Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [147]
“Do you know the purpose of our trip, our intentions?”
“Approximately. I can guess. I have a notion. Man’s eternal longing for the land. The dream of living by the work of your own hands.”
“And so? It seems you don’t approve? What do you say?”
“A naïve, idyllic dream. But why not? God help you. But I don’t believe in it. Utopian. Homemade.”
“How will Mikulitsyn treat us?”
“He won’t let you cross the threshold, he’ll drive you out with a broom, and he’ll be right. He’s got bedlam there even without you, a thousand and one nights, factories idle, workers scattered, not a blessed thing in terms of means of existence, no fodder, and suddenly—oh, joy—the deuce brings you along. If he killed you, I wouldn’t blame him.”
“There, you see—you’re a Bolshevik and you yourself don’t deny that this isn’t life, but something unprecedented, phantasmagorical, incongruous.”
“Of course. But it’s a historical inevitability. We have to go through it.”
“Why an inevitability?”
“What, are you a little boy, or are you pretending? Did you drop from the moon or something? Gluttons and parasites rode on the backs of starving laborers, drove them to death, and it should have stayed that way? And the other forms of outrage and tyranny? Don’t you understand the legitimacy of the people’s wrath, their wish to live according to justice, their search for the truth? Or does it seem to you that a radical break could have been achieved in the dumas, by parliamentary ways, and that it can be done without dictatorship?”
“We’re talking about different things, and if we were to argue for a hundred years, we wouldn’t agree on anything. I used to be in a very revolutionary mood, but now I think that we’ll gain nothing by violence. People must be drawn to the good by the good. But that’s not the point. Let’s go back to Mikulitsyn. If that is most likely what awaits us, why should we go there? We ought to swing around.”
“What nonsense. First of all, are the Mikulitsyns the only light in the window? Second, Mikulitsyn is criminally kind, kind in the extreme. He’ll make noise, get his hackles up, then go soft, give you the shirt off his back, share his last crust of bread with you.” And Samdevyatov told this story.
6
“Twenty-five years ago, Mikulitsyn, a student at the Technological Institute, arrived from Petersburg. He was exiled here under police surveillance. Mikulitsyn arrived, got a job as manager at Krüger’s, and married. We had four Tuntsev sisters here, one more than in Chekhov—all the students in Yuriatin courted them—Agrippina, Evdokia, Glafira, and Serafima Severinovna. In a paraphrase of their patronymic, the girls were nicknamed ‘severyanki,’ or ‘northern girls.’ Mikulitsyn married the eldest severyanka.
“Soon a son was born to the couple. As a worshipper of the idea of freedom, the fool of a father christened the boy with the rare name of Liberius. Liberius—Libka in common parlance—grew up a madcap, showing versatile and outstanding abilities. War broke out. Libka faked the date on his birth certificate and, at the age of fifteen, ran off to the front as a volunteer. Agrafena Severinovna, who was generally sickly, could not bear the blow, took to her bed, never got up again, and died two winters ago, just before the revolution.
“The war ended. Liberius returned. Who is he? A heroic lieutenant with three medals, and, well, of course, a thoroughly propagandized Bolshevik delegate from the front. Have you heard of the Forest Brotherhood?”
“No, sorry.”
“Then there’s no sense in telling you. Half the effect is lost. There’s no need to go staring out of the car at the highway. What’s it noted for? At the present time, for the partisans. What are the partisans? The chief cadres of the civil war. Two sources went to make up this force. The political organization that took upon itself the guiding of the revolution, and the low-ranking soldiers,