Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [298]
2. mad Gretchen: In the first part of Goethe’s Faust (see part 2, note 11), Faust sees the young Gretchen (Margarete) in the street and asks Mephistopheles to procure her for him. Gretchen’s purity makes the task difficult, but Faust succeeds in the end. Gretchen becomes pregnant, drowns her baby, is condemned to death, and awaits execution in prison, where Faust sees her for a last time.
3. Eruslan Lazarevich: A hero of so-called lubok literature. A lubok is a folk woodcut or steel engraving, a form of broadside combining illustrations and text, produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and later.
4. the Gypsy Panina: Varya Panina (1872–1911) was a famous Gypsy singer, whose voice had great depth and musicality. She began singing in Moscow restaurants and gave her first public concert, which was a huge success, in 1902, at the Hall of the Nobility in Petersburg. Alexander Blok called her “the celestial Varya Panina.” The words “led under the golden crown” refer to the Orthodox wedding service, during which the bride and groom stand under crowns held by their attendants.
5. second autumn … action: The Eighth Army under General Alexei Brusilov (1853–1926) had occupied Galicia in 1914, but had been forced to withdraw during a general retreat. In 1915, the Eighth Army entered the Carpathians and moved towards Hungary, but again was forced to withdraw due to circumstances elsewhere.
6. the Lutsk operation: Also known as the “Brusilov Offensive,” this was the liberation of the city of Lutsk, in northwest Ukraine, by four Russian armies under the command of General Brusilov on June 4–7, 1916.
7. Krestovozdvizhensky Hospital: The hospital is named for the feast of the Elevation of the Holy Cross (Krestovozdvizhenie), which falls on September 14/27 and commemorates the finding of the true cross in Jerusalem by the empress Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, in AD 326. Hospitals in Russia before the revolution were often named for church feasts.
8. friend Horatio: Cf. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, lines 165–66: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” After an abandoned earlier attempt in 1923–24, Pasternak translated Hamlet in 1939 at the request of the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold was arrested and shot before he could produce the play. A production in 1943 at the Moscow Art Theater was canceled owing to the death of the director, the venerable Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the first performance finally took place in 1954, at the Pushkin Theater in Leningrad. Pasternak’s work on the play over the years (there were twelve versions among his papers) left a deep mark on Doctor Zhivago. In his essay “Translating Shakespeare,” Pasternak wrote: “From the moment of the ghost’s appearance, Hamlet gives up his will in order to ‘do the will of him that sent him.’ Hamlet is not a drama of weakness, but of duty and self-denial … What is important is that chance has allotted Hamlet the role of judge of his own time and servant of the future” (translated by Manya Harari, in I Remember, New York, 1959).
9. Brusilov … on the offensive: See note 6 above.
10. St. Tatiana’s committee: A benevolent association formed at the beginning of the war, under the honorary chairmanship of the grand duchess Tatiana Konstantinovna Romanova, to aid those at the front and the families of the wounded or dead.
11. Wilhelm: Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) ruled as the last German emperor and king of Prussia from 1888 to 1918, when he was forced to abdicate.
12. Dahl: Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801–1872) was an eminent Russian lexicographer, compiler of the four-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Russian Language (1863–1866). He was a proponent of native as opposed to imported vocabulary.
13. equal before God: A reference