Book: Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
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Buy the book "Doctor Zhivago" from the author Boris Pasternak
AND THE SOIL AND FATE BREATHE
Two years after the completion of the novel "Doctor Zhivago" Boris Pasternak wrote:
"I think, despite the familiarity of everything that continues to stand before our eyes and that we continue to hear and read, there is nothing more of this, it has already passed and taken place, a huge, unheard of period that cost unheard of forces has ended and passed.
An immensely large, empty and unoccupied place has been freed up for the new and not yet experienced, for what will be guessed by someone's brilliant independence and freshness, for what will inspire and prompt the life of new numbers and days.
Now the torment of artists will not be whether they are recognized and whether they will be recognized by the stagnant, belated political modernity or the government, but the inability to completely break away from the concepts that have become familiar, forget the imposed skills, break the continuity.
We must understand that everything has become the past, that the end of what we have seen and experienced was already, and not yet to be.
We must abandon the idea that everything will continue to be announced before it begins to exist, and allow the possibility of a time when everything will move and change again without prior announcement.
This difficulty exists for me as well.
"Zhivago" is a very important step, it is a great happiness and luck, which I did not even dream of.
But this is done, and together with the period that this book expresses most of all written by others, this book and its author go into the past, and before me, still alive, a space is released, the unused and purity of which must first be understood, and then filled with this understood."
The author of these lines did not have to fulfill the new task formulated by him during the two years that, by the will of God, he had to live in the world.
What is surprising is that his work, and especially "Doctor Zhivago", continue to remain the greatest artistic evidence in the new conditions, not only of the way of life that has gone into the past and the destruction of several generations of outstanding thinking people, but also of the right way of liberation from the consequences of this period of oppression and hatred.
The extreme manifestations of unrestricted freedom in our time are somewhat reminiscent of the pre war years of the beginning of the century, described in the first chapters of Doctor Zhivago, but at the same time we are completely deprived of the moral and material basis that then nourished and restrained them.
The huge wealth accumulated in Russia by that time was squandered, looted and thrown to the wind.
The realm of historical necessity and continuity has been destroyed.
Spiritual conquests have always been acquired at the price of tragedies and victims that are inaccessible to a reasonable assessment.
The beginning of the history of Christianity in this sense suggests comparison with the events of the twentieth century.
The World War, pharisaically unleashed by the states of Europe, ostensibly in defense of small nationalities, was the beginning of the destruction that put humanity before the prospect of universal destruction.
During these years, few people managed to remain true to the life affirming provisions of their youth in their free and natural development.
Such is the creatively gifted Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, who, by virtue of his talent, knows that "the only thing in our power is to be able not to distort the voice of life that sounds in us."
He cannot give up this and, without giving up professional medical, scientific and literary work, nevertheless, he gradually loses the possibility of productive, independent activity.
His friends and peers adapt, change and are proud that they managed to maintain their external intelligence and resist.
And he gradually descends, suffers, reproaching himself for lack of will, gets sick and dies early.
For others, he is a wasted and socially superfluous person.
"You didnot turn out well," says the janitor Markel about him.
I studied, studied, and my work went to waste."
He, without deceiving his soul and without losing the clarity of perception, sees the terrible price of the spiritual perversion that his enslaved contemporaries pay.
It is in this sense that the phrase should be understood: "Dear friends, how hopelessly ordinary you are and the circle that you represent, and the brilliance and art of your favorite names and authorities.
The only living and bright thing about you is that you lived at the same time with me and knew me."
This precise statement of the difference between a creatively free artist and a person who idealizes his captivity caused many people to be offended at the time and largely caused the thirty year ban imposed on the printing of the novel at home.
But at the same time, a whole generation of future dissidents read Doctor Zhivago in banned lists and foreign publications, were brought up on it and found life support in it.
In" Doctor Zhivago", the pictorial (plastic) and musical (compositional) beginnings are strongest.
Even in philosophical topics that Pasternak wants to express with sufficient concreteness, he does not reach the unambiguity of journalistic or preachy determinism.
