Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [301]
9. the days following the Dormition: The feast of the Dormition (in the West the Assumption) of the Mother of God falls on August 15/28, which in Russia is already the beginning of autumn.
10. Hegel and Benedetto Croce: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a philosophical idealist and the creator of an integral philosophical system that was of great influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) was an Italian philosopher and critic, an idealist deeply influenced by Hegel, and politically a liberal.
11. the October fighting: That is, the outbreak of the October revolution of 1917 (see part 1, note 2, and part 5, note 2).
12. the time of the civil war: The Russian Civil War (1918–1923) broke out after the Bolsheviks assumed power and withdrew from the alliance opposed to the Central Powers in World War I. The Red Army was confronted by various forces from the former empire, known collectively as the White Army, made up of army officers, cadets, landowners, and foreign forces opposed to the revolution. The main White leaders were Generals Yudenich, Denikin, and Wrangel and Admiral Kolchak. Their units fought not only with the Red Army, but also with the Ukrainian nationalist Green Army and the Ukrainian anarchist Black Army led by General Nestor Makhno. The Whites eventually lost on all fronts, and the major fighting ended in 1922 with the Red Army’s capture of Vladivostok, though the last pocket of White resistance in the Far East capitulated only in June 1923. The events of the civil war form the backdrop of most of book 2 of Doctor Zhivago.
13. Mary Magdalene: One of the followers of Jesus, and, according to all four Gospels, the first or one of the first to see him after his resurrection (Matthew 28:1–10; Mark 16:1–10; Luke 24:1–11; John 20:1–18).
PART SEVEN
1. coupons … distribution center: As a result of the acute shortages that followed the war and the revolution, the authorities of the first socialist republic created closed stores where the privileged could obtain supplies in exchange for special coupons. The practice continued throughout the Soviet period.
2. kerenki: A nickname for banknotes issued by the Provisional Government in 1917 and by the Russian state bank until 1919, from the name of Alexander Kerensky (see part 5, note 2).
3. labor conscripts from Petrograd: By a decree issued in December 1918, all able-bodied citizens of the RSFSR were obliged to work on state construction projects. The name of St. Petersburg was changed to Petrograd in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. In 1924 it became Leningrad, and in 1991 it became St. Petersburg again.
4. stormy petrels: In 1901, Maxim Gorky (see part 2, note 7) published a poem entitled “The Song of the Stormy Petrel,” in which the petrel symbolizes the working class as a revolutionary force. He was arrested for publishing it but soon set free. The poem, which was one of Lenin’s favorites, became a battle song of the revolution.
5. Pugachevism … Pushkin’s perception … Aksakovian: Emelian Pugachev (1742–1775) was a Don Cossack who led a rebellion in 1773–1774, claiming the throne under the pretense that he was the tsar Peter III. Alexander Pushkin wrote The History of Pugachev (1834) and a fictional treatment of the same events in his short novel The Captain’s Daughter (1836). The Aksakov family, the father Sergei (1791–1859) and his two sons, Konstantin (1817–1860) and Ivan (1823–1886), were writers belonging to the group known as Slavophiles, who favored the native and local traditions of Russian life as opposed to Western influences. Sergei Aksakov, who was born in Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria, over a thousand miles east of Moscow on the border of Asia, gives a detailed description of Russian patriarchal life, hunting, fishing, flora, and fauna in his Family Chronicle