Just as it promised

The end of last week we had perfect August days.
August

Just as it promised

The early morning sun entered between the curtains

And a slanting, saffron streak

Reached the sofa.

The sun's hot ochre 

Covered the near-by woods, the village houses,

..................

Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

sun

This feels like the corner to laze with the early morning sun whilst reading...

Hamlet

Hamlet

The noise is stilled. I come out on the stage.

Leaning against the door-post

I try to guess from the distant echo

What is to happen in my lifetime.

The darkness of night is aimed at me

Along the sights of a thousand opera-glasses.

Abba. Father, if it be possible,

Let this cup pass from me.

I love your stubborn purpose,

I consent to play my part,

But now a different drama is being acted;

For this once let me be.

Yet the order of the acts is planned

And the end of the way inescapable.

I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.

To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field*.

Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago

*The last line is a Russian proverb.

If one can have a favourite Good Friday passage this would be it.

Abba. Father, if it be possible,

Let this cup pass from me.

The forest in spring

And now to spring in Russia.

"He reflected again that he thought of history, of what is called the course of history, not in the accepted way, but in the form of images taken from the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under the snow, the deciduous wood are thin and poor... But in only a few days in spring the forest is transformed, it reaches the clouds and you can hide or lose yourself in a leafy maze. During this transformation the forest moves with a speed greater than that of animals, for animals do not grow as fast as plants; yet this movement can be observed. The forest does not change its place, cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of moving. However much we look at it we see it as motionless. And such is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing life of society, of history moving as invisibly in its incessant transformation as the forest in spring." Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

forest


This passage is almost poetry in the way I don't quite understand it but feel it.

Winter Night

Winter Night

Snow swept over the earth,

Swept it from end to end.

The candle on the table burned.

Like swarms of summer midges

Drawn to the flame 

The snowflakes

Flocked to the window.

The driven snow drew circles and arrows

On the window pane.

The candle on the table burned,

The candle burned.

window

.....

And everything was lost 

In the white-haired, white, snowy darkness.

The candle on the table burned,

The candle burned.

.....

snow

The snow swept all through February,

And now and again

The candle on the table burned,

The candle burned.

Boris Pasternak

Dr. Zhivago

How did you spend your snowy Sunday?

Gingery Spices

After the glorious warm weather autumn has arrived.....

'The autumn smelled of these brown bitter leaves and of many other gingery spices. Greedily he breathed in the mixed peppery smell of chilled apples, bitter dry twigs, sweetish damp earth and that of the blue September mist which smoked like the fumes of a recently extinguished fire.' Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

What is the scent of autumn for you?

autumn

The colour of happiness

One of our memories of Granny is the colour lilac. It suited her eyes, her grey hair, her whole being.

.... 'Her [Galuzina] favourite colour was a violet-mauve, the colour of church vestments on certain solemn days, the colour of lilac in bud, the colour of her best velvet dress and of her set of crystal goblets. It was the colour of happiness and of her memories, and Russia, too, in her virginity before the revolution, seemed to her to her to have been the colour of lilac.' Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

image - so sorry the credit was lost when blogger had it's upset in May.

Do you have a colour associated to a precious person in your life?

In these hours

Darling , Dearest Granny died today.

'In these hours when the silence, unfilled by any ceremony, was made almost tangibly oppressive by a sense of absence, only the flowers took the place of the singing and psalms.
They did more than blossom and smell sweet. In unison, like a choir, ... they unstintingly poured out their fragrance and, imparting something of their scented strength in everyone, seemed to be accomplishing a ritual.
The kingdom of plants can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbour of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of transformation and enigmas of life which so torment us are concentrated on the green of the earth, among the trees in graveyards and the flowering shoots springing from their beds.' Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

31st July 1918 - 5th May 2011

Coming into Blossom

The blossom trees are truly blossoming... 'There was a smell of all the flowers at once, as if the earth had been unconscious all day long and were now waking. And from the Countess's centuries-old garden, so littered with fallen branches that it was impenetrable, the dusty aromatic smell of old lime trees coming into blossom drifted in a huge wave as tall as a house.' Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

blossom

Do you have any pretty views of blossom near you?

First Signs of Spring

It's coming... We can feel it in our bones...

'First signs of spring. Thaw. The sleepy air smells of buttered pancakes and vodka as at shrovetide. A sleepy, oily sun blinking in the forest, sleepy pines blinking their needles like eyelashes, oily puddles shining at noon. The countryside yawns, stretches turns over and goes back to sleep.' Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

springtime

Hope you enjoy the first signs of spring this weekend.

Dr Zhivago: A Love Story

So I've finished Dr. Zhivago. As you may have gathered from reading my comments on your posts I loved many parts of it. The description of nature, I love the faith and as Rachel put it so much more eloquently than me the 'soul'. I've been confused by the issue of 'translation' but have been reminded of the lesson that 'the grass isn't always greener on the other side.'