Its purpose is to allow the reader to see and think through the pictures of the transformed reality for himself.
In this way, he complements the probabilistic interpretation of the course of history given by Leo Tolstoy with observations on nature, arguing that the existence of humanity has not yet lost its living possibilities, that, to our joy, it has remained as unpredictable and unexpected as the life of the forest.
Pasternak writes that "history is what is called the course of history", Yuri Andreevich saw history as a kind of "vegetable kingdom":
"In winter, under the snow, the bare twigs of the deciduous forest are thin and pathetic, like the hairs on an old man's wart.
In the spring, in a few days, the forest is transformed, rises to the clouds, you can get lost and hide in its leafy wilds.
This transformation is achieved by a movement that is faster than the movements of animals, because an animal does not grow as fast as a plant, and which can never be spied on.
The forest does not move, we cannot cover it, lie in wait for a change of place.
We always find him motionless.
And in the same immobility we find the ever growing, ever changing, untraceable in its transformations, the life of society, history.
Tolstoy did not bring his thought to the end when he denied the role of the instigators behind Napoleon, the rulers, the generals.
He was thinking exactly the same thing, but he did not finish it with all clarity.
No one makes history, you canot see it, just like you canot see how the grass grows."
The Russian Revolution seemed to Pasternak to be the main event of the century, an experimental test of the social utopias of the past.
He was interested in its moral foundations – the response of life to the imposed restrictions, rebellion as a reaction to the trampled beauty and dignity of man.
At first, it seemed to him a retribution for the perversion of the ability to love, admiring God's plan, fruitfully and independently participate in it.
At the same time, Pasternak from the very beginning strongly condemned the political pharisaism, violence and hatred that had replaced public hopes.
Lyrically, these ideas are manifested in the relations of Yuri Zhivago, Larisa Antipova and Pavel Antipov Strelnikov.
Yuri Andreevich obeys love as the highest principle, for him it is the desire to make a person happy, without imposing anything on him, paying the price of his own losses and deprivations, inevitable and conditioned by life.
Understanding his capabilities in front of her face puts a limit to his activity.
His apparent lack of will is the result of a sober assessment of the artist, a witness, a researcher and, finally, a doctor who must correctly diagnose and, if possible, cure, that is, help life cope with the disease.
His creative will talent, as a "child's model of the universe, laid down from an early age" in the heart, makes him incapable of violent manifestations, which, regardless of the goal, lead to perversion and death.
Subordination to the will of life circumstances explains the countless hardships that fell to his lot, the loss of his home, family, Lara.
Although Komarovsky is to blame not only for the crippled fate of Larisa, but also for his own ruin and orphanhood, Zhivago immediately loses the ability to defend the woman he loves, as soon as she voluntarily takes the side of an alien subordinate force.
"Personal interest encourages him to be proud and strive for the truth.
This advantageous and happiest position in life can be a tragedy, this is secondary, " Pasternak wrote, describing the properties of talent.
The only strong willed act of Yuri Andreevich, his risky escape from the partisan camp, escape to Lara, release from captivity, is possible thanks to a favorable combination of circumstances.
Life and nature patronize them and build their love.
"They loved each other because it wanted all around the earth beneath them, the sky above their heads, the clouds, trees...
Never, never, even in moments of the endowment, forgetful of happiness never left their highest and thrilling one stop General modeling world, a sense of atesunate themselves to the whole picture, a sense of belonging to the beauty of the spectacle to the whole universe."..
Pasternak dreamed of great prose throughout his life, but the attempts he made earlier, dragging on for years, remained unfinished.
Excerpts published in newspapers and magazines of the 1930s, passed vali paintings and everyday sketches of the pre revolutionary years of Russia.
But the author was tormented and stopped by the lack of "unity in understanding things"in his work.
This understanding came at the end of the war, when there was a distinct sense of the presence of God in the historical existence of Russia.
It came when the people, not broken by years of terror, found the strength to resist the evil of the fascist plague and at the cost of huge losses, incomparable even with the German ones, to win the Patriotic War.
