Doctor Zhivago

Part Three

THE CHRISTMAS PARTY AT THE SVENTITSKYS’

1

Once in the winter Alexander Alexandrovich gave Anna Ivanovna an antique wardrobe. He had bought it by chance. The ebony wardrobe was of enormous proportions. It would not go through any doorway in one piece. It was delivered dismantled, brought into the house in sections, and they began thinking where to put it. It would not do in the downstairs rooms, where there was space enough, because its purpose was unsuitable, and it could not be put upstairs for lack of room. Part of the upper landing of the inside stairway was cleared for the wardrobe, by the door to the master bedroom.

The yard porter Markel came to put the wardrobe together. He brought along his six-year-old daughter Marinka. Marinka was given a stick of barley sugar. Marinka snuffed her nose and, licking the candy and her slobbery fingers, watched frowningly as her father worked.

For a while everything went smoothly. The wardrobe gradually grew before Anna Ivanovna’s eyes. Suddenly, when it only remained to attach the top, she decided to help Markel. She stood on the high bottom of the wardrobe and, tottering, bumped against the side, which was held together only by a mortise and tenon. The slipknot Markel had tied temporarily to hold the side came undone. Together with the boards that went crashing to the floor, Anna Ivanovna also fell on her back and hurt herself badly.

“Eh, dear mistress,” Markel murmured as he rushed to her, “why on earth did you go and do that, dear heart? Is the bone in one piece? Feel the bone. The bone’s the main thing, forget the soft part, the soft part’ll mend and, as they say, it’s only for ladies’ playzeer. Don’t you howl, you wicked thing,” he fell upon the weeping Marinka. “Wipe your snot and go to mama. Eh, dear mistress, couldn’t I have managed this whole clothing antimony without you? You probably think, at first glance I’m a regular yard porter, but if you reason right, our natural state is cabinetmaking, what we did was cabinetmaking. You wouldn’t believe how much of that furniture, them wardrobes and cupboards, went through my hands, in the varnishing sense, or, on the contrary, some such mahogany wood or walnut. Or, for instance, what matches, in the rich bride sense, went floating, forgive the expression, just went floating right past my nose. And the cause of it all—the drinking article, strong drink.”

With Markel’s help, Anna Ivanovna got to the armchair, which he rolled up to her, and sat down, groaning and rubbing the hurt place. Markel set about restoring what had been demolished. When the top was attached, he said: “Well, now it’s just the doors, and it’ll be fit for exhibition.”

Anna Ivanovna did not like the wardrobe. In appearance and size it resembled a catafalque or a royal tomb. It inspired a superstitious terror in her. She gave the wardrobe the nickname of “Askold’s grave.” By this name she meant Oleg’s steed,¹ a thing that brings death to its owner. Being a well-read woman in a disorderly way, Anna Ivanovna confused the related notions.

With this fall began Anna Ivanovna’s predisposition for lung diseases.

2

Anna Ivanovna spent the whole of November 1911 in bed. She had pneumonia.

Yura, Misha Gordon, and Tonya were to finish university and the Higher Women’s Courses in the spring. Yura would graduate as a doctor, Tonya as a lawyer, and Misha as a philologist in the philosophy section.

Everything in Yura’s soul was shifted and entangled, and everything was sharply original—views, habits, and predilections. He was exceedingly impressionable, the novelty of his perceptions not lending itself to description.

But greatly as he was drawn to art and history, Yura had no difficulty in choosing a career. He considered art unsuitable as a calling, in the same sense that innate gaiety or an inclination to melancholy could not be a profession. He was interested in physics and natural science, and held that in practical life one should be occupied with something generally useful. And so he chose medicine.

Four years back, during his first year, he had spent a whole semester in the university basement studying anatomy on corpses. He reached the cellar by a winding stair. Inside the anatomy theater disheveled students crowded in groups or singly. Some ground away, laying out bones and leafing through tattered, rot-eaten textbooks; others silently dissected in a corner; still others bantered, cracked jokes, and chased the rats that scurried in great numbers over the stone floor of the mortuary. In its darkness, the corpses of unknown people glowed like phosphorus, striking the eye with their nakedness: young suicides of unestablished identity; drowned women, well preserved and still intact. Alum injections made them look younger, lending them a deceptive roundness. The dead bodies were opened up, taken apart, and prepared, and the beauty of the human body remained true to itself in any section, however small, so that the amazement before some mermaid rudely thrown onto a zinc table did not go away when diverted from her to her amputated arm or cut-off hand. The basement smelled of formalin and carbolic acid, and the presence of mystery was felt in everything, beginning with the unknown fate of all these stretched-out bodies and ending with the mystery of life and death itself, which had settled here in the basement as if in its own home or at its headquarters.

The voice of this mystery, stifling everything else, pursued Yura, interfering with his dissecting. But many other things in life interfered with him in the same way. He was used to it, and the distracting interference did not disturb him.

Yura thought well and wrote very well. Still in his high school years he dreamed of prose, of a book of biographies, in which he could place, in the form of hidden explosive clusters, the most astounding things of all he had managed to see and ponder. But he was too young for such a book, and so he made up for it by writing verses, as a painter might draw sketches all his life for a great painting he had in mind.

Yura forgave these verses the sin of their coming to be for the sake of their energy and originality. These two qualities, energy and originality, Yura considered representative of reality in the arts, which were pointless, idle, and unnecessary in all other respects.

Yura realized how much he owed to his uncle for the general qualities of his character.

Nikolai Nikolaevich was living in Lausanne. In the books he published there in Russian and in translation, he developed his long-standing notion of history as a second universe, erected by mankind in response to the phenomenon of death with the aid of the phenomena of time and memory. The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.

Even more than on Yura, the circle of these notions had an effect on his friend. Under their influence, Misha Gordon chose philosophy as his specialty. In his department, he attended lectures on theology, and he even had thoughts of transferring later to the theological academy.

The uncle’s influence furthered Yura and liberated him, but it fettered Misha. Yura understood what role in Misha’s extreme enthusiasms was played by his origins. From cautious tactfulness, he did not try to talk Misha out of his strange projects. But he often wished to see an empirical Misha, much closer to life.

3

One evening at the end of November, Yura came home late from the university, very tired, having eaten nothing all day. He was told there had been a terrible alarm in the afternoon; Anna Ivanovna had had convulsions, several doctors had come, they had advised sending for a priest, but then the idea was dropped. Now it was better, she was conscious and asked them to send Yura to her without delay, as soon as he came home.

