This being by way of a final report on Dr. Zhivago of reference 1, having finished my reading of both the library version (translated by Pevear & Volkokhonsky, 2010) and my Everyman version (translated by Harari & Hayward, 1958). The first being a rather ordinary paperback, the latter a nicely produced hardback, properly topped and tailed.
The fourth post on this subject, following references 2, 3 and 4. Plus various minor mentions, the finding of which is left to the reader.
A big, serious novel which I shall probably read again before too long. Very much in the tradition of Pasternak’s illustrious forebears from the century before. A lot bigger and more serious than either of the films, which, as it the way with films, leave an awful lot out, have to leave an awful lot out, be the adaptation ever so clever. With Pasternak sharing a philosophical, pedagogical streak with Tolstoy, a streak I found tiresome as a young person, not so tiresome now. Interesting even.
I was reminded of another, rather different book from the same time, or at least set in much the same time, Sholokhov’s ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’, a book which I once knew well, much better than I ever knew this book. A more politically correct book, in the sense that it is about workers – or at least Cossacks – rather than about a doctor from the cultured and comfortably off middle classes. In fact, we do not get to see many workers: this is a book about a bourgeois fallen on hard times. Also a book which takes a long, lingering look at old Moscow. Rather as Simenon writes about the Paris of his youth. While the love interest does not take as much space as the Sharif/Christie film would suggest.
I have always had trouble with the three part Russian names – which I think I may now be bottoming out – and found it helpful to build up my own cast list, using one lifted from the Internet as a starting point. And I might say that the one lifted was reasonably carelessly put together. Not altogether fit for its intended use as a study aid. Gradually the cast sank in and one came to see the improbable way that all these lives were interwoven over getting on for thirty years. But some people didn’t interweave, they popped up just once or twice. And one wasn’t sure. Was I supposed to already know about one Andrei Vasilovitch? Here the Kindle Cloud Reader came into its own, providing a searchable version of the text for a modest £1.99. A small catch being that the different translations sometimes rendered the Russian names into English slightly differently and the search function was not cunning enough to deal with this on its own. But it did not take more than a bit of fiddling about to run the person in question down. All of which helped to consolidate things in the older brain.
I did not attempt the poetry at the back, not being much of a poetry reader. This despite the book being written by a famous poet about a chap who wrote a lot of poetry. Some space given to the details of the craft: the habit, the techniques, the table, the paper, the pens and ink. I don’t think there were any typewriters. Perhaps Pasternak did not think that they were the sort of thing that would survive the turmoils of revolutionary Russia. I associate to a book about a ballet dancer of the same time which said something about the last thing that a ballet dancer lets go was his dancing shoes. See reference 10.
Various odd glitches which would probably have been sorted out between the author and the publisher, had the book been edited and printed more conventionally.
A few more stray comments follow, roughly in order of appearance.
Bordighera gets a mention, a place where Zhivago holidayed as a child, when his family still had money. A place I noticed as someone I used to know lives nearby.
And having an interest in how exactly it comes about that we are conscious while a computer, for example, is not, I also noticed Zhivago’s musings on same in the margins of the Christmas party at the Sventitsky’s. Just one more bit of evidence of the Russian taste for philosophical musings in their novels.
The Sharif/Christie film being fairly fresh in my mind at the time, I noticed plenty of places where the film had strayed from the true path. But far too many to attempt to enumerate here – and anyway, I didn’t feel too much injustice had been done to the book in either of the cinema compressions – given that compression is the name of the game if you are going to make a film of a big book.
Plenty of typhus. Clearly a feared killer of this time and place. See reference 6.
At some point we get a prosector, from the context a person who does autopsies. Also a drunk. According to Wikipedia a sort of superior mortuary technician. And these people still exist with an advertisement for one at University of Aberdeen to be found at reference 8. Nevertheless, perhaps one of the glitches mentioned above. And perhaps the translator could have come up with a less obscure word.
Shortly after Zhivago meets Lara again in Yuriatin, she tells him how she knows lots of people, you need to know lots of people to get along. You can’t divide the world into Reds and Whites who only mix on the battle ground. People have to get along. I think Simenon takes rather the same line in reference 7, a story which revolves around a German occupation. People have to collaborate, at least a bit, to get along. While Zhivago makes a different point, that one has to live. One has to live in the present, not on theory, not on promises for the future.
Both cocaine and mental disorder crop up in the margins of the civil war. The latter being what might now be called post traumatic stress disorder – although disorder is rather a mild word for what happened here.
A rather odd, low key closing chapter to Zhivago’s life in the shabby Moscow of the 1920’s. He drops out, into odd jobs, rather than practise as a doctor. He marries for a second time. And is killed off by his weak heart just as his guardian angel half-brother has fixed him up with a proper medical job.
A savage tale about the laundry girl, who turns out to be the daughter of Lara and Yury. Very close to the end of the book.
One which note I close, only pausing to observe that there is plenty of casual brutality and plenty of slaughter. Far worse than the sort of thing in Germany, at about the same time, talked about by Toller and noticed at reference 9. And given the way it has all turned out a hundred years later, far from clear that it was worth it.
PS 1: the house on the right in the snap above, taken from Google’s Street View, might be the house near Perm that Pasternak lived in for a while, in the area in which a good chunk of the middle of the book is set. Possibly now a museum. 47 Ulitsa Svobody, Vsevolodo-Vil'va, Perm Krai. 59.2237728,57.4305104.
PS 2: along the way, I almost had an accident with Abebooks. Looking for something permanent in place of the library copy and seeing an old, CIA sponsored translation of the book into Russian, part of their effort for the then not so cold war and helped along by the Vatican, I thought it might be worth the £15 asked and very nearly bought it. One click away, I realised that it was £15,000 not £15.00. I supposed I am not used to coming across books at that price. Having now read the small print, I think I could have extricated myself, but I have also brought the limit on my credit down to a level that I could better afford, should need be. The dangers of one-click shopping with people who already know about one’s credit card! If only I had not retired the copy that we used to own – not that I can remember what it looked like now. Was it the Penguin edition, was it some hardback edition handed down by my parents?
PS 3: two attempts so far to get HSBC to lower my credit limit, using the feature for same included in their online banking service. Both failed, without my getting any notice of why. Yet to work up the energy to talk to one of the people at one of their call centres to try and sort things out.
PS 4: and it took three attempts to sort out the mess caused by pasting this text straight from Word, rather than going via Notepad which strips out lots of formatting stuff, not wanted here.
References
Reference 1: Dr. Zhivago – B. L. Pasternak – 1957.
Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/dr-z-part-1.html.
Reference 5: And Quiet Flows the Don – M. A. Sholokhov – 1934.
Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhus.
Reference 7: La Neige était Sale - Simenon - 1948.
Reference 9: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/ernst.html.
Reference 10: Borzoi – Igor Schwezoff – 1934.
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