You meant everything in my life.
Then came the war, the devastation, And for a long time there was not a word about You, not a spirit.
And after many many years, Your voice again alarmed me.
All night I read Your testament And as if from a faint I came to life.
I want to go to people, to the crowd, To their morning animation.
I'm ready to smash everything into splinters and bring everyone to their knees...
During the most severe oppression, Pasternak was sure that changes for the better would certainly begin with the spiritual awakening of society.
"If it pleases God, and I am not mistaken –" he wrote in the summer of 1944, " there will soon be a bright life in Russia, an exciting new century, and even earlier, before the onset of this prosperity in private life and everyday life, an amazingly huge art, as under Tolstoy and Gogol.
The premonition of this obscures everything else for me: the unhappiness and squalor of my personal life and my family, the face of the current reality, houses and streets, the disappointing opposite of the general tone of the press and politics, etc., etc.
By this presentiment I am connected with this future, I do not notice adversity and old age behind it, and for some time I have been serving it with every thought, every deed and movement."
The hopes for the liberalization of society awakened after the victory in the war strengthened Pasternak in his plan and gave him the strength to start working, which he considered his lifelong duty.
Despite the fact that these trends were soon put to an end, the intention to write a novel became an internal necessity.
"Doctor Zhivago" was launched in December 1945, the last changes to its text were made in December 1955.
The consciousness of the inevitability of the way of the Cross as a pledge of immortality is expressed in the poem "Hamlet", which opens the notebook of Yuri Zhivago:
The hum died away.
I went to the stage.
Leaning against the door frame, I catch in the distant echo of What will happen in my lifetime.
The twilight of the night is pointed at me with a thousand binoculars on the axis.
If only it is possible, Abba Father, take this Cup past.
The original plan of the novel was already completely formed from the very beginning, and Pasternak expected to write it quickly.
"Actually, this is my first real work.
In it, I want to give a historical image of Russia over the last forty five years, and at the same time, with all aspects of its plot, heavy, sad and elaborated in detail, like, ideally, Dickens or Dostoevsky – this thing will be an expression of my views on art, on the Gospel, on human life in history and much more...
The atmosphere of the thing is my Christianity, in its breadth a little different from the Quaker and Tolstoy, coming from other sides of the Gospel in addition to the moral ones," Pasternak wrote in October 1946.
"There will be no Death" is the first title of the novel in a pencil manuscript from 1946.
Here is an epigraph from the Revelation of John the Theologian: "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death; neither weeping, nor crying, nor sickness will be no more, for the former has gone."
The interpretation of these words is given in the novel in the scene at the bedside of the dying Anna Ivanovna Gromeko.
The immortality of the soul for the Zhivago is a consequence of active love for one's neighbor: "A person in other people is the soul of a person."
Drawing the time of his youth and the youth of those "boys and girls" who made up the glory of the Russian religious and philosophical renaissance, Pasternak defined its spiritual atmosphere as a mixture of the ideas of Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Tolstoy, socialism and modern poetry, which, quite getting along together, formed "a new, unusually fresh phase of Christianity".
The hopes of this generation were swept away by a historical storm, which was replaced by a new paganism of "smallpox dug Caligulas" (portrait of Stalin), who did not suspect "how incompetent every enslaver is".
The simplicity and truth of the appearance of Christ are contrasted with the pomposity of the Stalinist vampire style.
The author draws how to enter the world of "marble and gold tastelessness" (this is not about Ancient Rome, but about our modernity!)
Christ enters, "light and dressed in radiance, ""deliberately provincial, Galilean," and the world begins anew: "The peoples and the gods have stopped, and man has begun, a carpenter man, a plowman man, a shepherd man in a flock of sheep at sunset, a man who does not sound a bit proud, a man who is gratefully carried to all the lullabies of mothers and to all the picture galleries of the world."
The poems of Yuri Zhivago make up the final chapter of the novel.
Creating them on behalf of his hero, Pasternak found a new freedom and depth of lyrical self expression.
