Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [304]
10. kulichi … paschas: Foods traditionally eaten in celebration of Easter. A kulich is a tall, cylindrical cake, usually decorated with fruit and icing, and pascha is a molded sweet dish made from fresh white cheese, butter, sugar, eggs, and cream, with various dried fruits, nuts, and flavorings.
11. Many years: The prayer wishing a person “Many Years” is sung on name days or for congratulations on various occasions.
12. Miliukov: Pavel Miliukov (1859–1943), statesman and liberal historian, and a prominent member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, was elected to the Duma, became a member of the Provisional Government after the February revolution, and served as foreign minister from March to May 1917. He was known to be a powerful orator.
13. the Black Hundred: The name of a counterrevolutionary movement in Russia, formed in 1900 from conservative intellectuals, officials, landowners, and clergy, with a reputation for being anti-Semitic and anti-Ukrainian. It grew weaker after 1907 and was finally abolished following the February revolution.
PART ELEVEN
1. Kappel’s formation: General Vladimir Kappel (1883–1920), who sided with the Constitutional Democratic Party after the February revolution, was put in command of the so-called Komuch White Army Group in 1918 (“Komuch” is an abbreviation of Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly). After the execution of Admiral Kolchak (see part 10, note 1), he commanded the remnants of the White Army in Siberia and led them in a retreat across the frozen Lake Baikal, an episode known as the Great Siberian Ice March. He died of frostbite.
2. the law on food requisitioning: In January 1919, a decree was issued calling for the requisitioning without compensation of what was described as “surplus agricultural produce.” The procedure was open to abuse and resulted in great unrest among the peasants, which was brutally suppressed.
3. Church Slavonic … Russian: The language of the Russian and some other Orthodox Churches is Church Slavonic. Ultimately derived from Middle Bulgarian, it differs from Russian, which leads to misunderstandings such as those that follow here. The lines quoted are from Psalm 91 in the King James Version.
4. Dukhobor community … Tolstoyism: The Dukhobors (meaning “Spirit-Fighters,” a name coined by their opponents) emerged as a Christian sect in Russia in the eighteenth century, but may go back further. They rejected the authority of state and church, the Bible as divine revelation, and the divinity of Christ, lived in egalitarian farming communities, and refused military service, for which they were repeatedly persecuted. Their beliefs are close to the teachings of Tolstoyism (see part 1, note 5), and in fact Tolstoy contributed money to their cause when they petitioned to move to western Canada in the late nineteenth century.
5. You are angry, Jupiter … the Moor can go: The saying about Jupiter, which is proverbial in Russia, comes from the Latin: Iuppiter iratus ergo nefas (“Jupiter is angry, therefore he is [it is] wrong”), which is attributed to Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125–180 AD). The phrase about the Moor, also proverbial, comes from The Conspiracy of Fiesco in Genoa (1783), a play by the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).
6. Darwin met with Schelling: Charles Darwin (1809–1882) formulated the principle of natural selection in the process of biological evolution in his Origin of Species (1859). The German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), a friend and later a critic of Hegel, proposed the idea, in his Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie, 1797), that the ideal springs from the real in a dynamic series of evolutionary processes. Zhivago’s thoughts thus unite naturalist and idealist notions of evolution.
7. Razin and Pugachev: Stepan (“Stenka”) Razin (1630–1671) was a Cossack who led a band of robbers in the late 1660s. He was joined by discontented peasants and non-Russian peoples like the Kalmyks and in 1670 went into open rebellion against the Russian state. After some