Yura obeyed and, without changing, went to the bedroom.

The room bore signs of the recent turmoil. With soundless movements, a nurse was rearranging something on the bedside table. Crumpled napkins and damp towels from compresses lay about. The water in the rinsing bowl was slightly pink from spat-up blood. In it lay glass ampoules with broken-off tips and waterlogged wads of cotton.

The sick woman was bathed in sweat and licked her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. Her face was noticeably pinched compared with the morning, when Yura had last seen her.

“Haven’t they made a wrong diagnosis?” he thought. “There are all the signs of galloping pneumonia. This looks like the crisis.” Having greeted Anna Ivanovna and said something encouragingly empty, as people always do in such cases, he sent the nurse away. Taking Anna Ivanovna’s wrist to count her pulse, he slipped his other hand under his jacket for the stethoscope. Anna Ivanovna moved her head to indicate that it was unnecessary. Yura realized that she needed something else from him. Gathering her strength, Anna Ivanovna began to speak:

“See, they wanted to confess me … Death is hanging over me … Any moment it may … You’re afraid to have a tooth pulled, it hurts, you prepare yourself … But here it’s not a tooth, it’s all, all of you, all your life … snap, and it’s gone, as if with pincers … And what is it? Nobody knows … And I’m anxious and frightened.”

Anna Ivanovna fell silent. Tears ran down her cheeks. Yura said nothing. After a moment Anna Ivanovna went on.

“You’re talented … And talent is … not like everybody else … You must know something … Tell me something … Reassure me.”

“Well, what can I say?” Yura said, fidgeted uneasily on the chair, got up, paced the room, and sat down again. “First, tomorrow you’ll get better—there are signs, I’ll stake my life on it. And then—death, consciousness, faith in resurrection … You want to know my opinion as a natural scientist? Maybe some other time? No? Right now? Well, you know best. Only it’s hard to do it like this, straight off.”

And he gave her a whole impromptu lecture, surprised himself at the way it came out of him.

“Resurrection. The crude form in which it is affirmed for the comfort of the weakest is foreign to me. And I’ve always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different way. Where will you find room for all these hordes gathered over thousands of years? The universe won’t suffice for them, and God, the good, and meaning will have to take themselves out of the world. They’ll be crushed in this greedy animal stampede.

“But all the time one and the same boundlessly identical life fills the universe and is renewed every hour in countless combinations and transformations. Here you have fears about whether you will resurrect, yet you already resurrected when you were born, and you didn’t notice it.

“Will it be painful for you, does tissue feel its own disintegration? That is, in other words, what will become of your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let’s look into it. To wish consciously to sleep means sure insomnia, the conscious attempt to feel the working of one’s own digestion means the sure upsetting of its nervous regulation. Consciousness is poison, a means of self-poisoning for the subject who applies it to himself. Consciousness is a light directed outwards, consciousness lights the way before us so that we don’t stumble. Consciousness is the lit headlights at the front of a moving locomotive. Turn their light inwards and there will be a catastrophe.

“And so, what will become of your consciousness? Yours. Yours. But what are you? There’s the whole hitch. Let’s sort it out. What do you remember about yourself, what part of your constitution have you been aware of? Your kidneys, liver, blood vessels? No, as far as you can remember, you’ve always found yourself in an external, active manifestation, in the work of your hands, in your family, in others. And now more attentively. Man in other people is man’s soul. That is what you are, that is what your conscience breathed, relished, was nourished by all your life. Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what then? You have been in others and you will remain in others. And what difference does it make to you that later it will be called memory? It will be you, having entered into the composition of the future.

“Finally, one last thing. There’s nothing to worry about. There is no death. Death is not in our line. But you just said ‘talent,’ and that’s another thing, that is ours, that is open to us. And talent, in the highest, broadest sense, is the gift of life.

“There shall be no more death, says John the Theologian,² and just listen to the simplicity of his argumentation. There shall be no more death, because the former things have passed. It’s almost the same as: there shall be no more death, because we’ve already seen all that, it’s old and we’re tired of it, and now we need something new, and this new thing is eternal life.”

He paced up and down the room while he spoke. “Sleep,” he said, going to the bed and putting his hands on Anna Ivanovna’s head. Several minutes went by. Anna Ivanovna began to fall asleep.

Yura quietly left the room and told Egorovna to send the nurse to the bedroom. “Devil knows,” he thought, “I’m turning into some sort of quack. Casting spells, healing by the laying on of hands.”

The next day Anna Ivanovna felt better.

4

Anna Ivanovna contrived to improve. In the middle of December she tried getting up, but was still very weak. She was advised to have a good long stay in bed.

She often sent for Yura and Tonya and for hours told them about her childhood, spent on her grandfather’s estate, Varykino, on the river Rynva in the Urals. Neither Yura nor Tonya had ever been there, but from Anna Ivanovna’s words, Yura could easily imagine those fifteen thousand acres of age-old, impenetrable forest, dark as night, pierced in two or three places, as if stabbing it with the knife of its meanders, by the swift river with its stony bottom and steep banks on the Krügers’ side.

In those days Yura and Tonya were having evening dress made for them for the first time in their lives—for Yura a two-piece black suit, and for Tonya an evening gown of light satin with a slightly open neck. They were going to wear these outfits for the first time on the twenty-seventh, at the traditional annual Christmas party at the Sventitskys’.

The orders from the men’s shop and the dressmaker were delivered on the same day. Yura and Tonya tried the new things on, remained pleased, and had no time to take them off again before Egorovna came from Anna Ivanovna and said that she was sending for them. As they were, in their new clothes, Yura and Tonya went to Anna Ivanovna.

When they appeared, she propped herself on her elbow, looked at them from the side, told them to turn around, and said:

“Very nice. Simply ravishing. I didn’t know they were ready. Now, Tonya, once more. No, never mind. It seemed to me that the basque was slightly puckered. Do you know why I sent for you? But first a few words about you, Yura.”

“I know, Anna Ivanovna. I myself asked them to show you that letter. You, like Nikolai Nikolaevich, think that I shouldn’t have renounced it. A moment’s patience. It’s bad for you to talk. I’ll explain everything to you at once. Though you know it all very well.

