Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [262]
The wives of professors, who even earlier in difficult times had secretly baked white rolls for sale in defiance of the prohibition, now openly sold them in some place registered as a bicycle repair shop all those years. They changed landmarks,3 accepted the revolution, and began saying “You bet,” instead of “Yes” or “Very well.”
In Moscow Yuri Andreevich said:
“You’ll have to start doing something, Vasya.”
“I suppose I’ll study.”
“That goes without saying.”
“I also have a dream. I want to paint mama’s face from memory.”
“Very good. But for that you must know how to draw. Have you ever tried?”
“In Apraksin, when my uncle wasn’t looking, I fooled around with charcoal.”
“Well, all right. With any luck. We’ll give it a try.”
Vasya turned out to have no great ability at drawing, but an average one was enough to allow him to study applied art. Through connections, Yuri Andreevich got him enrolled in the general education program of the former Stroganov school, from which he was transferred to the department of polygraphy. There he studied lithographic techniques, typography and bookbinding, and graphic design.
The doctor and Vasya combined their efforts. The doctor wrote little books the size of one printer’s sheet on the most varied questions, and Vasya printed them at school as work counted for his examinations. The books, published in a small number of copies, were distributed through newly opened secondhand bookstores, founded by mutual acquaintances.
The books contained Yuri Andreevich’s philosophy, explanations of his medical views, his definitions of health and unhealth, his thoughts about transformism and evolution, about personality as the biological basis of the organism, his reflections on history and religion, close to his uncle’s and to Simushka’s, sketches of the Pugachev places he had visited, and his stories and poems.
His works were set forth accessibly, in spoken form, though far from the goals set by popularizers, because they contained disputable, arbitrary opinions, insufficiently verified, but always alive and original. The little books sold. Fanciers valued them.
At that time everything became a specialty, verse writing, the art of literary translation, theoretical studies were written about everything, institutes were created for everything. Various sorts of Palaces of Thought and Academies of Artistic Ideas sprang up. Yuri Andreevich was the staff doctor in half of these bogus institutions.
The doctor and Vasya were friends for a long time and lived together. During this period they took many rooms and half-ruined corners one after another, in various ways uninhabitable and uncomfortable.
Just after his arrival in Moscow, Yuri Andreevich visited his old house in Sivtsev, which, as he learned, his family had never stopped at in passing through Moscow. Their exile had changed everything. The rooms reserved for the doctor and his family had other tenants, and there was nothing left of his or his family’s belongings. People shied away from Yuri Andreevich as from a dangerous acquaintance.
Markel had risen in the world and no longer passed his time in Sivtsev. He had been transferred to Flour Town as a superintendent, one of the benefits of the job being a manager’s apartment for himself and his family. However, he preferred to live in the old porter’s lodge with a dirt floor, running water, and an enormous Russian stove that nearly filled the whole space. In all the buildings of the quarter, the water and heating pipes burst in winter, and only in the porter’s lodge was it warm and did the water not freeze.
At that time a cooling off took place in the relations between the doctor and Vasya. Vasya had become extraordinarily developed. He began to