Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [229]
Sima went on:
“I’ll tell you something else on that same theme in a moment. But meanwhile a small digression. In relation to the care for workers, the protection of mothers, the struggle with the power of capital, our revolutionary time is an unprecedented, unforgettable time, with achievements that will abide for a long time, forever. As for the understanding of life, the philosophy of happiness that’s being propagated now, it’s simply hard to believe that it’s spoken seriously, it’s such a ridiculous remnant. These declamations about leaders and people could send us back to Old Testament times of cattle-breeding tribes and patriarchs, if they had the power to reverse the course of time and throw history back thousands of years. Fortunately, that’s impossible.
“A few words about Christ and Mary Magdalene. This isn’t from the Gospel account of her, but from the prayers of Holy Week, I think from Holy Tuesday or Wednesday. But you know that without me, Larissa Fyodorovna. I simply want to remind you of a thing or two, and not at all to lecture you.
“ ‘Passion’ in Slavonic, as you know perfectly well, first of all means ‘suffering,’ the Passion of our Lord, ‘the Lord goeth to His voluntary passion’ (that is, to His voluntary suffering). Besides that, the word is used in the later Russian meaning of vices and lusts. ‘Having enslaved the dignity of my soul to passions, I turned into a beast,’ ‘Having been expelled from paradise, let us strive to enter it by abstention from passions,’ and so on. I’m probably very depraved, but I don’t like the pre-Easter readings in that line, devoted to harnessing sensuality and mortifying the flesh. It always seems to me that these crude, flat prayers, lacking in the poetry proper to other spiritual texts, were composed by greasy, fat-bellied monks. And the point is not that they themselves did not live by their own rules and deceived others. Suppose they even lived according to conscience. The point isn’t them, but the content of these texts. These laments give unnecessary significance to various infirmities of the body and to whether it is well-fed or famished. It’s disgusting. Here a dirty, inessential secondariness is raised to an undue, inappropriate height. Forgive me for putting off the main thing like this. I’ll reward you presently for the delay.
“It has always interested me why the mention of Mary Magdalene is placed just before Easter, on the threshold of Christ’s end and His resurrection. I don’t know the reason, but the reminder of what life is comes so timely at the moment of taking leave of it and on the threshold of its return. Now listen with what genuine passion, with what directness regardless of anything, this mention is made.
“There’s a debate about whether it’s Mary Magdalene, or Mary of Egypt, or some other Mary. Whoever she may be, she asks the Lord: ‘Loose my debt as I have loosed my hair.’ That is: ‘Release me from guilt, just as I have released my hair.’ How materially the thirst for forgiveness, for repentance, is expressed! You can touch it with your hands.
“And there is a similar exclamation in another hymn for the same day, a more detailed one, which we can refer with greater certainty to Mary Magdalene.
“Here, with terrible tangibility, she laments for her past, for the fact that every night her former, inveterate habits flare up in her. ‘For I live in the night of licentiousness, shrouded in the dark and moonless love of sin.’ She asks Christ to accept her tears of repentance and incline His ear to the sighing of her heart, so that she may wipe His most pure feet with her hair, with which the stunned and ashamed Eve covered herself in paradise. ‘Once Eve heard Thy footstep in paradise in the cool of day and in fear ran and hid herself. But now I will tenderly embrace those pure feet and wipe them with the hair of my head.’ And suddenly, right after this about her hair, an exclamation is wrung from her: ‘Who can measure the multitude of my sins, or the depth of Thy judgments?’ What