“And so, first. The case to do with the Zhivago inheritance exists for the sake of feeding lawyers and collecting court costs, but in reality there is no inheritance, there’s nothing but debts and entanglements, and the filth that floats to the surface along with it all. If it were possible to turn anything into money, do you think I would give it to the court and not make use of it myself? But the thing is that the case has been trumped up, and rather than rummage through it all, it was better to renounce my rights to the nonexistent property and yield it to several false rivals and envious impostors. Of the claims of a certain Madame Alice, who lives in Paris under the name Zhivago, I heard long ago. But new claimants have been added, and, I don’t know about you, but I discovered it all quite recently.

“It turns out that, while mama was still alive, father became enamored of a certain dreamer and madcap, Princess Stolbunova-Enrizzi. This person has a son by my father, he is now ten years old, his name is Evgraf.

“The princess is a recluse. She and her son live on unknown means without ever quitting her private house on the outskirts of Omsk. I was shown a photograph of the house. A handsome place with a five-window façade, single-pane windows, and stucco medallions along the cornice. And all the while recently I’ve been feeling as if this house is looking at me unkindly with its five windows across the thousands of miles separating European Russia from Siberia, and sooner or later will give me the evil eye. So what is it all to me: fictitious capital, artificially created rivals, their ill will and envy? Plus the lawyers.”

“All the same, you shouldn’t have renounced it,” Anna Ivanovna objected. “Do you know why I sent for you?” she repeated and at once went on: “I remembered his name. Remember, yesterday I told you about a forester. His name was Vakkh. Splendid, isn’t it? A dark forest horror, overgrown with beard up to his eyebrows, and—Vakkh! His face was disfigured, a bear mauled him, but he fought him off. They’re all like that there. With names like that. One syllable. So that it’s sonorous and vivid. Vakkh. Or Lupp. Or, say, Faust. Listen, listen. Sometimes they’d come and report something. There’d be some Avkt or Frol there, like a blast from grandfather’s double-barreled shotgun, and in a moment the herd of us would dart from the nursery to the kitchen. And there, if you can picture it, there would be a charcoal burner from the forest with a live bear cub or a prospector from a far-off border with a mineral sample. And grandfather would give each of them a little note. For the office. Money for one, grain for another, ammunition for a third. And the forest just outside the windows. And the snow, the snow! Higher than the house!” Anna Ivanovna began to cough.

“Stop, mama, it’s not good for you,” Tonya warned. Yura seconded her.

“It’s nothing. Trifles. Yes, by the way, Egorovna let on that you’re not sure whether you should go to the Christmas party the day after tomorrow. I don’t want to hear any more of that foolishness! Shame on you. What kind of doctor are you after that, Yura? So, it’s settled. You’re going, with no further discussion. But let’s go back to Vakkh. This Vakkh was a blacksmith in his youth. He had his guts busted up in a fight. So he made himself new ones out of iron. What an odd fellow you are, Yura. As if I don’t understand. Of course, not literally. But that’s what people said.”

Anna Ivanovna coughed again, this time for much longer. The fit would not pass. She could not catch her breath.

Yura and Tonya rushed to her at the same moment. They stood shoulder to shoulder by her bed. Still coughing, Anna Ivanovna seized their touching hands in hers and held them united for a time. Then, regaining control of her voice and breath, she said:

“If I die, don’t part. You’re made for each other. Get married. There, I’ve betrothed you,” she added and burst into tears.

5

In the spring of 1906, before the start of her last year of high school, the six months of her liaison with Komarovsky had already gone beyond the limits of Lara’s endurance. He very skillfully took advantage of her despondency and, whenever he found it necessary, without letting it show, reminded her subtly and inconspicuously of her dishonor. These reminders threw Lara into that state of disarray which a sensualist requires of a woman. This disarray made Lara ever more captive to the sensual nightmare, which made her hair stand on end when she sobered up. The contradictions of the night’s madness were as inexplicable as black magic. Here everything was inside out and contrary to logic, sharp pain manifested itself in peals of silvery laughter, struggle and refusal signified consent, and the torturer’s hand was covered with kisses of gratitude.

It seemed there would be no end to it, but in spring, at one of the last classes of the school year, having reflected on how much more frequent this pestering would be in the summer, when there were no school studies, which were her last refuge against frequent meetings with Komarovsky, Lara quickly came to a decision that changed her life for a long time.

It was a hot morning, a thunderstorm was gathering. The classroom windows were open. The city was humming in the distance, always on the same note, like bees in an apiary. The shouts of playing children came from the courtyard. The grassy smell of earth and young greenery made your head ache, like the smell of vodka and pancakes in the week before Lent.³

The history teacher was telling about Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition.⁴ When he came to the landing at Fréjus, the sky turned black, cracked and split by lightning and thunder, and through the windows, along with the smell of freshness, columns of sand and dust burst into the room. Two class toadies rushed officiously to the corridor to call the janitor to shut the windows, and when they opened the door, the draft lifted the blotting paper from the notebooks on all the desks and blew it around the room.

The windows were shut. Dirty city rain mixed with dust poured down. Lara tore a page from her notebook and wrote to the girl sitting next to her at the desk, Nadya Kologrivova:

“Nadya, I must set up my life separately from mama. Help me to find well-paid lessons. You have many rich acquaintances.”

Nadya replied in the same way:

“We’re looking for a tutor for Lipa. Why don’t you come to us. That would be great! You know how papa and mama love you.”

6

For more than three years Lara lived with the Kologrivovs as if behind a stone wall. No attempts on her were made from anywhere, and even her mother and brother, from whom she felt greatly estranged, did not remind her of themselves.

Lavrenty Mikhailovich Kologrivov was a big entrepreneur, a practical man of the new fashion, talented and intelligent. He hated the moribund order with the double hatred of a fabulously wealthy man able to buy out the state treasury, and of a man from simple folk who had gone amazingly far. He hid fugitives from the law, hired lawyers to defend the accused in political trials, and, as the joke went, overthrew himself as a proprietor by subsidizing revolution and organizing strikes at his own factory. Lavrenty Mikhailovich was a crack shot and a passionate hunter, and in the winter of 1905 had gone on Sundays to the Silver Woods and Moose Island to teach militiamen how to shoot.

He was a remarkable man. Serafima Filippovna, his wife, was a worthy match for him. Lara felt an admiring respect for them both. Everyone in the house loved her like their own.

