Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [224]
“And suddenly this leap from serene, innocent measuredness into blood and screaming, mass insanity, and the savagery of daily and hourly, lawful and extolled murder.
“Probably this never goes unpaid for. You probably remember better than I do how everything all at once started going to ruin. Train travel, food supplies for the cities, the foundations of family life, the moral principles of consciousness.”
“Go on. I know what you’ll say further. How well you analyze it all! What a joy to listen to you!”
“Then untruth came to the Russian land. The main trouble, the root of the future evil, was loss of faith in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the urgings of their moral sense was gone, that now they had to sing to the general tune and live by foreign notions imposed on everyone. The dominion of the ready-made phrase began to grow—first monarchistic, then revolutionary.
“This social delusion was all-enveloping, contagious. Everything fell under its influence. Our home couldn’t stand against this bane either. Something in it was shaken. Instead of the unconscious liveliness that had always reigned with us, a dose of foolish declamation crept into our conversations, some ostentatious, mandatory philosophizing on mandatory world themes. Could a man as subtle and self-demanding as Pasha, who could so unerringly distinguish essence from appearance, pass by this insidious falseness and not notice it?
“And here he committed a fatal error, which determined everything beforehand. He took the sign of the time, the social evil, for a domestic phenomenon. He attributed the unnatural tone, the official stiffness of our discussions to himself, he ascribed them to his being a dry stick, a mediocrity, a man in a case.4 To you it probably seems incredible that such trifles could mean anything in our life together. You can’t imagine how important it was, how many stupid things Pasha did because of that childishness.
“He went to the war, something nobody demanded of him. He did it to free us from himself, from his imaginary burden. That was the beginning of his follies. With some youthful, misdirected vanity, he took offense at something in life that one doesn’t take offense at. He began to pout at the course of events, at history. He began to quarrel with it. And to this day he’s settling accounts with it. Hence his defiant extravagances. He’s headed for certain ruin because of that stupid ambition. Oh, if only I could save him!”
“How incredibly purely and deeply you love him! Go on, go on loving him. I’m not jealous of him, I won’t hinder you.”
15
Summer came and went imperceptibly. The doctor recovered. Temporarily, in expectation of his supposed departure for Moscow, he took three posts. The quickly progressing devaluation of money forced him to juggle several jobs.
The doctor rose at cockcrow, stepped out on Kupecheskaya, and went down it past the Giant picture house to the former printing shop of the Ural Cossack army, now renamed the Red Typesetter. At the corner of City Square, on the door of Administrative Affairs, he came upon a plaque reading “Claims Office.” He crossed the square diagonally and came to Malaya Buyanovka Street. Past the Stanhope factory, through the hospital backyard, he arrived at the dispensary of the Military Hospital—the place of his main job.
Half his way lay under the shady trees hanging over the street, past whimsical, mostly wooden little houses with steeply