Translated material
There will be no death
To the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”
Here I am all. I went on stageParsnip. First edition of the poem "Hamlet"
The poetic whole of Doctor Zhivago, its structure and meaning, which force one to perceive a huge novel with an abundance of characters, hidden echoes of heterogeneous motives and a fantastic run-up of plot lines as a single “word” in its mysterious multidimensionality, grows out of the creative history of Pasternak’s treasured book and defines its own , a destiny that continues to this day and is open to the future. The desire for a large and free narrative in prose, only sketches of which are conceived of poetry no matter how beautiful, which does not let go of the poet and delights readers, arises in Pasternak very early and does not let go of him for many years. In her first letter addressed to Pasternak, Tsvetaeva recalled a deeply non-random conversation during a chance meeting with Pasternak: “Once upon a time (in 1918, in the spring) you and I sat next to each other at dinner at the Tseitlins’. You said: “I want to write a great novel: with love, with a heroine - like Balzac.” And I thought: “How good. How exactly. How beyond self-esteem. - Poet."
Omitting the well-known vicissitudes of Pasternak’s “novel with prose” (early attempts to comprehend the artist’s fate, the dazzling flashes of “Childhood Grommets” and “Air Routes”, the relationship between the novel in verse “Spectorsky” and the prose “Tale”, comprehension of the path traveled in “Safety Certificate”, difficult approaches to a new epic in prose in 1934 - all these achievements will one way or another be echoed in Doctor Zhivago and will be revealed in a new way in its light), let's step from 1918 into the wartime, when Pasternak Tsvetaeva's requiem was taking shape. The bad day drags on gloomily./ Streams flow disconsolately/ Along the porch in front of the door in the hallway/ And through my open windows. // Behind the fence along the road/ Floods the public garden./ Lounging like animals in a den,/ The clouds lie in disarray./ In bad weather I imagine a book/ About the earth and its beauty./ I draw a forest shishiga / For you on the title page. Pasternak made a note on the typescript: “Conceived in 1942, written at the prompting of Alexei Kruchenykh on December 25 and 26 (the change in the calendar that happened in sub-Soviet Russia cannot erase the original Christmas coloring of these numbers. - A.N. ) 1943 in Moscow. At home. The idea of these poems (the requiem is two-part - A.N. ) is connected with the planned article about Blok and the young Mayakovsky. This is a circle of ideas that have only just been outlined and require continuation, but with them I began my new year, 1944.” For those who read Pasternak’s novel not diagonally, the commemoration of Tsvetaeva and the auto-commentary to it will remind a lot of things.
For example, about how the wind and rain rush into Meluzev’s house, deceptively promising the return of Lara. “In the pantry, the window was broken by a piece of a linden branch hitting the glass, and there were huge puddles on the floor, and the same thing in the room left from Lara, the sea, the real sea, the whole ocean.” The episode of the “visit” of the elements in the lived-in locus, permeated with reminiscences of the book “My Sister is My Life” and Tsvetaev’s appeals to Pasternak, will come back to haunt us after the doctor’s final farewell to Lara. “I will put your features on paper, as after a terrible storm that explodes the sea to its foundations, traces of the strongest wave that splashes farthest lie on the sand. In a broken, winding line, the sea throws pumice, cork, shells, algae, the lightest and most weightless thing that could be lifted from the bottom. This is the coastal border of the highest surf that endlessly stretches into the distance. So the storm of life brought you to me, my pride. This is how I will portray you." And he will depict - in the “flowing” “Separation”, where Tsvetaeva’s same-named element will again manifest itself: There is some kind of noise in the ears in the morning./ Is he in his memory or is he dreaming?/ And why does the thought of the sea keep coming to his mind? // When through the frost on the window/ The light of God is not visible,/ The hopelessness of melancholy is doubly/ Similar to the desert of the sea. // She was so dear/ To him, like every trait,/ As the shores are close to the sea/ The entire line of the surf. // Like the reeds flooding/ Excitement after the storm,/ His soul sank to the bottom/ Its features and forms. // During the years of ordeal, during the // Unthinkable life/ She was nailed to him by a wave of fate from the bottom. // Among countless obstacles, / Bypassing danger, / The wave carried her, carried her, / And drove her close.
