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By Root 2077 0

been so several times in history. What was conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned into Rome, so the Russian enlightenment turned into the Russian revolution. Take Blok’s ‘We, the children of Russia’s terrible years,’4 and you’ll see the difference in epochs. When Blok said that, it was to be understood in a metaphorical sense, figuratively. The children were not children, but sons, offspring, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible, but providential, apocalyptic, and those are two different things. But now all that was metaphorical has become literal, and the children are children, and the terrors are terrifying—there lies the difference.”

5

Five or ten years went by, and one quiet summer evening they were sitting again, Gordon and Dudorov, somewhere high up by an open window over the boundless evening Moscow. They were leafing through the notebook of Yuri’s writings put together by Evgraf, which they had read many times and half of which they knew by heart. As they read, they exchanged observations and abandoned themselves to reflections. Midway through their reading it grew dark, they had difficulty making out the print and had to light the lamp.

And Moscow below and in the distance, the native city of the author and of half of what had befallen him, Moscow now seemed to them, not the place of these events, but the main heroine of a long story, which they had reached the end of that evening, with the notebook in their hands.

Though the brightening and liberation they had expected after the war did not come with victory, as had been thought, even so, the portents of freedom were in the air all through the postwar years, constituting their only historical content.

To the aging friends at the window it seemed that this freedom of the soul had come, that precisely on that evening the future had settled down tangibly in the streets below, that they themselves had entered into that future and henceforth found themselves in it. A happy, tender sense of peace about this holy city and about the whole earth, about the participants in this story who had lived till that evening and about their children, filled them and enveloped them in an inaudible music of happiness, which spread far around. And it was as if the book in their hands knew it all and lent their feelings support and confirmation.

Part Seventeen

THE POEMS OF YURI ZHIVAGO

1

Hamlet

The hum dies down. I step out on the stage.

Leaning against a doorpost,

I try to catch the echoes from far off

Of what my age is bringing.

The night’s darkness focuses on me

Thousands of opera glasses.

Abba Father, if only it can be,

Let this cup pass me by.

I love the stubbornness of your intent

And agree to play this role.

But now a different drama’s going on—

Spare me, then, this once.

But the order of the acts has been thought out,

And leads to just one end.

I’m alone, all drowns in pharisaism.

Life is no stroll through a field.

2

March

The sun heats up to the seventh sweat,

And the ravine, gone foolish, rages.

Like the work of a robust barnyard girl,

Spring’s affairs are in full swing.

The snow wastes away with anemia

In the branchwork of impotent blue veins,

But life is steaming in the cowshed,

And the pitchfork’s teeth are the picture of health.

Oh, these nights, these days and nights!

The drumming of drops towards the middle of day,

The dwindling of icicles on the eaves,

The sleepless babbling of the brooks!

Everything wide open, stables and cowshed,

Pigeons peck up oats from the snow,

And the lifegiver and culprit of it all—

Dung—smells of fresh air.

3

Holy Week

Still the gloom of night around.

Still so early in the world,

The stars are countless in the sky,

And each of them as bright as day,

And if the earth were able to,

It would sleep its way through Easter

To the reading of the psalms.

Still the gloom of night around.

So early an hour in the world,

The square lies like eternity

From the crossroads to the corner,

And the light and warmth of dawn