In the fourth year of Lara’s carefree life her brother Rodya came to see her on business. Swaying foppishly on his long legs and, for greater importance, pronouncing the words through his nose and drawing them out unnaturally, he told her that the graduating cadets of his class had collected some money for a farewell gift to the head of the school, had given it to Rodya, and had entrusted him with choosing and purchasing the gift. And that two days ago he had gambled away all the money to the last kopeck. Having said this, he dropped his whole lanky figure into an armchair and burst into tears.

Lara went cold when she heard it. Sobbing, Rodya continued:

“Yesterday I went to see Viktor Ippolitovich. He refused to talk with me about the subject, but said that if you wished … He said that, though you don’t love us all anymore, your power over him is still so great … Larochka … One word from you is enough … Do you understand what a disgrace it is and how it stains the honor of an officer’s uniform? … Go to him—what will it cost you?—ask him … You won’t have me wash away this embezzlement with my blood.”

“Wash away with blood … Honor of an officer’s uniform,” Lara repeated indignantly, pacing the room in agitation. “And I’m not a uniform, I have no honor, and you can do anything you like with me. Do you realize what you’re asking, did you grasp what he’s offering you? Year after year the Sisyphean labor of building, raising up, not getting enough sleep, and then this one comes, it’s all the same to him, he’ll snap his fingers, and it will all be blown to smithereens! Devil take you. Shoot yourself, if you like. What do I care? How much do you need?”

“Six hundred and ninety-some rubles—let’s round it off to seven hundred,” said Rodya, faltering slightly.

“Rodya! No, you’re out of your mind! Do you realize what you’re saying? You gambled away seven hundred rubles? Rodya! Rodya! Do you know how long it would take an ordinary person like me to knock together a sum like that by honest labor?”

After a slight pause she added in a cold, estranged voice:

“All right. I’ll try. Come tomorrow. And bring the revolver you were going to shoot yourself with. You’ll turn it over to me. With a good supply of cartridges, don’t forget.”

She got the money from Mr. Kologrivov.

7

Working at the Kologrivovs’ did not prevent Lara from finishing high school, entering the higher courses, studying successfully in them, and approaching graduation, which for her would come in the following year, 1912.

In the spring of 1911 her pupil Lipochka finished high school. She already had a fiancé, the young engineer Friesendank, from a good and well-to-do family. Lipochka’s parents approved of her choice, but were against her marrying so early and advised her to wait. As a result, there were scenes. The spoiled and whimsical Lipochka, the family’s favorite, shouted at her father and mother, wept and stamped her feet.

In this rich home, where Lara was considered one of their own, they did not remember the debt she had incurred for Rodya and did not remind her of it.

Lara would have repaid this debt long ago, if she had not had permanent expenses, the destination of which she kept hidden.

In secret from Pasha, she sent money to his father, Antipov, who was living in exile, and helped his often ailing, peevish mother. Besides that, in still greater secrecy, she reduced the expenses of Pasha himself, paying some extra to his landlord for his room and board without his knowing it.

Pasha, who was slightly younger than Lara, loved her madly and obeyed her in everything. At her insistence, after finishing his progressive high school, he took additional Latin and Greek, in order to enter the university as a philologist. Lara’s dream was that in a year, after they passed the state examinations, she and Pasha would get married and go to teach, he in a boys’ high school and she in a girls’, in one of the provincial cities of the Urals.

Pasha lived in a room that Lara herself had found and rented for him from its quiet owners, in a newly built house on Kamergersky Lane, near the Art Theater.

In the summer of 1911, Lara visited Duplyanka for the last time with the Kologrivovs. She loved the place to distraction, more than the owners did themselves. That was well-known, and there existed a consensus concerning Lara on the occasion of these summer trips. When the hot and soot-blackened train that brought them continued on its way and, amid the boundless, stupefying, and fragrant silence that succeeded it, the excited Lara lost the gift of speech, they allowed her to go alone on foot to the estate, while the luggage was carried from the little station and put onto a cart, and the Duplyanka driver, the sleeves of his red shirt thrust through the armholes of his coachman’s vest, told the masters the local news of the past season as they got into the carriage.

Lara walked beside the rails along a path beaten down by wanderers and pilgrims and turned off on a track that led across a meadow to the forest. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, breathed in the intricately fragrant air of the vast space around her. It was dearer to her than a father and mother, better than a lover, and wiser than a book. For an instant the meaning of existence was again revealed to Lara. She was here—so she conceived—in order to see into the mad enchantment of the earth, and to call everything by name, and if that was beyond her strength, then, out of love for life, to give birth to her successors, who would do it in her place.

That summer Lara arrived overtired from the excessive work she had heaped on herself. She was easily upset. A self-consciousness developed in her that had not been there before. This feature lent a certain pettiness to her character, which had always been distinguished by its breadth and lack of touchiness.

The Kologrivovs did not want to let her go. She was surrounded by the same affection as ever with them. But since Lipa was on her feet now, Lara considered herself superfluous in their house. She refused her salary. They made her take it. At the same time she needed money, and to earn an independent income while being a guest was awkward and practically unfeasible.

Lara considered her position false and untenable. It seemed to her that she was a burden to them all and they simply did not show it. She was a burden to herself. She wanted to flee from herself and the Kologrivovs wherever her feet would take her, but, according to her own notions, to do so she would have to repay the money to the Kologrivovs, and at the moment she had nowhere to get it. She felt herself a hostage on account of Rodya’s stupid embezzlement, and her impotent indignation gave her no peace.

She seemed to see signs of negligence in everything. If the Kologrivovs’ visiting acquaintances made much of her, it meant they were treating her as an uncomplaining “ward” and easy prey. But when she was left in peace, it proved that she was a nonentity and they did not notice her.

Her fits of hypochondria did not keep Lara from sharing in the amusements of the numerous company that visited Duplyanka. She bathed and swam, went boating, took part in nighttime picnics across the river, set off fireworks, and danced. She acted in amateur theatricals and with particular passion competed in target shooting from short Mauser rifles, to which, however, she preferred Rodya’s light revolver. She came to fire it with great accuracy and jokingly regretted that she was a woman and the career of a swashbuckling duelist was closed to her. But the merrier Lara’s life was, the worse she felt. She did not know what she wanted herself.

This increased especially after her return to the city. Here to Lara’s troubles were added some slight disagreements with Pasha (Lara was careful not to quarrel seriously with him, because she considered him her last defense). Lately Pasha had acquired a certain self-confidence. The admonishing tones in his conversation upset her and made her laugh.