They are freed from the biographical narrowness and the forced metaphoricity inherent in Pasternak's early poetry, thereby becoming a reflection of the generalized experience of the generation.
Pasternak wrote that Yuri Zhivago "will have to represent something between me, Blok, Yesenin and Mayakovsky."
This made it possible to significantly expand the range of topics that primarily relate to the poems of the gospel cycle, written from the point of view of a direct witness to the events of Sacred History.
The novel "Doctor Zhivago" is devoid of any didactic tendencies, which helped him find a grateful response in the souls of people, which his author hoped for when he wrote: "The difference between modern Soviet literature and all the previous ones seems to me most of all that it is established on solid grounds, regardless of whether it is read or not read.
This is a proud, self contained and self sufficient phenomenon that shares with other state institutions their inviolability and infallibility.
But real art, in my understanding, is far from such claims.
Where he can command and prescribe, when there are more weaknesses and sins on him than virtues.
It timidly wants to be the reader's dream, the object of the reader's thirst, and needs his responsive imagination not as a friendly condescension, but as a component element, without which the artist's construction cannot do, as a ray needs a reflecting surface or a refractive medium to play and light up."
The author's hopes were justified.
Pasternak called his novel about Doctor Zhivago pictures of half a century of everyday life.
After the second half of the century and at the turn of the new one, it continues to excite readers and find a lively response in their souls.
EVGENY PASTERNAK
THE FIRST BOOK
PART ONE
FIVE HOUR FAST
1
They went on and on and sang "Eternal Memory", and when they stopped, it seemed that the legs, horses, and wind blows continued to sing it along the well worn path.
Passers by missed the procession, counted wreaths, crossed themselves.
Curious people entered the procession, asked:
"Who is being buried?" they were answered: "Zhivago".
"That's it.
Then it's clear. "
- " Yes, not his.
Her."
- "It doesnot matter.
The kingdom of heaven.
Funerals are rich."
The last minutes flashed by, few, irrevocable.
"The Lord's earth and its fulfillment, the universe and all who live on it."
The priest threw a handful of earth on Maria Nikolaevna with a baptizing movement.
They sang "With the spirits of the Righteous".
A terrible race has begun.
The coffin was closed, boarded up, and began to be lowered.
A rain of clods rattled off, which were hastily thrown into four shovels into the grave.
A mound grew on it.
A ten year old boy climbed it.
Only in the state of stupor and insensibility that usually comes at the end of a large funeral, it could seem that the boy wanted to say a word on his mother's grave.
He raised his head and looked from the dais at the autumn wastelands and the heads of the monastery with an absent gaze.
His snub nosed face contorted.
His neck stretched out.
If the cub had raised his head with such a movement, it would have been clear that he was about to howl.
Covering his face with his hands, the boy sobbed.
A cloud flying towards him began to lash his hands and face with wet lashes of a cold downpour.
A man in black, with the rucksacks on his tight fitting sleeves, walked to the grave.
It was the brother of the deceased and the uncle of the crying boy, the priest Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, who was cut off at his own request.
He approached the boy and took him away from the cemetery.
2
They spent the night in one of the monastery rooms, which they had given to their uncle through an old acquaintance.
It was the eve of the Intercession.
The next day, he and his uncle had to go far to the south, to one of the provincial cities of the Volga region, where Father Nikolai worked in a publishing house that produced a progressive newspaper of the region.
The train tickets were bought, the things were tied up and stood in the cell.
From the station next door, the wind brought the tearful whistling of steam locomotives maneuvering in the distance.
By the evening it got very cold.
Two windows at ground level looked out on a corner of a nondescript vegetable garden planted with yellow acacia bushes, on the frozen puddles of the roadway and at the end of the cemetery where Maria Nikolaevna was buried that afternoon.
The vegetable garden was empty, except for a few moire ridges of cabbage, blue from the cold.
When the wind came, the bushes of the decayed acacia rushed like demons, and lay down on the road.
At night, Yura was woken up by a knock on the window.
The dark cell was supernaturally illuminated by a white fluttering light.
