Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [13]
They walked past the greenhouse, the gardener’s quarters, and some stone ruins of unknown purpose. Their conversation got on to the new young forces in science and literature.
“You come across talented people,” said Nikolai Nikolaevich. “But now various circles and associations are the fashion. Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it’s a faith in Soloviev,6 or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently. Is there anything in the world that merits faithfulness? Such things are very few. I think we must be faithful to immortality, that other, slightly stronger name for life. We must keep faith in immortality, we must be faithful to Christ! Ah, you’re wincing, poor fellow. Again you haven’t understood a thing.”
“M-m-yes,” grunted Ivan Ivanovich, a thin, towheaded, mercurial man, with a malicious little beard that made him look like an American of Lincoln’s time (he kept gathering it in his hand and catching the tip of it in his lips). “I, of course, say nothing. You understand—I look at these things quite differently. Ah, by the way. Tell me how they defrocked you. I’ve long been meaning to ask. I bet you were scared. Did they anathematize you? Eh?”
“Why change the subject? Though, anyhow, why not? Anathematize? No, these days they do without cursing. There was some unpleasantness; it had its consequences. For instance, I can’t hold a government job for a long time. They won’t allow me in the capitals.7 But that’s all rubbish. Let’s go back to what we were talking about. I said we must be faithful to Christ. I’ll explain at once. You don’t understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one’s neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man’s heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable—namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. Bear in mind that this is still extremely new. The ancients did not have history in this sense. Then there was the sanguinary swinishness of the cruel, pockmarked Caligulas, who did not suspect how giftless all oppressors are. They had the boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. Ages and generations breathed freely only after Christ. Only after him did life in posterity begin, and man now dies not by some fence in the street, but in his own history, in the heat of work devoted to the overcoming of death, dies devoted to that theme himself. Ouf, I’m all in a sweat, as they say. But you can’t even make a dent in him!”
“Metaphysics, old boy. It’s forbidden me by my doctors; my stomach can’t digest it.”
“Well, God help you. Let’s drop it. Lucky man! What a view you have from here—I can’t stop admiring it! And he lives and doesn’t feel it.”
It was painful to look at the river. It gleamed in the sun, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Suddenly it wrinkled up. A heavy ferry with horses, carts, peasant women and men set out from this bank to the other.
“Just think, it’s only a little past five,” said Ivan Ivanovich. “See, there’s the express from Syzran. It passes here at a little after five.”
Far