Pasha, Lipa, the Kologrivovs, money—it all started spinning in her head. Life became repugnant to Lara. She was beginning to lose her mind. She felt like dropping everything familiar and tested and starting something new. In that state of mind, around Christmastime of the year 1911, she came to a fateful decision. She decided to part from the Kologrivovs immediately and somehow build her life alone and independently, and to ask Komarovsky for the money needed for that. It seemed to Lara that after all that had happened and the subsequent years of her hard-won freedom, he should help her chivalrously, not going into any explanations, disinterestedly and without any filth.

With that aim she went, on December 27, to the Petrovsky neighborhood and, on the way out, put Rodya’s revolver, loaded and with the safety off, into her muff, intending to shoot Viktor Ippolitovich if he should refuse her, understand her perversely, or humiliate her in any way.

She walked in terrible perturbation along the festive streets, not noticing anything around her. The intended shot had already rung out in her soul, with total indifference to the one it had been aimed at. This shot was the only thing she was conscious of. She heard it all along the way, and it was fired at Komarovsky, at herself, at her own fate, and at the oak in Duplyanka with a target carved on its trunk.

8

“Don’t touch the muff,” she said to the oh-ing and ah-ing Emma Ernestovna when she reached out to help Lara take off her coat.

Viktor Ippolitovich was not at home. Emma Ernestovna went on persuading Lara to come in and take off her coat.

“I can’t. I’m in a hurry. Where is he?”

Emma Ernestovna said he was at a Christmas party. Address in hand, Lara ran down the gloomy stairs with the stained glass coats of arms in the windows, which vividly reminded her of everything, and set out for the Sventitskys’ in Flour Town.

Only now, going out for the second time, did Lara look around properly. It was winter. It was the city. It was evening.

It was freezing cold. The streets were covered with black ice, thick as the glass bottoms of broken beer bottles. It was painful to breathe. The air was choked with gray hoarfrost, and it seemed to tickle and prickle with its shaggy stubble, just as the icy fur of Lara’s collar chafed her and got into her mouth. With a pounding heart Lara walked along the empty streets. Smoke came from the doorways of tearooms and taverns along the way. The frostbitten faces of passersby, red as sausage, and the bearded muzzles of horses and dogs hung with icicles emerged from the mist. Covered with a thick layer of ice and snow, the windows of houses were as if painted over with chalk, and the colorful reflections of lighted Christmas trees and the shadows of merrymakers moved over their opaque surface, as if the people outside were being shown shadow pictures from inside on white sheets hung before a magic lantern.

In Kamergersky Lara stopped. “I can’t do it anymore, I can’t stand it” burst from her almost aloud. “I’ll go up and tell him everything,” she thought, regaining control of herself, opening the heavy door of the imposing entrance.

9

Red from the effort, his tongue stuck in his cheek, Pasha struggled before the mirror, putting on his collar and trying to stick the recalcitrant stud through the overstarched buttonhole of his shirt front. He was getting ready to go out, and he was still so pure and inexperienced that he became embarrassed when Lara came in without knocking and found him in such a minor state of undress. He noticed her agitation at once. Her legs were giving way under her. She came in, pushing her dress ahead at each step as if crossing a ford.

“What is it? What’s happened?” he asked in alarm, rushing to meet her.

“Sit down beside me. Sit down as you are. Don’t smarten yourself up. I’m in a hurry. I’ll have to leave at once. Don’t touch the muff. Wait. Turn away for a moment.”

He obeyed. Lara was wearing a two-piece English suit. She took the jacket off, hung it on a nail, and transferred Rodya’s revolver from the muff to the jacket pocket. Then, returning to the sofa, she said:

“Now you can look. Light a candle and turn off the electricity.”

Lara liked to talk in semidarkness with candles burning. Pasha always kept a spare unopened pack for her. He replaced the burned-down end in the candlestick with a new whole candle, placed it on the windowsill, and lit it. The flame choked on the stearine, shot crackling little stars in all directions, and sharpened into an arrow. The room filled with a soft light. The ice on the windowpane at the level of the candle began to melt, forming a black eyehole.

“Listen, Patulya,” said Lara. “I’m in difficulties. I need help to get out of them. Don’t be frightened and don’t question me, but part with the notion that we’re like everybody else. Don’t remain calm. I’m always in danger. If you love me and want to keep me from perishing, don’t put it off, let’s get married quickly.”

“But that’s my constant wish,” he interrupted her. “Quickly name the day, I’ll be glad to do it whenever you like. But tell me more simply and clearly, don’t torture me with riddles.”

But Lara distracted him, imperceptibly avoiding a direct answer. They talked for a long time on themes that had no relation to the subject of Lara’s grief.

10

That winter Yura was writing a scientific paper on the nervous elements of the retina in competition for a university gold medal. Though Yura would be graduating as a generalist, he knew the eye with the thoroughness of a future oculist.

This interest in the physiology of vision spoke for other sides of Yura’s nature—his creative gifts and his reflections on the essence of the artistic image and the structure of the logical idea.

Tonya and Yura were riding in a hired sleigh to the Christmas party at the Sventitskys’. The two had lived for six years side by side through the beginning of youth and the end of childhood. They knew each other in the smallest detail. They had habits in common, their own way of exchanging brief witticisms, their own way of snorting in response. And so they were riding now, keeping silent, pressing their lips from the cold, and exchanging brief remarks. And both thinking their own thoughts.

Yura recalled that the time for the contest was near and he had to hurry with the paper, and in the festive turmoil of the ending year that could be felt in the streets, he jumped from those thoughts to others.

In Gordon’s department a hectograph student magazine was published, and Gordon was the editor. Yura had long been promising them an article on Blok.⁵ The young people of both capitals were raving about Blok, he and Misha more than anyone.

But these thoughts did not remain long in Yura’s conscience. They rode on, tucking their chins into their collars and rubbing their freezing ears, and thought about differing things. But on one point their thoughts came together.

The recent scene at Anna Ivanovna’s had transformed them both. It was as if they had recovered their sight and looked at each other with new eyes.

Tonya, this old comrade, this person so clear that she needed no explanations, turned out to be the most unattainable and complex of all that Yura could imagine, turned out to be a woman. With a certain stretching of fantasy, Yura could picture himself as a hero climbing Ararat, a prophet, a conqueror, anything you like, but not a woman.