Yura, in only his shirt, ran to the window and pressed his face against the cold glass.
There was no road, no cemetery, no vegetable garden outside the window.
A blizzard was raging in the yard, the air was smoking with snow.
One might have thought that the storm had noticed Yura and, realizing how terrible she was, was enjoying the impression made on him.
She whistled and howled and tried to attract Yurino's attention in every way.
From the sky, turn after turn, endless coils of white cloth fell to the ground, wrapping it in funeral shrouds.
The blizzard was the only one in the world, nothing could compete with it.
The first movement of Yura, when he got down from the windowsill, was the desire to get dressed and run outside to do something.
Sometimes he was afraid that the monastery cabbage would be brought in and it would not be dug up, that his mother would be swept up in the field and she would be powerless to resist what would go even deeper and further into the ground from him.
The matter ended in tears again.
My uncle woke up, talked to him about Christ and comforted him, and then yawned, went to the window and thought.
They started getting dressed.
It was getting light.
3
While his mother was alive, Yura did not know that his father had long abandoned them, traveled to different cities of Siberia and abroad, caroused and debauched, and that he had long ago squandered and scattered their million dollar fortune to the wind.
Yura was always told that he was either in St. Petersburg, or at some fair, most often on Irbitskaya.
And then my mother, who was always ill, developed consumption.
She began to go to the south of France and to Northern Italy for treatment, where Yura accompanied her twice.
So, in a mess and among constant riddles, Yura's childhood life passed, often in the hands of strangers, who changed all the time.
He was used to these changes, and in an environment of eternal awkwardness, the absence of his father did not surprise him.
As a little boy, he found a time when many self important things were called by the name that he bore.
Was there a Zhivago manufactory, a Zhivago bank, at home?
Zhivago, a method of tying and pinning a tie with a Zhivago pin, even some kind of sweet pie of a round shape, like a rum woman, called Zhivago, and at one time in Moscow you could shout to the cabman "to Zhivago!", just like " to hell in the middle of nowhere!", and he would take you on a sledge to the far off kingdom, to the far off state.
A quiet park surrounded you.
Crows landed on the hanging branches of fir trees, showering frost from them.
Their cawing could be heard, rolling like the crackling of a tree branch.
Purebred dogs were running across the road from new buildings behind the clearing.
Lights were being lit there.
Evening was falling.
Suddenly, it all flew apart.
They have become impoverished.
4
In the summer of nineteen hundred and three, in a tarantass, Yura and his uncle drove through the fields to Duplyanka, the estate of a silk spinning manufacturer and a great patron of the arts Kologrivov, to the teacher and popularizer of useful knowledge Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboynikov.
It was Kazan, the height of the harvest.
Because of the lunch time or on the occasion of a holiday, there was not a soul in the fields.
The sun beat down on the half compressed strips, like the half shaved nape of a prisoner's head.
Birds were circling over the fields.
With the ears bent, the wheat stretched out in a string amid the perfect calmness, or stood in the sacs far from the road, where, when looking for a long time, it took the form of moving figures, as if surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes.
"And these," Nikolai Nikolaevich asked Pavel, a laborer and a watchman from the book publishing house, who was sitting sideways on the box, stooping and crossing his legs, as a sign that he was not a real coachman and did not drive by vocation, "and what are these, landowners 'or peasants'?
"Enti gentlemen," Pavel answered and lit a cigarette – "but efti," after taking a drag on the fire and taking a drag, after a long pause he poked the end of the whip in the other direction, " efti yours.
Are you asleep?
every now and then he shouted at the horses, whose tails and rumps he kept squinting at, like an engineer at a pressure gauge.
But the horses were driven like all horses in the world, that is, the root ran with the innate directness of an unsophisticated nature, and the driver seemed to the incomprehensible a notorious idler who only knew that, arching like a swan, she danced in a squat to the strumming of bells, which she herself raised with her jumps.
Nikolai Nikolaevich was taking the proofreading of his book on the land issue to Voskoboynikov, which, due to increased censorship, under pressure, the publishing house asked for a review.
