Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [142]
Strelnikov had justified the trust put in him.
His service record in the recent period included the affairs at Ust-Nemda and Nizhni Kelmes, the affair of the Gubasovo peasants, who had shown armed resistance to a supply detachment, and the affair of the robbery of a supply train by the fourteenth infantry regiment at the Medvezhaya Poima station. In his service book was the affair of the Razinsky regiment, who raised a rebellion in the town of Turkatuy and, arms in hand, went over to the side of the White Guard, and the affair of a soldiers’ riot at the river wharf of Chirkin Us, with its murder of a commander who remained loyal to soviet power.
In all these places, he appeared like a bolt from the blue, judged, sentenced, carried out the sentences, quickly, severely, dauntlessly.
His traveling about on the train had put an end to the general desertion in the area. The revision of the recruiting organizations changed everything. The Red Army levy went successfully. The selection committees got to work feverishly.
Finally, in recent days, when the Whites began pushing from the north and the situation was acknowledged as threatening, Strelnikov was charged with new tasks, essentially military, strategic and operational. The results of his intervention were not slow in telling.
Strelnikov knew that rumor had nicknamed him Rasstrelnikov, “the Executioner.” He calmly took it in stride, he feared nothing.
He was a native of Moscow and the son of a worker who had taken part in the revolution of 1905 and had suffered for it. He himself had kept away from the revolutionary movement in those years because of his youth, and in the following years, when he was studying at the university, because young people from a poor milieu, when they got to do advanced studies, valued it more and studied more assiduously than the children of the rich. The ferment among the well-to-do students had not touched him. He had left the university with a vast amount of knowledge. He had, by his own efforts, supplemented his historico-philological education with a mathematical one.
By law he was not obliged to go into the army, but he had gone to war as a volunteer, had been taken prisoner as a lieutenant, and at the end of the year 1917 had escaped, on learning that there was revolution in Russia.
Two features, two passions, distinguished him.
He thought with outstanding clarity and correctness. And he possessed a rare degree of moral purity and fairness, was a man of warm and noble feelings.
But for the activity of a scientist laying out new paths, his mind lacked the gift of unexpectedness, that power which, with unforeseen discoveries, disrupts the fruitless harmony of empty foresight.
And for doing good, he, a man of principle, lacked the unprincipledness of the heart, which knows no general cases, but only particular ones, and which is great in doing small things.
From an early age Strelnikov had striven for the highest and brightest. He considered life an enormous arena in which people, honorably observing the rules, compete in the attainment of perfection.
When it turned out that this was not so, it never entered his head that he was wrong in simplifying the world order. Having driven the offense inside for a long time, he began to cherish the thought of one day becoming an arbiter between life and the dark principles that distort it, of stepping forth to its defense and avenging it.
Disappointment embittered him. The revolution armed him.
31
“Zhivago, Zhivago,” Strelnikov went on repeating to himself in his car, to which they had passed. “From merchants. Or the nobility. Well, yes: a doctor from Moscow. To Varykino. Strange. From Moscow and suddenly to such a godforsaken hole.”
“Precisely with that