20. Cui’s nephew: César Cui (1835–1918), Russian composer, was one of a group of composers known as “the Five” or “the Mighty Little Bunch” (Moguchaya Kuchka), the other four being Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin.
PART THREE
1. “Askold’s grave” … Oleg’s steed: The actual grave is said to be the burial place of the Kievan prince Askold, still to be seen on the steep bank of the river Dnieper. Askold was killed in 882 by Oleg, the successor to Rurik, founder of the first dynasty of Russian rulers. These events were the subject of an opera composed by Alexei Verstovsky (1799–1862). It was predicted that Oleg’s death would be caused by his favorite horse. As it turned out, he died from the bite of a snake that hid in the skull of his horse long after its death.
2. John the Theologian: St. John, the author of the fourth Gospel, known as John the Theologian in Orthodox tradition, was also the author of the book of Revelation, from which Zhivago quotes (“and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more,” Revelation 21:4).
3. vodka and pancakes …: In the week before the beginning of the Great Lent, the forty-day fast period preceding Holy Week and Easter, it is the Russian custom to eat pancakes (bliny) with all sorts of fish and cream toppings, accompanied by vodka.
4. Egyptian expedition … Fréjus: The ultimately unsuccessful expedition of the French army in Egypt lasted from 1798 to 1801, but Napoleon led it only until August of 1799, when news of unrest in Paris drew him back to the capital. He landed at the port of Fréjus in the south of France on October 9, 1799, and a month later led a bloodless coup against the then-ruling Directoire and set up the Consulat, with himself as first consul.
5. Blok: Alexander Blok (1880–1921), one of the greatest Russian poets, was a leader of the symbolist movement. In an autobiographical sketch written near the end of his life, Pasternak noted: “A number of writers of my age as well as myself went through the years of our youth with Blok as our guide” (I Remember, translated by David Magarshack, New York, 1959). Blok is an important presence in Doctor Zhivago, where he is referred to a number of times.
6. panikhidas: See part 1, note 1. During the prayers over a dead person before burial, the panikhida may be repeated several times.
7. “Holy God … have mercy on us”: This prayer, known as the trisagion, is sung repeatedly after the funeral service as the coffin is carried out.
PART FOUR
1. Erfurt Program … Plekhanov: The Erfurt Program was a plan of action adopted by the German Social Democratic Party at its conference in Erfurt in 1891, based on a simplified or “vulgar” Marxist analysis. Presented a year later in The Class Struggle, by Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), one of the authors of the program, it became widely influential in the years before the 1917 revolution. Georgi Plekhanov (1857–1918), revolutionary activist and Marxist theorist, was one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. At the second party conference in 1903, Plekhanov broke with Lenin, who headed the Bolsheviks (“Majority”), and joined the Mensheviks (“Minority”), who tended to be more moderate.
2. mad Gretchen: In the first part of Goethe’s Faust (see part 2, note 11), Faust sees the young Gretchen (Margarete) in the street and asks Mephistopheles to procure her for him. Gretchen’s purity makes the task difficult, but Faust succeeds in the end. Gretchen becomes pregnant, drowns her baby, is condemned to death, and awaits execution in prison, where Faust sees her for a last time.
3. Eruslan Lazarevich: A hero of so-called lubok literature. A lubok is a folk woodcut or steel engraving, a form of broadside combining illustrations and text, produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and later.
4. the Gypsy Panina: Varya Panina (1872–1911) was a famous Gypsy singer, whose voice had great depth and musicality. She began singing in Moscow restaurants and gave her first public concert, which was a huge success, in 1902, at the Hall of the Nobility in Petersburg. Alexander Blok called her “the celestial Varya Panina.” The words “led under the golden crown” refer to the Orthodox wedding service, during which the bride and groom stand under crowns held by their attendants.
5. second autumn … action: The Eighth Army under General Alexei Brusilov (1853–1926) had occupied Galicia in 1914, but had been forced to withdraw during a general retreat. In 1915, the Eighth Army entered the Carpathians and moved towards Hungary, but again was forced to withdraw due to circumstances elsewhere.
6. the Lutsk operation: Also known as the “Brusilov Offensive,” this was the liberation of the city of Lutsk, in northwest Ukraine, by four Russian armies under the command of General Brusilov on June 4–7, 1916.
7. Krestovozdvizhensky Hospitaclass="underline" The hospital is named for the feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross (Krestovozdvizhenie), which falls on September 14/27 and commemorates the finding of the true cross in Jerusalem by the empress Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, in AD 326. Hospitals in Russia before the revolution were often named for church feasts.
8. friend Horatio: Cf. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, lines 165–66: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” After an abandoned earlier attempt in 1923–24, Pasternak translated Hamlet in 1939 at the request of the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold was arrested and shot before he could produce the play. A production in 1943 at the Moscow Art Theater was canceled owing to the death of the director, the venerable Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the first performance finally took place in 1954, at the Pushkin Theater in Leningrad. Pasternak’s work on the play over the years (there were twelve versions among his papers) left a deep mark on Doctor Zhivago. In his essay “Translating Shakespeare,” Pasternak wrote: “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” (translated by Manya Harari, in I Remember, New York, 1959).
9. Brusilov … on the offensive: See note 6 above.
10. St. Tatiana’s committee: A benevolent association formed at the beginning of the war, under the honorary chairmanship of the grand duchess Tatiana Konstantinovna Romanova, to aid those at the front and the families of the wounded or dead.
11. Wilhelm: Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) ruled as the last German emperor and king of Prussia from 1888 to 1918, when he was forced to abdicate.
12. Dahclass="underline" Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801–1872) was an eminent Russian lexicographer, compiler of the four-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Russian Language (1863–1866). He was a proponent of native as opposed to imported vocabulary.
13. equal before God: A reference to Paul’s epistle to the Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”