"The people in the district are playing pranks," Nikolai Nikolaevich was saying.
– In the Pankovsky parish, a merchant was stabbed to death, a horse factory was burned at the zemsky.
What do you think about it?
What do they say in your village?
But it turned out that Pavel looked at things even more gloomily than even the censor, who tempered the agrarian passions of Voskoboynikov.
– What are they saying?
The people were dismissed.
Pampering, they say.
Is it possible with our brother?
Let the peasant have his way, because they will pass each other around, the true Lord.
Are you asleep?
This was the second trip of the uncle and nephew to the Hollow.
Yura thought that he had memorized the road, and every time the fields spread out and their thin border covered the forests in front and behind, it seemed to Yura that he would recognize the place from which the road should turn to the right, and from the turn the ten verst Kologrivovskaya panorama with the river shining in the distance and the railway running behind it would appear and disappear in a minute.
But he was still deceived.
Fields were replaced by fields.
They were again and again covered by forests.
The change of these expanses set up a wide mood.
I wanted to dream and think about the future.
None of the books that later glorified Nikolai Nikolaevich had yet been written.
But his thoughts were already determined.
He didnot know how close his time was.
Soon, among the representatives of the literature of that time, university professors and philosophers of the revolution, this man was supposed to appear, who thought on all their topics and who, except for terminology, had nothing in common with them.
All of them together adhered to some dogma and were content with words and appearances, and Father Nikolai was a priest who had passed Tolstoyism and the revolution and was always going further.
He longed for a thought, inspired by the material, which would draw an unfeignedly discernible path in its movement and change something in the world for the better, and which even a child and an ignoramus would be noticeable, like a flash of lightning or a trace of rolling thunder.
He was hungry for something new.
Yura had a good time with her uncle.
He looked like his mother.
Like her, he was a free man, devoid of prejudice against anything unusual.
Like her, he had a noble sense of equality with everything living.
He, like her, understood everything at a glance and was able to express thoughts in the form in which they come to mind at the first minute, as long as they are alive and do not become meaningless.
Yura was glad that his uncle took him to the Hollow.
It was very beautiful there, and the picturesqueness of the place also reminded me of my mother, who loved nature and often took Yura for walks with her.
Besides, Yura was pleased that he would again meet Nika Dudorov, a high school student who lived with Voskoboynikov, who probably despised him because he was two years older than him, and who, when greeting him, pulled his hand down with force and bent his head so low that his hair fell over his forehead, covering his face half.
5
"The vital nerve of the problem of pauperism," Nikolai Nikolaevich read from the corrected manuscript.
"I think it's better to say – with a being," Ivan Ivanovich said and made the required correction in the proofreading.
They were studying in the semi darkness of the glass terrace.
The eye could make out watering cans and gardening tools lying in a mess.
A raincoat was draped over the back of a broken chair.
In the corner there were waders with dried mud and the tops hanging to the floor.
"Meanwhile, the statistics of deaths and births show," Nikolai Nikolaevich dictated.
– It is necessary to insert: for the reporting year, - Ivan Ivanovich said and wrote it down.
The terrace was slightly skewed.
There were pieces of granite on the pages of the brochure so that they would not fly apart.
When they had finished, Nikolai Nikolaevich hurried home.
- A thunderstorm is coming.
We need to get ready.
– Donot think about it.
I wonot let you.
We'll have tea now.
– I have to go to the city by the evening.
- Nothing will help.
I donot want to hear it.
From the front garden there was a smell of samovar burning, which drowned out the smell of tobacco and heliotrope.
Kaymak, berries and cheesecakes were brought there from the wing.
Suddenly, information came that Pavel went swimming and took the horses to the river to bathe.
Nikolai Nikolaevich had to submit.
"Let's go to the cliff, we'll sit on the bench while they set the table for tea," Ivan Ivanovich suggested.
Ivan Ivanovich, as a friend, occupied two rooms in the manager's wing of the rich man Kologrivov.