And now Tonya had taken this most difficult and all-surpassing task on her thin and weak shoulders (she suddenly seemed thin and weak to Yura, though she was a perfectly healthy girl). And he became filled with that burning compassion and timid amazement before her which is the beginning of passion.

The same thing, with corresponding modifications, happened to Tonya in relation to Yura.

Yura thought that in any case they had no business leaving the house. What if something should happen during their absence? And then he remembered. Learning that Anna Ivanovna was worse, they had gone to her, already dressed for the evening, and suggested that they stay. She had protested against it with all her former sharpness and insisted that they go to the party. Yura and Tonya went behind the draperies into the deep window niche to see what the weather was like. When they came out of the niche, the two parts of the tulle curtains clung to the still unworn fabric of their new clothes. The light, clinging stuff dragged for several steps behind Tonya like a wedding veil behind a bride. They all burst out laughing, so simultaneously did this resemblance strike the eye of everyone in the room without a word spoken.

Yura looked around and saw the same things that had caught Lara’s eye not long before. Their sleigh raised an unnaturally loud noise, which awakened an unnaturally long echo under the ice-bound trees of the gardens and boulevards. The frosted-over windows of houses, lit from inside, resembled precious caskets of laminated smoky topaz. Behind them glowed Moscow’s Christmas life, candles burned on trees, guests crowded, and clowning mummers played at hide-and-seek and pass-the-ring.

It suddenly occurred to Yura that Blok was the manifestation of Christmas in all domains of Russian life, in the daily life of the northern city and in the new literature, under the starry sky of the contemporary street and around the lighted Christmas tree in a drawing room of the present century. It occurred to him that no article about Blok was needed, but one needed simply to portray a Russian adoration of the Magi, like the Dutch masters, with frost, wolves, and a dark fir forest.

They were driving down Kamergersky. Yura turned his attention to a black hole melted in the icy coating of one window. Through this hole shone the light of a candle, penetrating outside almost with the consciousness of a gaze, as if the flame were spying on the passersby and waiting for someone.

“A candle burned on the table. A candle burned …” Yura whispered to himself the beginning of something vague, unformed, in hopes that the continuation would come of itself, without forcing. It did not come.

11

From time immemorial the Christmas parties at the Sventitskys’ had been organized in the following fashion. At ten, when the children went home, the tree was lighted a second time for the young people and the adults, and the merrymaking went on till morning. The more elderly cut the cards all night in a three-walled Pompeian drawing room, which was an extension of the ballroom and was separated from it by a heavy, thick curtain on big bronze rings. At dawn the whole company had supper.

“Why are you so late?” the Sventitskys’ nephew Georges asked them in passing, as he ran through the front hall to his uncle and aunt’s rooms. Yura and Tonya also decided to go there to greet the hosts, and, on their way, while taking off their coats, looked into the ballroom.

Past the hotly breathing Christmas tree, girdled by several rows of streaming radiance, rustling their dresses and stepping on each other’s feet, moved a black wall of walkers and talkers, not taken up with dancing.

Inside the circle, the dancers whirled furiously. They were spun around, paired off, stretched out in a chain by Koka Kornakov, a lycée student, the son of a deputy prosecutor. He led the dancing and shouted at the top of his voice from one end of the room to the other: “Grand rond! Chaîne chinoise!”^*—and it was all done according to his word. “Une valse s’il vous plaît!”^* he bawled to the pianist and led his lady at the head of the first turn à trois temps, à deux temps,^* ever slowing and shortening his step to a barely noticeable turning in place, which was no longer a waltz but only its dying echo. And everyone applauded, and the stirring, shuffling, and chattering crowd was served ice cream and refreshing drinks. Flushed young men and girls stopped shouting and laughing for a moment and hastily and greedily gulped down some cold cranberry drink or lemonade, and, having barely set the glass on the tray, renewed their shouting and laughing tenfold, as if they had snatched some exhilarating brew.

Without going into the ballroom, Tonya and Yura went on to the hosts’ rooms at the rear of the apartment.

12

The Sventitskys’ inner rooms were cluttered with superfluous things taken from the drawing room and ballroom to make space. Here was the hosts’ magic kitchen, their Christmas storehouse. It smelled of paint and glue, there were rolls of colored paper and piles of boxes with cotillion stars and spare Christmas tree candles.

The old Sventitskys were writing tags for the gifts, place cards for supper, and tickets for some lottery that was to take place. Georges was helping them, but he often confused the numbering and they grumbled irritably at him. The Sventitskys were terribly glad to see Yura and Tonya. They remembered them from when they were little, did not stand on ceremony with them, and with no further talk sat them down to work.

“Felitsata Semyonovna doesn’t understand that this ought to have been thought about earlier and not in the heat of things, when the guests are here. Ah, Georges, you ungodly muddler, again you’ve jumbled up the numbers! The agreement was that we’d put those for the boxes of dragées on the table and the blank ones on the sofa, and again you’ve got it all topsy-turvy and done it backwards.”

“I’m very glad Annette feels better. Pierre and I were so worried.”

“Yes, but you see, dearest, she happens to be worse, worse, you understand, you always get everything devant-derrière.”^*

Yura and Tonya hung around backstage for half the festive night with Georges and the old folks.

13

All the while they were sitting with the Sventitskys, Lara was in the ballroom. Though she was not dressed for a ball and did not know anyone there, she now allowed Koka Kornakov to make a turn with her, passively, as if in sleep, now strolled aimlessly about the room, quite crestfallen.

Once or twice already, Lara had stopped irresolutely and hesitated on the threshold of the drawing room, hoping that Komarovsky, who sat facing the ballroom, would notice her. But he kept his eyes on his cards, which he held fanlike in his left hand, and either really did not see her or pretended not to. The affront took Lara’s breath away. Just then a girl Lara did not know went into the drawing room from the ballroom. Komarovsky gave the girl that glance Lara knew so well. The flattered girl smiled at Komarovsky, flushed and beamed happily. Lara almost cried out when she saw it. The color of shame rose high in her face; her forehead and neck turned red. “A new victim,” she thought. Lara saw as in a mirror her whole self and her whole story. But she still did not give up the idea of having a talk with Komarovsky and, having decided to put off the attempt to a more suitable moment, forced herself to calm down and went back to the ballroom.

