Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Author:Boris Pasternak [Pasternak, Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-37996-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Part Nine

VARYKINO

1

In the winter, when there was more time, Yuri Andreevich began to take various kinds of notes. He noted for himself:

“How often during the summer I wanted to say together with Tyutchev:1

What a summer, ah, what a summer!

In truth it’s something magical.

And how, I ask, was it given to us,

Just so, for no reason at all?

“What happiness to work for yourself and your family, from dawn to dusk, to construct a shelter, to till the soil for the sake of subsistence, to create your own world like Robinson Crusoe, imitating our Maker in creating the universe, following your own mother in bringing yourself again and again into the world!

“So many thoughts go through your consciousness, you think so much that is new, while your hands are busy with the muscular, corporeal work of digging or carpentry; while you set yourself reasonable, physically solvable tasks, which reward you at their completion with joy and success; while for six hours in a row you trim something with an axe or dig the earth under the open sky, which scorches you with its beneficent breath. And that these thoughts, surmises, and juxtapositions are not set down on paper, but are forgotten in all their passing transience, is not a loss, but a gain. You city recluse, whipping up your sagging nerves and imagination with strong black coffee or tobacco, you don’t know the most powerful drug, which consists in unfeigned need and sound health.

“I go no further than what I’ve said, I do not preach Tolstoyan simplification and return to the earth, I do not invent my own amendment to socialism on agrarian questions. I merely establish the fact and do not erect our accidentally befallen fate into a system. Our example is questionable and not suitable for drawing conclusions. Our housekeeping is of too heterogeneous a composition. We owe only a small part of it—the store of vegetables and potatoes—to the work of our hands. All the rest comes from another source.

“Our use of the land is illegal. It is arbitrarily concealed from the accounting established by the state authorities. Our cutting of wood is theft, not excusable by the fact that we are stealing from the state pocket—formerly Krüger’s. We are protected by the connivance of Mikulitsyn, who lives by approximately the same means; we are saved by the distances, by being far from the city, where for now, fortunately, they know nothing of our tricks.

“I have given up medicine and keep quiet about being a doctor, so as not to trammel my freedom. But some good soul from the back of beyond always finds out that a doctor has settled in Varykino, and drags himself from twenty miles away for advice, one with a chicken, another with eggs, another with a bit of butter or something else. No matter how I dodge the honoraria, it’s impossible to fend them off, because people don’t believe in the effectiveness of unpaid-for, freely given advice. And so my medical practice brings me something.

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