This house with an adjoining front garden was located in a black, neglected part of the park with an old semicircular entrance alley.
The alley is densely overgrown with grass.
There was no traffic on it now, and only earth and construction debris were carried into the ravine, which served as a place of dry landfills.
A man of advanced views and a millionaire who sympathized with the revolution, Kologrivov himself and his wife were currently abroad.
Only his daughters Nadia and Lipa lived on the estate with a teacher and a small staff of servants.
The manager's garden was fenced off from the entire park with its ponds, lawns and manor house by a thick hedge of black viburnum.
Ivan Ivanovich and Nikolai Nikolaevich walked around this thicket from the outside, and as they walked, sparrows flew out in equal flocks at equal intervals in front of them, with which the viburnum swarmed.
This filled it with a steady noise, as if water was flowing through a pipe along the fence in front of Ivan Ivanovich and Nikolai Nikolaevich.
They passed a greenhouse, a gardener's apartment, and stone ruins of unknown purpose.
They started talking about new young forces in science and literature.
"There are people with talent," Nikolai Nikolaevich said, " but now different circles and associations are very popular.
Every herd is a refuge of non giftedness, whether it is loyalty to Solovyov, or Kant, or Marx.
Only loners seek the truth and break with everyone who does not love it enough.
Is there anything in the world that deserves loyalty?
There are very few such things.
I think we should be faithful to immortality, this other name of life, a little strengthened.
We must remain faithful to immortality, we must be faithful to Christ!
Ah, you're wincing, you wretch.
Again, you didnot understand anything.
"Yeah," mumbled Ivan Ivanovich, a thin, blond creeper with a malicious beard that made him look like an American from the time of Lincoln (he constantly grabbed it in a handful and caught its tip with his lips).
You understand yourself – I look at these things completely differently.
Oh, by the way.
Tell us how you were cut off.
I've been meaning to ask for a long time.
Have you been anathematized?
Eh?
– Why digress to the side?
Although, however, well.
Anathema?
No, they are not cursing now.
There were troubles, there are consequences.
For example, it is impossible to enter the civil service for a long time.
They are not allowed to enter the capitals.
But this is nonsense.
Let's return to the subject of the conversation.
I said we must be faithful to Christ.
I'll explain now.
You do not understand that you can be an atheist, you can not know whether there is a God and what he is for, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature, but in history, and that in the current understanding it is founded by Christ, that the Gospel is its justification.
And what is history?
This is the establishment of age old works on the consistent solution of death and its future overcoming.
To do this, they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, and they write symphonies for this.
It is impossible to move forward in this direction without some lifting.
These discoveries require spiritual equipment.
The data for it is contained in the Gospel.
Here they are.
This is, first, love for one's neighbor, this highest kind of living energy that overflows the human heart and requires an outlet and waste, and then these are the main components of modern man, without which he is unthinkable, namely the idea of a free personality and the idea of life as a sacrifice.
Keep in mind that this is still extremely new.
The ancients had no history in this sense.
There was the sanguine swinishness of the cruel, smallpox riddled Caligulas, who did not suspect how incompetent every enslaver is.
There was a boastful dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns.
Centuries and generations only after Christ breathed freely.
Only after him did life begin in posterity, and a person dies not on the street under a fence, but in his own history, in the midst of works dedicated to overcoming death, he himself dies dedicated to this topic.
Ugh, I'm already sweating, as they say.
And at least he has a stake on his head!
- Metaphysics, my dear.
The doctors forbade me to do this, my stomach does not cook this.
- Well, God be with you.
Let's drop it.
Lucky guy!
The view from you is what – you will not get enough of it!
And he lives and does not feel.
It was painful to look at the river.
It shone in the sun, bending and bending like a sheet of iron.
Suddenly it began to crease.
A heavy ferry with horses, carts, women and men sailed from this shore to that.
"Just think, it's only the sixth hour," said Ivan Ivanovich.
- You see, the ambulance from Syzran.
It passes here in five minutes and a half.
In the distance, a clean yellow blue train rolled across the plain from right to left, greatly reduced by the distance.
