Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [306]
7. In the Red Sea … remained intact: The quotations come from the Dogmatik (Hymn to the Mother of God) in the fifth tone, sung at vespers. The earlier references are to the Old Testament books of Exodus, Daniel (see part 8, note 8), and Jonah.
8. to make Adam God: The quotation comes from verses sung in the second tone at the vespers of the Annunciation. The essential notion that “God became man so that man could become God” is attributed to several early church fathers, among them St. Irenaeus of Lyons (second century) and St. Athanasius of Alexandria (293–373).
9. Christ and Mary Magdalene … God and a woman: This entire passage is based on the traditional identification of Mary Magdalene with the woman taken in adultery in John 8:3–11, and with the unnamed woman who anoints Christ’s feet from an alabaster flask and wipes them with her hair in Matthew 26:6–13, Mark 14:3–9, and Luke 7:36–50. In John’s version of this incident (12:1–8), the woman is Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who is neither a prostitute nor the Magdalene. Sima mentions this confusion herself. St. Mary of Egypt was indeed a repentant prostitute, but she lived in the fourth century. Sima goes on to quote hymns from the matins of Holy Wednesday, the middle of Holy Week, in which the woman with the alabaster vessel confesses to having been a harlot. The longest of these hymns, from which Sima quotes most fully, known as “The Hymn of Cassia,” is attributed to the Byzantine abbess and hymnographer Cassia (ca. 805–867). Zhivago’s two poems about Mary Magdalene follow the same tradition.
10. Several well-known social figures … deported from Russia: Tonya’s letter mixes real people with the fictional Gromeko family: S. P. Melgunov (1879–1956) was a historian, a Constitutional Democrat, and an outspoken opponent of the Bolsheviks; A. A. Kiesewetter was also a historian and a leader of the CD Party; and E. D. Kuskova was a journalist and member of the Committee to Aid the Hungry. Deportation became Lenin’s preferred way of dealing with prominent ideological opponents. In the fall of 1922 he loaded some 160 intellectuals, including the philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Sergei Bulgakov, Ivan Ilyin, and Fyodor Stepun, on the so-called “Philosophy Steamer” and shipped them to Europe.
PART FOURTEEN
1. In Primorye … the remaining time: Primorye, more fully the Primorsky Krai, or “Maritime Territory,” is the extreme southeast region of Russia, bordering on China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan, with its capital at Vladivostok. The remnants of Kappel’s forces (see part 11, note 1), with other White groups, set up a government there, known as the Provisional Primorye Government, which lasted from late May 1921 to October 1922, when the Red Army took Vladivostok and effectively ended the civil war.
2. Egory the Brave: The name for St. George in Russian oral epic tradition. The image of St. George slaying the dragon figures on both the Moscow and the Russian coats of arms, and in Zhivago’s poem, “A Tale.”
3. Tolstoy … generals: Zhivago is thinking of Tolstoy’s commentaries on the moving forces of history in War and Peace, particularly in the second epilogue to the novel.
4. Tverskaya-Yamskaya Streets: Four parallel streets north of the center of Moscow.
5. Herzen: Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner, was a pro-Western writer and publicist, often called “the father of Russian socialism.” In 1847, having inherited his father’s fortune, he left Russia and never returned. Abroad he edited the radical Russian-language newspaper Kolokol (“The Bell”) and wrote a number of books, the most important of which is the autobiographical My Past and Thoughts (1868).
6. a clanging cymbal: A phrase from Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians (13:1): “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
PART FIFTEEN
1. the NEP: That is, the New Economic Policy, established by a decree of March 21, 1921, which allowed for some private