In the novel, young Zhivago wants to write an article about Blok, but the yuletide bubbling of Moscow turns his thoughts. “Suddenly Yura thought that Blok is a phenomenon of Christmas in all areas of Russian life, in northern urban life and in modern literature, under the starry sky of a modern street and around a lit Christmas tree in the living room of this century. (The hero and his future wife go to the Sventitsky Christmas tree; there he will again see the “girl from another circle,” Lara, who will shoot at Komarovsky’s “dragon.” - A.N. ) He thought that no article about Blok was needed , but you just need to write the Russian worship of the Magi, like the Dutch, with frost, wolves and a dark spruce forest.” Yura “instead of an article about Blok” will write “The Christmas Star.” And the “Fairy Tale” about an unnamed, but recognizable patron of the two main cities of the novel (Moscow and Yuryatin) - St. George, whose birth will be connected with the real wolves besieging Varykino, and the happy plot will atone for the horror of the novel’s plot (for Zhivago - life ), in which the dragon-molester will take the princess to distant lands. And “Winter Night”, the candle of which Yura sees in some window, driving along Kamergersky Lane on the same Christmas evening - with this candle Lara talks with Antipov in the room that years later will become the last refuge of Doctor Zhivago, where Lara will sob over the coffin of the one who failed to save her. “The candle was burning on the table. The candle was burning...” Yura whispered to himself the beginning of something vague, unformed, in the hope that the continuation would come by itself. It didn't come." It has come, it has already been revealed to the creator of Yura and Lara (and other “boys and girls” - one of the preliminary titles of the novel, going back to Blok’s “willow” poems). Pasternak wrote not only “the poems of Yuri Zhivago,” but also a novel - forest and city, winter and summer, old-fashioned and incredibly new, achingly sad and liberating, Christmas and Easter.
In letters and conversations, Pasternak more than once emphasized that the personality of the hero (and, consequently, his poetry) combines the traits of Blok, Mayakovsky, Yesenin and the author himself, taken, as we understand, in abstraction from “biographical circumstances.” “Boys and girls” do not have “exact” prototypes. Therefore, it is pointless to exchange completely solid arguments between those researchers who see in Lara a reflection of the poet’s second wife Zinaida Nikolaevna, and those who give this vacancy to his last beloved, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya. And in the lawless Lara, and in Tone, prescribed by the correct - old and good - order of things, and in the “random” (although in the world of the novel, chance is always, according to Pushkin’s great word, “a powerful, instant instrument of Providence”) Marina (Pasternak it was in vain that he gave her Tsvetaev’s name) all the “girls” (from different circles) with whom Pasternak’s life is connected and without whom Pasternak’s life is unimaginable come to life in different ways. And in each of them that Eternal Femininity shines, of which the poet felt himself an admiring captive, an involuntary insulter and a devout defender. (“Doctor Zhivago” was already guessed and to a large extent written when the translation of “Faust” became his “companion”. But it was not Goethe’s “influence” that gave the Russian doctor “Faustian” properties and determined the power of the motif of the Eternal Feminine, but “selective affinity” poets, Pasternak’s ability to see and convey the living and contemporary meaning of Goethe’s work made the translation of Faust a huge event in Pasternak’s life, which naturally responded to the growth of the novel.)
And the same with the “dispersed” presence of poets. When in Antipov-Strelnikov they discover similarities with Mayakovsky (reinforced by the hero’s suicide), this is absolutely true, but the “Mayakovsky” melody also sounds in completely different episodes (often dramatically transformed). Zhivago, who had just returned from the front (having seen “War and Peace” with his own eyes), answering the recurring (and not requiring answers) questions of Dudorov, always relevant to the time (for whom interest in Mayakovsky’s poems is on a par with those that were relevant for 1917, but purely theoretical , which do not assume terrible tomorrow's conclusions from historical studies - about the land policy of Ivan the Terrible and Saint-Just), he is not expressing a “literary judgment”, but testifies to a blood relationship (super closeness, which can turn into a break, love-hate) with the author of “The Flute” -spine” and “Man”: “I always liked Mayakovsky. This is some kind of continuation of Dostoevsky. Or rather, these are lyrics written by one of the younger rebellious characters, like Hippolytus, Raskolnikov or the hero of “The Teenager”. What an all-consuming (terrible epithet! Indeed, “it will devour everything”; including itself. - A.N. ) power of talent! As it is said once and for all, irreconcilably and straightforwardly! And most importantly, with what scope all this was thrown into the face of society and somewhere further, into space!” It is clear that the subversive and tragic energy of Mayakovsky, presenting a murderous account of the old world - which allows the humiliation of beauty and the violation of justice - the world, rhymes with the shots that the scolded Lara hears in 1905. “The boys are shooting,” Lara thought. She thought so not about Nick (Dudorov, who in his adolescence dreams of revolution, and in 1917 climbs to Zhivago with questions about Mayakovsky. - A.N. ) and Patul (Antipov, the future Strelnikov, Rastrelnikov; when the people's speech " increases” the already ominous pseudonym of the character, in the bearer of the fatal name, who allowed himself “blood according to his conscience,” the hero of “Crime and Punishment” undoubtedly appears - A.N. ), but about the whole shooting city. “Good, clean boys,” she thought (considering herself “dirty” and dead. - A.N. ). - Good. That’s why they shoot.”