Suddenly they noticed that he had stopped.
White balls of steam rose above the locomotive.
A little later, his alarm whistles came.
"That's strange," said Voskoboynikov.
– Something's wrong.
There's no reason for him to stop there in the swamp.
Something has happened.
Let's go have tea.
6
Nicky was not in the garden or in the house.
Yura guessed that he was hiding from them because he was bored with them and Yura was not a match for him.
My uncle and Ivan Ivanovich went to study on the terrace, leaving Yura to loiter around the house without a purpose.
There was an amazing charm here!
Every minute there was a clear three ton whistle of the willow, with intervals of waiting for the wet, as if extracted from a pipe, to completely permeate the neighborhood.
A standing, lost smell of flowers in the air.
rigvozhden was motionless in the heat to the flower beds.
How it reminded me of Antibes and Bordighera!
Yura kept turning right and left every minute.
The ghost of my mother's voice hung over the lawns like an auditory hallucination, it sounded like a Yura in the melodic turns of birds and the buzzing of bees.
Yura shuddered, he kept imagining that his mother was talking to him and calling him somewhere.
He went to the ravine and began to descend.
He descended from the sparse and clean forest that covered the top of the ravine, into the alder that lined its bottom.
There was damp darkness, windbreak and carrion, there were few flowers and the jointed stems of horsetail looked like wands and staffs with Egyptian ornaments, as in his illustrated Holy Scripture.
Yura was getting sadder and sadder.
He wanted to cry.
He fell to his knees and burst into tears.
"To the angel of God, my holy guardian," Yura prayed, " confirm my mind in the true path and tell my mother that I am happy here, so that she does not worry.
If there is an afterlife, Lord, make Mummy in paradise, where the faces of saints and righteous women shine like luminaries.
Mama was so good, it canot be that she was a sinner, have mercy on her, Lord, make her not suffer.
Mummy!
– in heart rending anguish, he called her from the sky, like a newly venerated saint, and suddenly he could not stand it, fell to the ground and lost consciousness.
He did not lie unconscious for long.
When he woke up, he heard his uncle calling him from above.
He answered and began to rise.
Suddenly he remembered that he had not prayed for his missing father, as Maria Nikolaevna had taught him.
But he felt so good after fainting that he did not want to part with this feeling of lightness and was afraid of losing it.
And he thought that it would be all right if he prayed for his father some other time.
- It can wait.
He'll be patient – " he seemed to think.
Yura didnot remember him at all.
7
On the train, in a second class compartment, a second class high school student Misha Gordon, an eleven year old boy with a thoughtful face and large black eyes, was traveling with his father, a sworn lawyer Gordon from Orenburg.
The father moved to Moscow for service, the boy was transferred to the Moscow gymnasium.
My mother and sisters had been there for a long time, busy with the troubles of arranging an apartment.
The boy and his father were on the train for the third day.
Russia, fields and steppes, cities and villages, flew past in clouds of hot dust, bleached by the sun like lime.
Carts stretched along the roads, turning heavily from the road to the crossings, and from the madly rushing train it seemed that the carts were not moving, and the horses were raising and lowering their legs in one place.
At large stops, passengers ran like mad to the buffet, and the setting sun from behind the trees of the station garden illuminated their feet and shone under the wheels of the cars.
All the movements in the world individually were calculated sober, and in total they were unaccountably drunk by the general flow of life that united them.
People worked and fussed, driven by the mechanism of their own worries.
But the mechanisms would not work if their main regulator was not a sense of supreme and fundamental carelessness.
This insouciance was given by a sense of the coherence of human existences, confidence in their transition from one to another, a sense of happiness that everything that happens is happening not only on the earth, in which the dead are buried, but also in something else, in what some call the kingdom of God, and others history, and still others somehow.
The boy was a bitter and difficult exception to this rule.
His final spring remained a sense of preoccupation, and a sense of carelessness did not ease or ennoble him.
He knew this inherited trait behind him and caught it with suspicious alertness
