Doctor Zhivago

It is the noise of acts played far away.

I take part in all five.

I am alone. All drowns in pharisaism.

Life is no stroll through a field.

The second, written in late 1946, consists of four stanzas:

The hum dies down. I step out on the stage.

Leaning against a doorpost,

I try to catch the echoes from far off

Of what my age is bringing.

The night’s darkness focuses on me

Thousands of opera glasses.

Abba Father, if only it can be,

Let this cup pass me by.

I love the stubbornness of your intent

And agree to play this role.

But now a different drama’s going on,

Spare me, then, this once.

But the order of the acts has been thought out,

And leads to just one end.

I’m alone, all drowns in pharisaism.

Life is no stroll through a field.

This second version, adding the figure of Christ to those of Hamlet and the poet, gives great depth and extension to the notion of reluctant acceptance of the Father’s stubborn intent. Pasternak draws the same parallel in the commentary on Hamlet in his Notes on Translating Shakespeare, written in the summer of 1946: “From the moment of the ghost’s appearance, Hamlet gives up his will in order to ‘do the will of him that sent him.’ Hamlet is not a drama of weakness, but of duty and self-denial … What is important is that chance has allotted Hamlet the role of judge of his own time and servant of the future. Hamlet is the drama of a high destiny, of a life devoted and preordained to a heroic task.”

Early in his career, Pasternak had likened poetry to a sponge left on a wet garden bench, which he would wring out at night “to the health of the greedy paper.” Now it has become an act of witness, the acceptance of a duty. The second version of “Hamlet” became the first of Yuri Zhivago’s poems in the final part of Doctor Zhivago. With the new resolve that had come to him, Pasternak was able to take up the long prose work he had been contemplating all his life and finally complete it.

RICHARD PEVEAR

TRANSLATORS’ NOTES

Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father’s first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of the first name and patronymic; diminutives are commonly used among family and friends; the family name alone can also be used familiarly, and on occasion only the patronymic is used, usually among the lower classes.

Principal Characters:

Yuri Andreevich Zhivago (Yura, Yurochka)

Larissa Fyodorovna Guichard, married name Antipova (Lara, Larochka)

Antonina Alexandrovna Gromeko, married name Zhivago (Tonya, Tonechka)

Pavel Pavlovich Antipov (Pasha, Pashka, Pashenka, Pavlushka, Patulya, Patulechka)

Innokenty Dementievich Dudorov (Nika)

Mikhail Grigorievich Gordon (Misha)

Viktor Ippolitovich Komarovsky (no diminutives)

Evgraf Andreevich Zhivago (Granya)

There is an extraordinary play with the names of minor characters in the novel. They are all plausible, but often barely so, and they sometimes have an oddly specific meaning. For instance, there is Maxim Aristarkovich Klintsov- Pogorevshikh, whose name has a rather aristocratic ring until you come to Pogorevshikh, which means “burned down.” Others are simply tongue twisters: Anfim Efimovich Samdevyatov, or Rufina Onisimovna Voit-Voitkovskaya. There are too many of these names for us to comment on them, but the Russian-less reader should know that for Russian readers, too, they are strange and far-fetched, and that Pasternak clearly meant them to be so. Dmitri Bykov, in his Boris Pasternak (Moscow, 2007), thinks they suggest a realm alien to Zhivago—deep Siberia, the city outskirts—and almost a different breed of man.

The place-names for the parts of the novel set in the Moscow region and western Russia are real; the place- names in the Urals—Yuriatin, Varykino, Rynva—are fictional. And there is a corresponding difference in “worlds”— the one more historical, the other more folkloric. The novel moves from the one to the other and back again. There is also a double sense of time, marked by two different calendars, civil and church-festal, the first linear, the second cyclical. Sometimes the most mundane moment suddenly acquires another dimension, as when the narrator, describing the end of a farewell party, says: “The house soon turned into a sleeping kingdom.” We have tried to match as closely as possible the wide range of voices, the specific cadences, and the sudden shifts of register in Pasternak’s prose.

The poems of Yuri Zhivago, which make up the final part of the novel, are not merely an addendum; they are inseparable from the whole and its true outcome—what remains, what endures. Some clearly reflect moments in the novel; we even overhear Zhivago working on several of them; but it is a mistake to try to pinpoint each poem to a specific passage or event in the novel. In translating them, we have let the meaning guide us, and have welcomed poetry when it has offered itself. We have sacrificed rhyme, but have tried to keep the rhythm, especially when it is as important as it is in “A Wedding,” which is modeled on a popular song form called the chastushka. Above all, we have tried to keep the tone and terseness of the originals, which are often intentionally prosaic.

Book One

Part One

THE FIVE O’CLOCK EXPRESS

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