Zhivago is one of these same boys, although, as we know, he will not be able to shoot. The great scene of the novel, which most clearly refutes “revolutionary violence,” that is, fratricide, became the property of the Soviet reader long before he was allowed to find out what was so special about this very “Doctor...”. The episode in which Zhivago, “mobilized” by the partisans, shoots at a charred tree during an attack by the “whites”, was fully quoted in a letter to Pasternak from members of the editorial board of the “New World”, with righteous anger - planned in the Central Committee - rejecting the anti-Soviet novel. The letter, written in 1956, was published by Literaturnaya Gazeta and Novy Mir in November 1958, during the days of persecution against the poet that followed his award of the Nobel Prize. Authors - or “signatories”? - of the pogrom opus were certainly right in asserting that this scene is “the key to a lot.” Yes, Zhivago cannot shoot at his own people (and there are no strangers on Russian soil). This is what he argues with his antagonist (and his counterparts, like the commander of a partisan detachment). But when Strelnikov commits suicide after a nightly conversation about the revolution and the imperative of retribution that determined his fate (“The accusation against the century could be made in her name, through her mouth,” through the mouth of Lara, Antipov-Strelnikov’s wife, Zhivago’s beloved), Yuri Andreevich will see and will feel something deeply “of his own.”
“The snow under his left temple formed a red lump, soaked in a pool of flowing blood. Small drops of blood that splashed to the side rolled with the snow into red balls, similar to frozen rowan berries.” The same rowan tree that, having merged in the doctor’s mind with Lara, finally frees him from partisan captivity. During the dialogue with the guard (“- I saw a rowan in the ice cream berries, I want to go chew it. – Here it is, the lord’s nonsense, in winter, one berry at a time. For three years we have been beating and beating, but you can’t beat it out. There is no consciousness. Go to your rowan, you crazy.” ) a rehearsal of the meeting takes place, promising a real meeting. “She was half in the snow, half in frozen leaves and berries, and extended two snow-covered branches forward towards him. He remembered Lara’s large white hands, round, generous, and, grabbing the branches, pulled her towards him. As if with a conscious response movement, the mountain ash showered him with snow from head to toe. He muttered, not understanding what he was saying and not remembering himself:
“I will see you, my written beauty, my princess, rowan, my dear blood.” The connection of this scene with Mayakov’s suicide is as undeniable as its “Yesenin” poetics.
I do not at all want to “deduce” Doctor Zhivago only from the poems in memory of Tsvetaeva and the thoughts and feelings swirling around them. The novel was started only the following winter (1945/46). But it became that very book “about the earth and its beauty” that Pasternak imagined when he remembered Tsvetaeva. The same one that once upon a time, without even molding itself into an exact “literary concept”, had already revealed its fundamental properties (“... a great novel: with love, with a heroine - like Balzac”) and evoked the only true reaction from Tsvetaeva : “Like beyond self-esteem. - Poet! The same one about which Pasternak, who disappeared in 1959 “like an animal in a pen,” will exclaim, varying the motives of crying according to Tsvetaeva: What kind of dirty trick have I done, / Am I a murderer and a villain? / I made the whole world cry, / Over the beauty of the earth mine. After the sobbing stanza of the “Nobel Prize” comes another - about the state of mind that led the poet to the novel and did not leave him in the dark days. But even so, almost at the grave, / I believe the time will come - / The power of meanness and malice / Will overcome the spirit of good.
