Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [11]
Suddenly it all flew to pieces. They were poor.
4
In the summer of 1903, Yura and his uncle were riding in a tarantass and pair over the fields to Duplyanka, the estate of Kologrivov, the silk manufacturer and great patron of the arts, to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, a pedagogue and popularizer of useful knowledge.
It was the feast of the Kazan Mother of God,3 the thick of the wheat harvest. Either because it was lunchtime or on account of the feast day, there was not a soul in the fields. The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners. Birds circled over the fields. Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you stared long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes.
“And these,” Nikolai Nikolaevich asked Pavel, a handyman and watchman at the publishing house, who was sitting sideways on the box, stooping and crossing his legs, as a sign that he was not a regular coachman and driving was not his calling, “are these the landowner’s or the peasants’?”
“Them’s the master’s,” Pavel replied, lighting up, “and them there,” having lighted up and inhaled, he jabbed with the butt of the whip handle towards the other side and said after a long pause, “them there’s ours. Gone to sleep, eh?” he shouted at the horses every so often, glancing at their tails and rumps out of the corner of his eye, like an engineer watching a pressure gauge.
But the horses pulled like all horses in the world; that is, the shaft horse ran with the innate directness of an artless nature, while the outrunner seemed to the uncomprehending to be an arrant idler, who only knew how to arch its neck like a swan and do a squatting dance to the jingling of the harness bells, which its own leaps set going.
Nikolai Nikolaevich was bringing Voskoboinikov the proofs of his little book on the land question, which, in view of increased pressure from the censorship, the publisher had asked him to revise.
“Folk are acting up in the district,” said Nikolai Nikolaevich. “In the Pankovo area they cut a merchant’s throat and a zemstvo man4 had his stud burned down. What do you think of that? What are they saying in your village?”
But it turned out that Pavel took an even darker view of things than the censor who was restraining Voskoboinikov’s agrarian passions.
“What’re they saying? Folk got free and easy. Spoiled, they say. Can you do that with our kind? Give our muzhiks their head, they’ll throttle each other, it’s God’s truth. Gone to sleep, eh?”
This was the uncle and nephew’s second trip to Duplyanka. Yura thought he remembered the way, and each time the fields spread out wide, with woods embracing them in front and behind in a narrow border, it seemed to Yura that he recognized the place where the road should turn right, and at the turn there would appear and after a moment vanish the seven-mile panorama of Kologrivovo, with the river glistening in the distance and the railroad running beyond it. But he kept being mistaken. Fields were succeeded by fields. Again and again they were embraced by woods. The succession of these open spaces tuned you to a vast scale. You wanted to dream and think about the future.
Not one of the books that were later to make Nikolai Nikolaevich famous had yet been written. But his thoughts were already defined. He did not know how near his hour was.
Soon he was to appear among the representatives