In another letter, written to his parents in Berlin in the spring of 1933, on Hitler’s accession to power, Pasternak defined the tragedy that was being played out in Europe with remarkable clarity and in terms that reveal the essence of his historical understanding as it would finally be embodied in Doctor Zhivago:
… however strange it may seem to you, one and the same thing depresses me in both our own state of affairs and yours. It is that this movement is not Christian, but nationalistic; that is, it runs the same danger of degenerating into the bestiality of facts. It has the same alienation from the age-old, gracious tradition that breathes with transformations and anticipations, rather than the cold statements of blind insanity. These movements are on a par, one is evoked by the other, and it is all the sadder for this reason. They are the left and right wings of a single materialistic night. (Published in Quarto, London, 1980)
After the appearance of Second Birth, Pasternak entered a more or less silent period, in terms of publication, which lasted until 1941. But he did address congresses of the Writers’ Union several times during those years. In an important speech to a plenum session of the union, held in Minsk in February 1936, he said:
The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it … Art is inconceivable without risk, without inner sacrifice; freedom and boldness of imagination can be won only in the process of work, and it is there that the unforeseen I spoke of a moment ago must intervene, and there no directives can help.
He went on to describe the inner change he was undergoing:
For some time I will be writing badly, from the point of view that has been mine up to now, and I will continue to do so until I have become used to the novelty of the themes and situations I wish to address. I will be writing badly, literally speaking, because I must accomplish this change of position in a space rarefied by abstractions and the language of journalists, and therefore poor in images and concreteness. I will also be writing badly in regard to the aims I am working for, because I will deal with subjects that are common to us in a language different from yours. I will not imitate you, I will dispute with you …
To earn his living during this time, Pasternak turned to translation. In 1939, the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold invited him to make a new version of Hamlet. Other commissions for Shakespeare plays followed during the war years, but the work on Hamlet had a profound effect on Pasternak (twelve versions of the play were found among his papers). During the war years, there was a spirit of genuine unity among the Russian people in the opposition to a real enemy, after the nightmarish conditions of the terror—a spirit reflected in the epilogue to Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak believed then that the changes brought about by necessity would lead to the final liberation that had been the promise of the revolution from the beginning. What came instead, starting in August 1946, was a new series of purges, an ideological constriction signaled by virulent denunciations of the poet Anna Akhmatova and the prose writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, new restrictions on film and theater directors, and the “bringing into line” of the composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev. And a campaign also began against Pasternak, who was effectively silenced as a writer until after Stalin’s death.
Pasternak lived through a profound spiritual crisis at this time, what might be called his “Hamlet moment.” The change in him is suggested by the two versions of the poem “Hamlet” that he wrote in 1946. The first, written in February, before the denunciations of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, has just two stanzas:
Here I am. I step out on the stage.
Leaning against a doorpost,
I try to catch the echoes in the distance
Of what will happen in my age.
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:
Yúri Andréevich Zhivágo (Yúra, Yúrochka)
Laríssa Fyódorovna Guichárd, married name Antípova (Lára, Lárochka)
Antonína Alexándrovna Groméko, married name Zhivágo (Tónya, Tónechka)
Pável Pávlovich Antípov (Pásha, Páshka, Páshenka, Pavlúshka, Patúlya, Patúlechka)
Innokénty Deméntievich Dúdorov (Níka)
Mikhaíl Grigórievich Gordon (Mísha)
Víktor Ippolítovich Komaróvsky (no diminutives)
Evgráf Andréevich Zhivágo (Gránya)
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 Maxím Aristárkovich Klintsóv-Pogorévshikh, whose name has a rather aristocratic ring until you come to Pogorévshikh, which means “burned down.” Others are simply tongue twisters: Anfím Efímovich Samdevyátov, or Rufína Onísimovna Vóit-Voitkóvskaya. 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.