Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [9]
Principal Characters:
Yúri Andréevich Zhivágo (Yúra, Yúrochka)
Laríssa Fyódorovna Guichárd, married name Antípova (Lára, Lárochka)
Antonína Alexándrovna Groméko, married name Zhivágo (Tónya, Tónechka)
Pável Pávlovich Antípov (Pásha, Páshka, Páshenka, Pavlúshka, Patúlya, Patúlechka)
Innokénty Deméntievich Dúdorov (Níka)
Mikhaíl Grigórievich Gordon (Mísha)
Víktor Ippolítovich Komaróvsky (no diminutives)
Evgráf Andréevich Zhivágo (Gránya)
There is an extraordinary play with the names of minor characters in the novel. They are all plausible, but often barely so, and they sometimes have an oddly specific meaning. For instance, there is Maxím Aristárkovich Klintsóv-Pogorévshikh, whose name has a rather aristocratic ring until you come to Pogorévshikh, which means “burned down.” Others are simply tongue twisters: Anfím Efímovich Samdevyátov, or Rufína Onísimovna Vóit-Voitkóvskaya. There are too many of these names for us to comment on them, but the Russian-less reader should know that for Russian readers, too, they are strange and far-fetched, and that Pasternak clearly meant them to be so. Dmitri Bykov, in his Boris Pasternak (Moscow, 2007), thinks they suggest a realm alien to Zhivago—deep Siberia, the city outskirts—and almost a different breed of man.
The place-names for the parts of the novel set in the Moscow region and western Russia are real; the place-names in the Urals—Yuriatin, Varykino, Rynva—are fictional. And there is a corresponding difference in “worlds”—the one more historical, the other more folkloric. The novel moves from the one to the other and back again. There is also a double sense of time, marked by two different calendars, civil and church-festal, the first linear, the second cyclical. Sometimes the most mundane moment suddenly acquires another dimension, as when the narrator, describing the end of a farewell party, says: “The house soon turned into a sleeping kingdom.” We have tried to match as closely as possible the wide range of voices, the specific cadences, and the sudden shifts of register in Pasternak’s prose.
The poems of Yuri Zhivago, which make up the final part of the novel, are not merely an addendum; they are inseparable from the whole and its true outcome—what remains, what endures. Some clearly reflect moments in the novel; we even overhear Zhivago working on several of them; but it is a mistake to try to pinpoint each poem to a specific passage or event in the novel. In translating them, we have let the meaning guide us, and have welcomed poetry when it has offered itself. We have sacrificed rhyme, but have tried to keep the rhythm, especially when it is as important as it is in “A Wedding,” which is modeled on a popular song form called the chastushka. Above all, we have tried to keep the tone and terseness of the originals, which are often intentionally prosaic.
Book One
Part One
THE FIVE O’CLOCK EXPRESS
1
They walked and walked and sang “Memory Eternal,”1 and whenever they stopped, the singing seemed to be carried on by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind.
Passersby made way for the cortège, counted the wreaths, crossed themselves. The curious joined the procession, asked: “Who’s being buried?” “Zhivago,” came the answer. “So that’s it. Now I see.” “Not him. Her.” “It’s all the same. God rest her soul. A rich funeral.”
The last minutes flashed by, numbered, irrevocable. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and those who dwell therein.” The priest, tracing a cross, threw a handful of earth onto Marya Nikolaevna. They sang “With the souls of the righteous.” A terrible bustle began. The coffin was closed, nailed shut, lowered in. A rain of clods drummed down as four shovels hastily filled the grave. Over it a small mound rose. A ten-year-old boy climbed onto it.
Only in the state of torpor and insensibility that usually comes at the end of a big funeral could it have seemed that