What I've found hard, and this was the same for me in another great Russian novel Anna Karenina, is the great love. But they're already married I keep thinking and feeling. In this case it's not as if his marriage wasn't happy. A part of me kept thinking 'We're lucky to find one love in life and here's Yury and Lara each have had two loves in their life!'

This passage shows he has a soul and a conscience - but what good are they if we don't change our actions?

"Yury was deceiving Tonya and what he concealed from her was becoming increasingly grave and ilicit. This was something unheard-of between them.
He worshipped Tonya. Her peace of mind meant more to him than anything in the world....
At home he felt like a criminal.....
Had he been unfaithful to her because he preferred another woman? No, he had made no comparison, no choice. He did not believe in 'free love' or in the 'right' to be carried away by his senses. To think or speak in such terms seemed to him degrading...Now he was crushed by the weight of his guilty conscience.
'What next?' he sometimes asked himself, and hoped wretchedly for some impossible, unexpected circumstance to solve his problem for him."

Part of me wonders what would have happenend if they hadn't been in the midst of civil unrest with families being mixed up, people just disappearing. How convenient for their love.

And then we read this letter from Tonya to Yury when she is about to leave for Paris.

"The whole trouble is that I love you and that you don't love me. I keep trying to discover the meaning of this judgement on me, to understand it, to see the reason for it. I look into into myself, I go over our whole life together and everything I know about myself, and I can't find the beginning , and I can't remember what it is I did and how I brought this misfortune on myself...
As for me, I love you. If only you knew how much I love you. I love all that is unusual in you, the inconvenient and as well as the covenient, and all the ordinary things which, in you, are made precious to me by being combined in an extraordinary way;
...God keep you, I must stop. They have come for the letter... O Yura Yura, my darling, my husband, my children's father, what is happening to us? Do you realise that we'll never, never see each other again?"

And my heart and soul ache for her - and I think/feel again 'Yury how can you do this?' And I think about us, the readers, are we condoning such behaviour by reading and re reading this story of deception, hurt and betrayal.

And then we get to the Conclusion and Epilogue (which to begin with I didn't understand and wondered why it was there but then grew to love it and perhaps became one of my favourite parts of the book.) Reading this passage I realised why everyone refers to Dr. Zhivago as 'the greatest love story.'

"Oh, what a love it was, how free, how new, like nothing else on earth!...
It was not out of necessity that they loved each other, 'enslaved by passion', as lovers are described. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the landscapes drawn up for them to see on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, were even more pleased with their love than they were themselves."

I'm still not sure how I feel about this love story. What are your thoughts?

Inward Music

One of reasons I'm really enjoying reading Dr. Zhivago is the theme of life and faith that runs though it. I haven't read many Russian novels but, of those I have, these themes seem to run through each of them. The questions of life which characters think and talk about provokes me. I like being reminded of my faith when reading. They're not always the best passages to put on a blog - sometimes too long. But I'm going to have a try.

'... what has for centuries has raised man above beast is... an inward music: the irrestible power of unarmed truth... It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical teaching and commandments. But for me the most important thing is the fact that Christ speaks in parables taken from daily life, that he explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea which underlies this is that communities between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.'


'Lara was not religious. She did not believe in ritual. But sometimes, to enable her to bear her life, she needed the accompaniment of an inward music and she could not always compose it for herself. That music was God's word of life and it was to weep over it she went to church.'

@

Dr. Zhivago

I'm joining in with the group read at Nonsuch Books.

I've seen the film many times but this is my first time of reading Dr. Zhivago. As ever when it's this way round I'm trying to make sense of the book with film thoughts often clouding in. The first time this happened was on reading

'Her [Lara] dark hair was scattered...'

but no this is Lara Antipov

Suddenly reading

'he owned an enormous estate in the Urals, near Yuryatin;'

'Yuryatin' a word which ones hears so much in the film and to suddenly see the word leap off the page sends shiver through me.

My main thought is from having read JoAnn's post on translation I'm wondering if I should be carrying the new hardback version around. Especially as I love collecting passages I feel I'm so missing out. I'm now reading it thinking "I wonder how this was translated in the new version?" At least I have a great reason to re buy (especially as I don't like the front cover but that's a whole other story) and re read Dr. Zhivago.

As this is the beginning of Dr. Zhivago group read I thought I'd end this post with.

"All these people were there, together, in this one place. But some of them had never known each other, while others failed to recognise each other now. And there were things about them which were never to be known for certain, while others were only to await another opportunity in order to reveal themselves." Boris Pasternak Dr.Zhivago (Tr.Max Hayward & Manya Harari)

How is this passage in your translation?