Three more men were playing at the same table with Komarovsky. One of his partners, sitting next to him, was the father of the foppish lycée student who had invited Lara to waltz. Lara concluded as much from the two or three words she exchanged with him while they made a turn around the room. And the tall, dark-haired woman in black with the crazed, burning eyes and unpleasantly strained, snakelike neck, who kept going from the drawing room to the ballroom, the field of her son’s activity, and back to the drawing room and her card-playing husband, was Koka Kornakov’s mother. Finally, it became clear that the girl who had served as pretext for Lara’s complex feelings was Koka’s sister, and Lara’s conclusions had no grounds at all.

“Kornakov,” Koka had introduced himself to Lara at the very start. But then she had not caught it. “Kornakov,” he repeated at the last gliding turn, taking her to a chair and bowing out. This time Lara heard him. “Kornakov, Kornakov,” she fell to thinking. “Something familiar. Something unpleasant.” Then she remembered. Kornakov, the deputy prosecutor of the Moscow court. He had prosecuted the group of railway workers with whom Tiverzin had stood trial. At Lara’s request, Lavrenty Mikhailovich had gone to butter him up, so that he would not be so fierce at the trial, but could not make him bend. “So that’s how it is! Well, well, well. Curious. Kornakov. Kornakov.”

14

It was past twelve or one in the morning. Yura had a buzzing in his ears. After a break, during which tea and cookies were served in the dining room, the dancing began again. When the candles on the tree burned down, no one replaced them anymore.

Yura stood absentmindedly in the middle of the ballroom and looked at Tonya, who was dancing with someone he did not know. Gliding past Yura, Tonya tossed aside the small train of her too-long satin dress with a movement of her foot and, splashing it like a fish, disappeared into the crowd of dancers.

She was very excited. During the break, when they sat in the dining room, Tonya refused tea and quenched her thirst with mandarines, which she peeled in great number from their fragrant, easily separated skins. She kept taking from behind her sash or from her little sleeve a cambric handkerchief, tiny as a fruit tree blossom, and wiping the trickles of sweat at the edges of her lips and between her sticky fingers. Laughing and not interrupting the animated conversation, she mechanically tucked it back behind her sash or the frills of her bodice.

Now, dancing with an unknown partner and, as she turned, brushing against Yura, who was standing to the side and frowning, Tonya playfully pressed his hand in passing and smiled meaningfully. After one of these pressings, the handkerchief she was holding remained in Yura’s hand. He pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. The handkerchief had the mingled smell of mandarine and of Tonya’s hot palm, equally enchanting. This was something new in Yura’s life, never before experienced, and its sharpness pierced him through. The childishly naïve smell was intimately reasonable, like a word whispered in the dark. Yura stood, covering his eyes and lips with the handkerchief in his palm and breathing it in. Suddenly a shot rang out in the house.

Everyone turned to the curtain that separated the drawing room from the ballroom. For a moment there was silence. Then turmoil set in. Everyone began to bustle and shout. Some rushed after Koka Kornakov to the place where the shot had resounded. People were already coming from there, threatening, weeping, and interrupting each other as they argued.

“What has she done, what has she done?” Komarovsky repeated in despair.

“Borya, are you alive? Borya, are you alive?” Mrs. Kornakov cried hysterically. “I’ve heard Dr. Drokov is among the guests here. Yes, but where is he, where is he? Ah, leave me alone, please. For you it’s a scratch, but for me it’s the justification of my whole life. Oh, my poor martyr, the exposer of all these criminals! Here she is, here she is, trash, I’ll scratch your eyes out, vile creature! Now she won’t get away! What did you say, Mr. Komarovsky? At you? She aimed at you? No, it’s too much. I’m in great distress, Mr. Komarovsky, come to your senses, I can’t take jokes now. Koka, Kokochka, what do you say to that! Your father … Yes … But the right hand of God … Koka! Koka!”

The crowd poured out of the drawing room into the ballroom. In the midst of them, loudly joking and assuring everyone that he was perfectly unharmed, walked Kornakov, pressing a clean napkin to the bleeding scratch on his slightly wounded left hand. In another group a little to the side and behind, Lara was being led by the arms.

Yura was dumbfounded when he saw her. The same girl! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! And again this graying one. But now Yura knows him. He is the distinguished lawyer Komarovsky; he was involved in the trial over father’s inheritance. No need to greet him, he and Yura pretend they’re not acquainted. But she … So it was she who fired the shot? At the prosecutor? It must be something political. Poor girl. She’ll get it now. What a proud beauty she is! And these! They’re dragging her by the arms, the devils, like a caught thief.

But he realized at once that he was mistaken. Lara’s legs had given way under her. They were holding her by the arms so that she would not fall, and they barely managed to drag her to the nearest armchair, where she collapsed.

Yura ran to her, so as to bring her to her senses, but for greater propriety he decided first to show concern for the imaginary victim of the attempt. He went to Kornakov and said:

“There was a request for medical assistance here. I can render it. Show me your hand. Well, you have a lucky star. It’s such a trifle I wouldn’t even bandage it. However, a little iodine won’t do any harm. Here’s Felitsata Semyonovna, we’ll ask her.”

Mrs. Sventitsky and Tonya, who were quickly approaching Yura, did not look themselves. They said he should drop everything and fetch his coat quickly, they had been sent for, something was wrong at home. Yura became frightened, supposing the worst, and, forgetting everything in the world, ran for his coat.

15

They did not find Anna Ivanovna alive when they came running headlong into the house from the Sivtsev entrance. Death had occurred ten minutes before their arrival. It was caused by a long fit of suffocation, resulting from an acute edema of the lungs that had not been diagnosed in time.

During the first hours Tonya cried her head off, thrashed in convulsions, and recognized no one. The next day she calmed down, listened patiently to what her father and Yura told her, but was able to respond only by nodding, because the moment she opened her mouth, grief overwhelmed her with its former force and howls began to escape her of themselves, as if she were possessed.

She spent hours on her knees beside the dead woman, in the intervals between panikhidas,⁶ embracing with her big, beautiful arms a corner of the coffin along with the edge of the platform it stood on and the wreaths that covered it. She did not notice anyone around her. But the moment her gaze met the gaze of her relations, she hurriedly got up from the floor, slipped out of the room with quick steps, swiftly ran upstairs to her room, holding back her sobs, and, collapsing on the bed, buried in her pillow the outbursts of despair that raged within her.

From grief, long standing on his feet, and lack of sleep, from the dense singing and the dazzling light of candles day and night, and from the cold he had caught during those days, there was a sweet confusion in Yura’s soul, blissfully delirious, mournfully enraptured.

