Doctor Zhivago Read Free Page A

shorter than the other. He supported himself by working as a private tutor and later as a clerk in the office of a chemical factory. In connection with this work he spent the winters of 1915 and 1916 in the region of the Urals, which forms the setting for most of Book Two of
Doctor Zhivago.
During that time he wrote the poems of his second book,
Above the Barriers
, published in 1917. When news of the February revolution of 1917 reached him in the Urals, he immediately set out for Moscow.
    In the summer of 1917, between the February and October revolutions, Pasternak found his true voice as a poet, composing poems that would go into his third book,
My Sister, Life
, one of the major works of twentieth-century Russian poetry. He knew that something extraordinary had come over him in the writing of this book. In
Safe Conduct
, he says:
    When
My Sister, Life
appeared, and was found to contain expressions not in the least contemporary as regards poetry, which wererevealed to me during the summer of the revolution, I became entirely indifferent as to the identity of the power which had brought the book into being, because it was immeasurably greater than myself and than the poetical conceptions surrounding me.
    Between that summer and the eventual publication of the book in 1922 came the Bolshevik revolution and the harsh years of War Communism, years of hunger, confusion, and civil war. In 1921, Pasternak’s parents and sisters immigrated to Berlin. (After Hitler’s accession to power they immigrated again, this time to England, where they remained.) Pasternak visited them in Berlin in 1922, after his first marriage, and never saw them again. He himself, like so many of his fellow poets and artists, was not opposed to the spirit of the revolution and chose to stay in Russia.
    My Sister, Life
was followed in 1923 by
Themes and Variations
, which grew out of the same lyric inspiration. In the later twenties, Pasternak felt the need for a more epic form and turned to writing longer social-historical poems dealing specifically with the ambiguities of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917:
Lieutenant Schmidt
(1926),
The Year 1905
(1927),
The Lofty Malady
(1928), and the novel in verse
Spektorsky
, with an extension in prose entitled “A Tale” (1925–1930).
Spektorsky
covers the pre-revolutionary years, the revolution, and the early Soviet period, almost the same span of time as
Doctor Zhivago.
Its hero, Sergei Spektorsky, a man of indefinite politics, apparently idle, more of a spectator than an actor, is in some ways a precursor of Yuri Zhivago.
    At the same time, Pasternak kept contemplating a long work in prose. In 1918 he had begun a novel set in the Urals, written in a rather leisurely, old-fashioned manner that was far removed from the modernist experiments of writers like Zamyatin, Bely, and Remizov. Only one part of it,
The Childhood of Luvers
, was ever published. He also wrote short works such as “Without Love” (1918) and “Aerial Ways” (1924), which sketch situations or characters that would reappear in
Doctor Zhivago.
And in 1931 he completed and published his most important prose work before the novel, the autobiography
Safe Conduct.
    In 1936 Pasternak went back to his idea of a long prose work, this time to be narrated in the first person, and in a deliberately plain style, as the notes and reminiscences of a certain Patrick, covering the period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Here there were still more foreshadowings of the later novel: Patrick is an orphan who, like Zhivago, grows up in the home of a family named Gromeko and marries their daughter Tonya; there is a woman reminiscent of the novel’s Lara Antipova, whose husbandis also a teacher in Yuriatin in the Urals; and Patrick, like Zhivago, is torn between his love for this woman and for his wife. Some sections from the notes were published in magazines between 1937 and 1939, but the manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1941. The cover, which