which is the autobiographical My Past and Thoughts (1868).
6. a clanging cymbal: A phrase from Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians (13:1): “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
PART FIFTEEN
1. the NEP: That is, the New Economic Policy, established by a decree of March 21, 1921, which allowed for some private enterprise on a small scale, following the ravages of War Communism, which had tried to remove the market economy entirely. Peasants were also allowed to sell their surplus, which previously had been requisitioned without compensation (see part 11, note 2). The policy was abandoned by Stalin in 1928, in favor of the first Five-Year Plan and the forced collectivization of agriculture.
2. the eve of St. Basil’s: The feast of St. Basil of Caesarea (330–379), a major Orthodox theologian and author of a liturgy that is still in use, is celebrated on January 1/14, the day of his death.
3. They changed landmarks: The reference is to a movement of liberals in the White Russian emigration named for a collection of essays entitled Smena Vekh (“Change of Landmarks”), published in Prague in 1921, which proposed a resigned acceptance of the October revolution and the Soviet regime and called on emigres to return to Russia.
4. Tikhon: Tikhon (Vassily Bellavin, 1865–1925), elected patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917, was the first patriarch since the reforms of Peter the Great eliminated the position in 1721 and brought the Church under state control. The Bolsheviks did not welcome Tikhon, who protested against many of their acts, and he was imprisoned from 1922 to 1923. He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1989.
5. The custom … was widespread by then: Cremation, which was not an Orthodox practice, was introduced after the revolution. But Zhivago’s acquaintances follow the old practice of laying out the body at home, in an open coffin on a table, surrounded by flowers.
6. She … the gardener: See John 20:1–18, the account of Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Christ.
7. the last kiss: From a hymn sung near the end of the Orthodox burial service, which speaks in the voice of the dead person: “Come, all you who loved me, and kiss me with the last kiss. For nevermore shall I walk or talk with you.”
8. making … the song: Alleluia: Words of a hymn from the funeral or memorial service: “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Whither we mortals all shall go, making our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia.”
PART SIXTEEN
1. the Kursk bulge … Orel: This major battle, fought in July 1943, ended in a decisive Soviet victory and set the Russian army on the offensive for the duration of the war. The city of Orel was liberated on August 5 of that year.
2. Ezhovshchina: The period of the most intense purges of the Communist Party and the Soviet government, in 1937–1938, named for Nikolai Ezhov (1895–1940), head of the NKVD, including the internal security forces, which ran the prisons and labor camps.
3. I never saw her again: The story of Christina Orletsova is based on the life of an actual girl named Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, an account of which was preserved in Pasternak’s archive.
4. Blok’s ‘We, the children …’: See part 3, note 5. The poem, written on September 8, 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, begins: “Those born in obscure times / Do not remember their path. / We, the children of Russia’s terrible years / Are unable to forget anything.”
NOTES TO THE POEMS OF YURI ZHIVAGO