Ten years before then, when his mother was being buried, Yura had been quite little. He could still remember how inconsolably he had wept, struck by grief and horror. Then the main thing was not in him. Then he was hardly even aware that there was some him, Yura, who had a separate existence and was of interest or value. Then the main thing was in what stood around him, the external. The outside world surrounded Yura on all sides, tangible, impenetrable, and unquestionable, like a forest, and that was why Yura was so shaken by his mother’s death, because he had been lost in that forest with her and was suddenly left alone in it, without her. This forest consisted of everything in the world—clouds, city signboards, the balls on fire towers, and the servers riding ahead of the carriage bearing the icon of the Mother of God, with earmuffs instead of hats on their heads, uncovered in the presence of the holy object. This forest consisted of shop windows in the arcades and the unattainably high night sky, with stars, dear God, and the saints.

This inaccessibly high sky bent down low, very low to them in the nursery, burying its head in the nanny’s skirt, when she told them something about God, and became close and tame, like the tops of hazel bushes when their branches are bent down in the ravines for picking hazelnuts. It was as if it dipped into the gilded basin in their nursery and, having bathed in fire and gold, turned into an early or late liturgy in the little church in the lane where his nanny took him. There the stars of the sky became icon lamps, dear God became the priest, and everyone was assigned his duties more or less according to ability. But the main thing was the actual world of the grown-ups and the city, which stood dark around him like a forest. Then, with all his half-animal faith, Yura believed in the God of this forest, as in a forest warden.

It was quite a different matter now. All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy. Now he was afraid of nothing, neither life nor death; everything in the world, all things were words of his vocabulary. He felt himself on an equal footing with the universe, and he stood through the panikhidas for Anna Ivanovna quite differently than in time past for his mother. Then he had been oblivious from pain, felt timorous, and prayed. But now he listened to the funeral service as information immediately addressed to him and concerning him directly. He listened attentively to the words and demanded meaning from them, comprehensibly expressed, as is demanded of every matter, and there was nothing in common with piety in his feeling of continuity in relation to the higher powers of earth and heaven, which he venerated as his great predecessors.

16

“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.”⁷ What is it? Where is he? The carrying out. They are carrying the coffin out. He must wake up. He had collapsed fully clothed on the sofa before six in the morning. He probably has a fever. Now they are looking all over the house for him, and no one has guessed that he is asleep in the library, in the far corner, behind the tall bookshelves that reach the ceiling.

“Yura, Yura!” the yard porter Markel is calling him from somewhere close by. They are carrying out the coffin. Markel has to take the wreaths down to the street, and he cannot find Yura, and besides he has gotten stuck in the bedroom, because the door is blocked by the open door of the wardrobe, preventing Markel from coming out.

“Markel! Markel! Yura!” they call for them from downstairs. With one shove, Markel makes short work of the obstruction and runs downstairs with several wreaths.

“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal”—gently drifts down the lane and lingers there, like a soft ostrich feather passing through the air, and everything sways: the wreaths and the passersby, the plumed heads of the horses, the censer swinging on its chain in the priest’s hand, the white earth underfoot.

“Yura! My God, at last. Wake up, please,” Shura Schlesinger, who has finally found him, shakes him by the shoulder. “What’s the matter with you? They’re carrying out the coffin. Are you coming?”

“Why, of course.”

17

The funeral service was over. The beggars, shifting their feet from the cold, moved closer together in two files. The hearse, the gig with the wreaths, and the Krügers’ carriage swayed and moved slightly. The cabs drew nearer to the church. The weeping Shura Schlesinger came out and, raising her tear-dampened veil, passed an inquisitive glance over the line of cabs. Finding the pallbearers from the funeral home among them, she beckoned for them to come and disappeared into the church with them. More and more people were pouring out of the church.

“So it’s Ann-Ivanna’s turn. Paid her respects, poor little thing, and drew herself a one-way ticket.”

“Yes, she’s done flitting about, poor thing. The butterfly’s gone to her rest.”

“Have you got a cab, or will you take the number eleven?”

“My legs are stiff. Let’s walk a bit and then catch the tram.”

“Did you notice how upset Fufkov is? He stared at the newly departed, tears pouring down, blowing his nose, as if he could devour her. And the husband right there beside him.”

“Ogled her all his life.”

With such conversations, they dragged themselves off to the cemetery at the other end of town. That day there was a let-up after the severe frost. The day was filled with a motionless heaviness, a day of diminished frost and departed life, a day as if created for a burial by nature herself. The dirtied snow seemed to shine through a covering of crape; from behind the fences wet fir trees, dark as tarnished silver, kept watch and looked as if they were dressed in mourning.

This was that same memorable cemetery, the resting place of Marya Nikolaevna. Yura had not found his way to his mother’s grave at all in recent years. “Mama,” he whispered almost with the lips of those years, looking towards it from far off.

They dispersed solemnly and even picturesquely along the cleared paths, whose evasive meandering accorded poorly with the mournful measuredness of their steps. Alexander Alexandrovich led Tonya by the arm. The Krügers followed them. Mourning was very becoming to Tonya.

Shaggy hoarfrost, bearded like mold, covered the chains of the crosses on the cupolas and the pink monastery walls. In the far corner of the monastery courtyard, ropes were stretched from wall to wall with laundered linen hung out to dry—shirts with heavy, waterlogged sleeves, peach-colored tablecloths, crooked, poorly wrung-out sheets. Yura looked at it more intently and realized that it was the place on the monastery grounds, now changed by new buildings, where the blizzard had raged that night.

Yura walked on alone, quickly getting ahead of the rest, stopping now and then to wait for them. In response to the devastation produced by death in this company slowly walking behind him, he wanted, as irresistibly as water whirling in a funnel rushes into the deep, to dream and think, to toil over forms, to bring forth beauty. Now, as never before, it was clear to him that art is always, ceaselessly, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life. Great and true art, that which is called the Revelation of St. John and that which goes on to finish it.

Yura longingly anticipated his disappearance for a day or two from family and university horizons and would put into his memorial lines for Anna Ivanovna all that turned up at that moment, all the chance things that life put in his way: two or three of the dead woman’s best characteristics; the image of Tonya in mourning; several observations in the street on the way back from the cemetery; the washed laundry in the place where one night long ago a blizzard had howled and he had wept as a little boy.

*Great ring! Chinese chain!

* A waltz please!

* In triple time, in double time.

* Back to front.