Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [102]
He now reasoned about everything amiably, in a low voice, as if he had a cold, staring dreamily at one spot, and not raising or lowering his eyes, as one reads a lecture.
By the end of the evening, when Shura Schlesinger burst in with her attacks, and everyone, heated up enough without that, was shouting simultaneously, Innokenty, whom Yuri Andreevich had addressed formally since their schooldays, asked him several times:
“Have you read War and Peace and The Backbone Flute?”3
Yuri Andreevich had long since told him what he thought on the subject, but Dudorov had not heard him because of the rousing general argument, and therefore, a little later, he asked once more:
“Have you read The Backbone Flute and Man?”
“But I answered you, Innokenty. It’s your fault if you didn’t hear me. Well, have it your way. I’ll say it again. I’ve always liked Mayakovsky. It’s some sort of continuation of Dostoevsky. Or, more rightly, it’s lyric verse written by one of his young, rebellious characters, like Ippolit, Raskolnikov, or the hero of The Adolescent.4 Such all-devouring force of talent! How it’s said once and for all, implacably and straight out! And above all, with what bold sweep it’s all flung in the face of society and somewhere further out into space!”
But the big hit of the evening was certainly the uncle. Antonina Alexandrovna was mistaken in saying that Nikolai Nikolaevich was at a dacha. He came back on the day of his nephew’s arrival and was in town. Yuri Andreevich had already seen him two or three times and had managed to talk a lot with him, to laugh a lot, to “oh” and “ah” a lot.
Their first meeting took place in the evening of a gray, overcast day. Light rain drizzled down in a fine watery dust. Yuri Andreevich came to Nikolai Nikolaevich’s hotel room. Hotels were already accepting people only at the insistence of the city authorities. But Nikolai Nikolaevich was known everywhere. He still had his old connections.
The hotel gave the impression of a madhouse abandoned by its fleeing administration. Emptiness, chaos, the rule of chance on the stairways and corridors.
Into the big window of the untidied room gazed the vast, peopleless square of those mad days, somehow frightening, as if it had been dreamed of in sleep at night, and was not in fact lying before their eyes under the hotel window.
It was an astounding, unforgettable, portentous meeting! The idol of his childhood, the ruler of his youthful thoughts, stood before him again, alive, in the flesh.
Gray hair was very becoming to Nikolai Nikolaevich. His loose foreign suit fitted him well. He was still very young for his age and handsome to look at.
Of course, he lost much next to the enormity of what was going on. Events overshadowed him. But it had never occurred to Yuri Andreevich to measure him with such a measure.
He was surprised by Nikolai Nikolaevich’s calmness, by the cool, bantering tone in which he talked on political themes. His social bearing exceeded Russian possibilities of the day. This feature bespoke a newcomer. It struck the eye, seemed old-fashioned, and caused a certain awkwardness.
Ah, it was not at all that, not that which filled the first hours of their meeting, made them throw themselves into each other’s arms, weep, and, breathless with excitement, interrupt the rush and fervor of their initial conversation with frequent pauses.
This was a meeting of two creative characters, bound by family ties, and, though the past arose and began to live a second life, memories came in a flood, and circumstances surfaced that had occurred during their time of separation; still, as soon as the talk turned to what was most important, to things known to people of a creative cast, all ties disappeared except that single one, there was neither uncle nor nephew, nor any difference in age, and there remained only the closeness of element to element, energy to energy, principle to principle.
Over the last decade, Nikolai Nikolaevich had had no occasion to speak of the fascination of authorship and the essence