The epilogue of Doctor Zhivago tells why this faith came to Pasternak during the war. The wiser Dudorov tells Gordon about this: “Not only in the face of your convict lot, but in relation to the entire previous life of the thirties, even in freedom, even in the prosperity of university activities, books, money, amenities, the war was a cleansing storm, a stream of fresh air , the spirit of deliverance <...>
And when the war broke out, its real horrors, real danger and threat of real death were a blessing in comparison with the inhuman dominion of fiction and brought relief because they limited the witchcraft power of the dead letter <...>
War is a special link in the chain of revolutionary decades. The action of the reasons directly lying in the nature of the revolution ended. Indirect results began to emerge, the fruits of the fruits, the consequences of the consequences. Strengthening of character extracted from disasters, unspoiledness, heroism, readiness for the big, desperate, unprecedented. These qualities are fabulous, stunning, and they constitute the moral color of the generation.” New boys and girls have grown up. They grew up in order to die heroically, like Dudorova’s beloved - Khristina Orletsova, who became a partisan. Or so that, having lost parents and a comfortable fate, miraculously preserving fragments of memories that smack of an ominous fairy tale, but true to the very essence, having received a humiliating street nickname (and taking its horror as a given), to be mysteriously preserved by fate - like Tanka Bezcherova, in which Gordon and Dudorov (and previously the doctor’s strange patron, his “dark” half-brother Evgraf Zhivago) recognize the daughter of Yuri and Lara. Boys and girls grew up, dark witchcraft receded, freedom came, which means: “There will be no death” (another preliminary title of the novel about Doctor Zhivago, about the healing life).
Before quoting the epilogue again, let me remind you that in writing on the poems in memory of Tsvetaeva, Pasternak considered it necessary to indicate (and even highlight in a separate sentence) the place where his lament and his dream of the main book took shape: “At home.” Knowing the novel, it is impossible to see a formality here. At home means in history. Yurin’s uncle and mentor Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin speaks about this already in the first part of the novel: “... one must be faithful to Christ. I'll explain now. You don’t understand that you can be an atheist, you can not know whether God exists and what He is for, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature, but in history, and that in the current understanding it was founded by Christ, that the Gospel there is a rationale for it. What is history? This is the establishment of centuries-old work on the consistent solution to death and its future overcoming. For this, mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves are discovered, and symphonies are written for this. It is impossible to move forward in this direction without some uplift. These discoveries require spiritual equipment. Data for it are contained in the Gospel. Here they are. This is, firstly, love for one’s neighbor, this highest type of living energy that overwhelms a person’s heart and requires release and waste, and then these are the main components of modern man, without which he is unthinkable, namely the idea of a free personality and the idea of life as a sacrifice. Keep in mind that this is still extremely new. The ancients did not have history in this sense. There was the sanguine swinishness of the pockmarked Caligulas, unaware of how incompetent every enslaver is. There was a boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. (It’s hard not to hear in the last two sentences characteristics not only of Rome, but also of its ominously caricatured repetition in the Stalinist empire. - A.N. ) Centuries and generations breathed freely only after Christ. Only after him did life begin in the offspring (here they are “boys and girls.” - A.N. ), and a person does not die on the street under a fence (that’s what Zhivago’s “tram” death only seems like. - A.N. ), and in history, in the midst of work devoted to overcoming death, he himself, dedicated to this topic, dies.”
Yura says the same thing to Anna Ivanovna Gromeko, who is sensing her imminent departure. Simochka Tuntsova says the same thing. And, of course, the same liberating music builds the gospel (and not only gospel) poems of Yuri Zhivago. The war returned Pasternak (for him this meant - and to all people) history, and with it freedom. That's why Doctor Zhivago was written. And it was written exactly like that - contrary to all current ideas about “perfection” and “novelty.” Better than in letters and conversations with perplexing intelligent friends, Pasternak explains the poetics of his novel with the words of the same Vedenyapin: “It has still been believed that the most important moral sayings and rules contained in the commandments are most important in the Gospel, and for me the most important thing is that that is that it Christ spoke by parables from everyday life, explaining the truth by the light of everyday life. This is based on the idea that the communication between mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic because it is significant. ” Hence the rejection of external will accept cosmogony and mythologism (with their hidden but powerful presence in the novel), from the emphasis of motive roll calls (with their amazing wealth), from modernist neglect of the plot, which in the desired book of life should be simple at once (operating eternal feelings) And fascinating. Hence the “Balzakovsky” code of “Dr. Zhivago”, Pasternak (deeply true) comparisons of the book with Goethe's dilogy about Wilhelm Meister (classical novel about the formation of the artist), Dickens prose and Dostoevsky’s “Karamazov brothers”, hence (with philosophical discrepancy with Tolstoy), the author’s involvement) In the Tolstoy atmosphere (which is more “teaching” and “art”) and a comparison in one of the letters of Dr. Zhivago with Dr. Chekhov. This (as well as visibly present in the text “Captain's daughter” or deeply hidden, but significant for the plot structure “adventure” and “mysterious” novels, primarily Walter-Skottov) are not “sources” and not “samples”-this is a dictionary And the grammar of natural and unlimited in the external modesty of the language of a living and constantly renewed great European literature, a language that is intelligible and necessary for anyone living in history (free), even if he himself is used to explain to others - who were erupted from the great trunk - intricate adverbs.
