Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [188]
“What is that, praise or blame?”
“I beg you once again to put off the dispute to a more convenient time. Besides that, I draw your attention to the cocaine that you have again been sniffing without restraint. You willfully appropriated it from the stock I’m in charge of. We need it for other purposes, not to mention that it’s a poison and I’m responsible for your health.”
“You weren’t at the study group again yesterday. Your social nerve has atrophied, as in illiterate peasant women or inveterately narrowminded philistines or bigots. And yet you’re a doctor, well-read, and it seems you even do some writing yourself. Explain to me, how does that tally?”
“I don’t know. It probably doesn’t tally, but there’s no help for it. I deserve to be pitied.”
“A humility worse than pride. Instead of smiling so sarcastically, you’d do better to familiarize yourself with the program of our courses and recognize your arrogance as inappropriate.”
“Good lord, Liberius Averkievich! What arrogance!? I bow down before your educative work. The survey of questions is repeated in the announcements. I’ve read it. Your thoughts about the spiritual development of the soldier are known to me. I admire them. Everything you say about the attitude of a soldier of the people’s army towards his comrades, towards the weak, towards the defenseless, towards woman, towards the idea of purity and honor—it’s all nearly the same as what formed the Dukhobor community, it’s a kind of Tolstoyism,4 it’s the dream of a dignified existence, which filled my adolescence. Who am I to laugh at such things?
“But, first, the ideas of general improvement, as they’ve been understood since October, don’t set me on fire. Second, it’s all still so far from realization, while the mere talk about it has been paid for with such seas of blood that I don’t think the end justifies the means. Third, and this is the main thing, when I hear about the remaking of life, I lose control of myself and fall into despair.
“The remaking of life! People who can reason like that may have been around, but they’ve never once known life, never felt its spirit, its soul. For them existence is a lump of coarse material, not yet ennobled by their touch, in need of being processed by them. But life has never been a material, a substance. It is, if you want to know, a continually self-renewing, eternally self-recreating principle, it eternally alters and transforms itself, it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”
“And yet attending meetings and socializing with our splendid, wonderful people would, I dare say, raise your spirits. You wouldn’t fall into melancholy. I know where it comes from. You’re depressed that they’re beating us and you don’t see any light ahead. But, my friend, one must never give way to panic. I know things that are much more terrible, concerning me personally—they’re not to be made public for now—and yet I don’t lose heart. Our failures are of a temporary nature. Kolchak’s downfall is inevitable. Remember my words. You’ll see. We’ll win. So take heart.”
“No, this is beyond anything!” the doctor thought. “What infantilism! What shortsightedness! I endlessly repeat to him about the opposition of our views, he took me by force and keeps me with him by force, and he imagines that his failures should upset me, and his calculations and hopes should fill me with high spirits. What self-blindness! The interests of the revolution and the existence of the solar system are the same for him.”
Yuri Andreevich cringed. He made no reply and only shrugged his shoulders, not even trying to conceal that Liberius’s naïveté had overflowed the measure of his patience and he could hardly control himself. That did not escape Liberius.
“You are angry,