Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [270]
“Just as they drive sequences of images through their lines, so a busy city street of the end of the nineteenth century sails along and draws past us its crowds, coaches, and carriages, and then, at the beginning of the next century, the cars of its electric trams and subways.
“Pastoral simplicity has no source in these conditions. Its false artlessness is a literary counterfeit, an unnatural mannerism, a phenomenon of a bookish order, picked up not in the countryside, but from the bookshelves of academic libraries. The living language, live-formed and answering naturally to the spirit of today, is the language of urbanism.
“I live on a crowded city intersection. Summer Moscow, blinded by the sun, her asphalt courtyards scorching, the windows of the upper floors scattering reflections and breathing in the flowering of clouds and boulevards, whirls around me and makes my head spin and wants me, for her glory, to make the heads of others spin. To that end she has brought me up and given art into my hands.
“Constantly noisy, day and night, the street outside my wall is as closely connected with the contemporary soul as the opening overture is with the theater curtain, filled with darkness and mystery, still lowered, but already set aglow by the flames of the footlights. Ceaselessly stirring and murmuring outside the doors and windows, the city is a vastly enormous introduction to the life of each of us. It is just along these lines that I would like to write about the city.”
In the notebook of Zhivago’s poems that has been preserved, no such poems are to be found. Perhaps the poem “Hamlet” belonged to that category?
12
One morning at the end of August, Yuri Andreevich got on the tram at the stop on the corner of Gazetny Lane, to go up Nikitskaya from the university to Kudrinskaya Square. He was going for the first time to his job at the Botkin Hospital, which was then called Soldatenkovskaya. It was all but his first visit to it in an official capacity.
Yuri Andreevich was not in luck. He got on a defective car which was meeting with all kinds of disasters. First a cart with its wheels stuck in the grooves of the rails held it up by blocking the way. Then faulty insulation under the floor or on the roof of the car caused a short circuit and something crackled and burned.
The driver would stop the car and with wrenches in his hands would come down from the front platform and, going around the car, would crouch down and immerse himself in repairing its mechanism between the wheels and the rear platform.
The ill-fated car blocked traffic along the whole line. The street was filled with trams it had already made stop and newly arriving and gradually accumulating ones. Their line reached the Manège and stretched back further. Passengers from the cars behind came to the front one that was the cause of it all, hoping to gain something by it. On that hot morning, the jam-packed car was cramped and stifling. A black and purple cloud crept from behind the Nikitsky Gates, rising ever higher in the sky over the crowd of passengers running across the pavement. A thunderstorm was approaching.
Yuri Andreevich was sitting on a single seat on the left side of the car, squeezed up against the window. The left-hand sidewalk of Nikitskaya, where the Conservatory was, remained in his view all the time. Willy-nilly, with the dulled attention of a man thinking about something else, he stared at the people walking or riding on that side and did not miss a single one.
A gray-haired old lady in a light straw hat with cloth daisies and cornflowers, and in a tight-fitting old-fashioned lilac dress, puffing and fanning herself with a flat parcel she carried in her hand, trudged along that side. She was tightly corseted, weary from the heat, and, sweating profusely, kept wiping her wet lips and eyebrows with a small lace handkerchief.
Her path lay parallel to that of the tram. Yuri Andreevich had already lost