Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [157]
“At first, in spring and summer, it was very hard. We were exhausted. Now, in the winter evenings, we rest. We gather around the lamp, thanks to Anfim, who provides us with kerosene. The women sew or knit, I or Alexander Alexandrovich reads aloud. The stove is burning, I, as the long-recognized stoker, keep an eye on it, so as to close the damper in time and not lose any heat. If a smoldering log hampers the heating, I take it out all smoky, run outside with it, and throw it far off into the snow. Scattering sparks, it flies through the air like a burning torch, lighting up the edge of the black, sleeping park with its white quadrangles of lawn, lands in a snowdrift, hisses, and goes out.
“We endlessly reread War and Peace, Evgeny Onegin and all the poems, we read The Red and the Black by Stendhal, A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and the short stories of Kleist.”
3
Closer to spring, the doctor wrote:
“I think Tonya is expecting. I told her so. She does not share my supposition, but I am sure of it. Until more unquestionable signs appear, I cannot be deceived by the preceding, less perceptible ones.
“A woman’s face changes. It cannot be said that she loses her good looks. But her appearance, which before was entirely under her supervision, now escapes her control. She is at the disposal of the future, which will come out of her and is no longer her. This escape of her appearance from under her surveillance wears a look of physical perplexity, in which her face becomes dull, her skin more coarse, and her eyes begin to shine differently, not as she would like, as if she could not manage it all and let it go.
“Tonya and I have never had any distance from each other. But this year of work has brought us closer still. I’ve noticed how efficient, strong, and untiring she is, how quick-witted in lining up tasks, so that in moving from one to the other she loses as little time as possible.
“It has always seemed to me that every conception is immaculate, that this dogma concerning the Mother of God expresses the general idea of motherhood.
“On every woman giving birth there lies the same reflection of solitude, of being abandoned, left to her own resources. The man is excluded from things to such a degree now, at this most essential of moments, that it is as if he had never been there and everything had fallen from the sky.
“A woman herself brings her progeny into the world, herself retires with him into the background of existence, where it is more quiet and where she can put the cradle without fear. She herself, in silent humility, nurses him and rears him.
“People ask the Mother of God: ‘Pray fervently to your Son and your God!’ They put fragments of a psalm into her mouth: ‘And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.’ She says this about her infant, he will exalt her (‘For he who is mighty has done great things for me’), he is her glory.3 Every woman can say the same. Her god is in her child. Mothers of great people should be familiar with that feeling. But decidedly all mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.”
4
“We endlessly reread Evgeny Onegin and the poems. Anfim was here yesterday and brought presents. We regale ourselves, we have light. Endless conversations about art.
“My long-standing thought that art is not the name of a category or sphere that embraces a vast multitude of notions and ramified phenomena, but, on the contrary, is something narrow and concentrated, the designation of a principle that enters into the composition of an artistic work, the name of the force applied or the truth worked out in it. And to me art has never seemed a subject or an aspect of form, but rather a mysterious and hidden part of content. To me it is clear as day, I feel it with my every fiber, but how express and formulate this thought?
“Works speak through many