A novel, born of such a feeling and written in such a language (one implies another), simply could not lurk in the table or be the property of a narrow circle of people of “good tone”. Pasternak wrote his book not in The Thaw, but in the Black Claus of the Last Stalinist seven years. He wrote when he was mixed with mud in the newspapers, when the threat of arrest (and most likely death) became more clearly day by day, when his lover was thrown into the dawn (and then to the camp). He wrote and did not hide the written. Contrary to the well -known rule, which does not recommend showing half the work of both “fools” and “smart”, he constantly read fragments (sometimes not finished) of an incomplete book - and not only close in spirit. He was not afraid to send - by mail! - The manuscript for those who languished in exiles (daughter of Tsvetaeva Ariadne Efron, Varlam Shalamova, Kayynn Kuliev). The existence of the novel addressed to the world was implied by his very article. And seasonal political fluctuations were not powerful here.
“Although the enlightenment and liberation that they were waiting for after the war did not come with the victory as they thought, but still the prevality of freedom was worn in the air for all the post -war years, constituting their only content,” the epilogue said. And it wasn’t Pasternak to change freedom when, after the death of Stalin, evil weakened his grip.
“Dr. Zhivago” was proposed by Soviet magazines - “New World” and “Ban” (on the page of which during the publication of several poems from the novel, the fateful phrase was first imprisoned), the writer's almanac “Literary Moscow”, Goslitizdat. Fragments of the novel were printed in socialist Poland, and he intended to publish it entirely in socialist Czechoslovakia. And when the Italian journalist (of course, the communist) Sergio d'angelo asked the Pasternak manuscript to introduce her to the Italian publisher (also a communist) Janjakomo Feltrinelli, he agreed. Yes, saying that perhaps this is his death sentence. Yes, entering the contacts with the power authorities later trying to suspend the publication in every possible way (and beckoned by the prospect of a distinguished publication in the Fatherland). Yes, avoiding sudden movements and signing the telegrams to the publisher with a request to delay printing before the publication of the novel in the USSR (among other things, hoping that Feltrinelli will understand the intrigue - as happened). The choice of Pasternak was made a lot earlier. Dr. Zhivago could not remain unwritten, but becoming a reality, wait for better times. This is immeasurably more important and the series of police events with which the Tsekist-writing brotherhood tried to stop the publication in Italy (the expressive selection of the corresponding secret materials is presented in the first section of the book “And the noise of the chase is behind me ...” Boris Pasternak and power. ”-M.-M.-M. , 2001). And a year later, a year of the Nobel Prize (the laureate of which Pasternak would be very likely, and he would not write a novel; however, this plot in the subjunctive inclination is incredible - in those years, true artists were nominated at the Nobel Prize, who, by definition, are not typical ). And the subsequent persecution of the great writer who quickly brought him to the grave and the eternal stigma of shame fell on the then rulers, the retransmators of the literature and “who did not read, but the“ ordinary Soviet people ”about the novel. And that misunderstanding of the novel, which for many reasons remains in force to this day, that deafness that reduces the “book of life” to bad politics, “cinema” melodrama and cheap metaphysics. And those “revealing” gossip about the author, who successfully accompany the matches of “artistic weakness”.
It is necessary to read the “Doctor of Zhivago” with the feeling that he owns Gordon and Duddov in the last prose paragraph of the novel. Then it will become clear that there will be no death.
“A happy, adapted calm for this holy city and throughout the land, over the participants of this story and their children who lived before this evening, they penetrated them and covered with inaudible music of happiness, which spilled far from a circle. And the book in their hands seemed to know all this and gave their feelings support and confirmation.” Their book is "Poems by Yuri Zhivago." Ours, waiting for a full -fledged and liberating reading, is Pasternak’s novel.