Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [296]
2. Yusupka … Kasimov bride: It was common until recently for Tartars like Gimazetdin Galiullin to work as yard porters in Russian apartment blocks. Gimazetdin’s son Osip (Yusupka) will play an important role later on. The Kasimov Bride (1879) is a historical novel by Vsevolod Soloviev (1849–1903), brother of the philosopher (see part 1, note 6). In the fifteenth century, the town of Kasimov, now in Riazan province, was the capital of the Kasimov Tartar kingdom.
3. Wafangkou: At the battle of Wafangkou (June 14–15, 1904), the Russian forces of General Stackelberg, who was attempting to relieve Port Arthur, were roundly defeated by the Japanese under General Oku.
4. Your dear … boy: An altered quotation from Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades (1890), with a libretto by Modest Tchaikovsky, based on the story by Alexander Pushkin.
5. a manifesto: The October Manifesto of 1905 (see note 1 above).
6. a papakha: A tall hat, usually of lambskin and often with a flat top, originating in the Caucasus.
7. Gorky … Witte: Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), a major figure in Russian literature and in the radical politics of the time, was one of a group of writers who wrote to inform the chairman of the council of ministers, Count Sergei Witte (1849–1915), of the peaceful character of Father Gapon’s demonstration on January 22, 1905 (see note 1 above). Witte, who brilliantly negotiated the peace with Japan in September 1905, was also the author of the October Manifesto.
8. The Meaning … Sonata: Leo Tolstoy’s story The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), a study of sensuality and jealousy, is a violent attack on the relations between the sexes in modern society. The Meaning of Love (1892–94), by the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (see part 1, note 6), is an affirmation of the physical-spiritual union of sexual love.
9. fauns … ‘let’s be like the sun’: Vyvolochnov refers to some of the favorite motifs in fin de siècle poetry and book design. One such book was Let’s Be Like the Sun (1903), the best-known work of the symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942).
10. Lev Nikolaevich … Dostoevsky: In his polemical treatise What Is Art?, Tolstoy (Lev Nikolaevich, i.e., Leo) attacks the “all-confusing concept of beauty” in art, and replaces it with the notion of “the good.” The phrase “Beauty will save the world” is commonly but wrongly ascribed to Dostoevsky. In fact, it comes from Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1868), where it is attributed to the hero, Prince Myshkin, by Aglaya Epanchina. Vassily Rozanov (1856–1919), philosopher, diarist, and critic, was one of the major figures of the period leading up to the revolution. He was deeply influenced by Dostoevsky.
11. Faust … Hesiod’s hexameters: Faust, a monumental cosmic drama in two parts, is considered the masterwork of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Part 1 was published in 1808 and part 2 in 1832. Pasternak translated the two parts of Faust between 1948 and 1953, in alternation with his work on Zhivago. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod, author of Works and Days and The Theogony, is thought to have lived in the later eighth century BC.
12. Katerina’s in The Storm: The Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–1886) wrote and staged his play The Storm in 1859. The heroine Katerina says, in a famous monologue in act 5, scene 4, “Where to go now? Home? No, whether home or the grave, it’s all the same to me.”
13. The psalm: Psalm 103, which opens with the words quoted here, is sung as the first of three antiphons at the start of the Orthodox liturgy.
14. the nine beatitudes: The beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–12) are sung as the third antiphon of the Orthodox liturgy.
15. Presnya days: The