PART FIVE
1. black earth region: The region of rich black soil (chernozem) extending from the northeast Ukraine across southern Russia.
2. Provisional Government: When the February revolution of 1917 (February 23–27/March 8–12) brought about the abdication of Nicholas II and the end of imperial Russia, a provisional government was created, composed of an alliance of non-Communist liberal and socialist parties headed by Prince Georgi Lvov (1861–1925), who was a Constitutional Democrat. In July 1917, Prince Lvov was replaced by the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970). The intent of the Provisional Government was to create a democratically elected executive and assembly, but its program was opposed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and in October 1917 the Provisional Government was brought down by the Bolshevik revolution.
3. the Time of Troubles: The period in Russian history from the death of the last representative of Rurik’s dynasty, the tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, in 1598, to the election in 1613 of the tsar Mikhail Romanov (1596–1645), founder of the new dynasty. The government was taken over by Boris Godunov (1551–1605), brother-in-law and chief adviser to the late tsar. His rule, from 1598 to 1603, was a time of great unrest, famine, factional struggles, international conspiracies, and false claims to the throne.
4. Raspou … Trease: As the author has just said, Mlle Fleury swallows the endings of Russian words, including in this case the name of Grigory Rasputin (1869–1916), a bizarre holy man who attached himself to the imperial family, and the word “treason.”
5. death penalty was reinstated: Among the first acts of the Provisional Government (see note 2 above) was the abolition of the death penalty. But in July 1917, owing to difficulties in the continuing war with Germany and the problem of mass desertions, special military courts were established and the death penalty was reinstated. It was abolished again by the Bolsheviks, and again quickly reinstated.
6. Pechorin-like: Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, the protagonist of the novel A Hero of Our Time (1839–1841), by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), is a world-weary, cynical, coldhearted, but also courageous, sensitive, and melancholic army officer.
7. State Duma: See part 2, note 1. The Fourth Duma sat from 1912 to 1917. During the February revolution, it sent a commission of representatives to replace the imperial ministers, leading to the creation of the Provisional Government (see note 2 above).
8. People’s Will Schlüsselburgers: People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) was a revolutionary terrorist organization of the later nineteenth century, responsible among other things for the assassination of the emperor Alexander II in 1881. Their program was non-Marxist, aimed at a peasant revolution bypassing capitalism. Some of its members, released from prison in the early twentieth century, helped to form the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party. The Schlüsselburg Fortress, on the Neva near Lake Ladoga, was used as a political prison.
9. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks: See part 4, note 1.
10. Balaam: The story of Balaam and his ass is told in Numbers 22:21–35. The Moabite prophet Balaam fails to see the angel of God barring his way, but his she-ass does see the angel and finally cries out to warn him.
11. Lot’s wife: Ustinya has confused the story of Balaam with the story of Lot, who was saved by the Lord when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, but whose wife was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at the cities (Genesis 19:1–26).
12. the land question: One of the major questions facing the Provisional Government was the redistribution and continued cultivation of land seized from the former landowners, made especially urgent by the decline in farm production during the war years. In May 1917, Izvestia, the newspaper of the Petrograd Soviet, expressing Menshevik and SR views, published a lead article headlined “All land to the people.”
13. the accursed questions: Dostoevsky coined this phrase (prokliatye voprosy) for the ultimate questions of human existence—the nature of man, the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of life, the riddle of death—“the great Russian questions,” as Nicolà Chiaromonte called them, which Pasternak raises again in Doctor Zhivago, “when it seemed that history … had suppressed them forever” (“Pasternak’s Message,” in Pasternak: Modern Judgements, edited by Donald Davie and Angela Livingstone, Nashville and London, 1970).
14. in Paul … “interpretation”: The reference is to Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians 14:5 and 13: “Now I want you all to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy … Therefore, he who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret.”
15. Petenka Verkhovensky … the Futurists: Pyotr (“Petenka”) Verkhovensky is the young radical organizer, theorist, and mystificator in Dostoevsky’s novel Demons (1872), who came to signify the empty babbler and demagogue. The Russian Futurists were a group of poets and artists who embraced the ideas of the Italian writer F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944) in his Futurist Manifesto of 1908 and shared his enthusiasm for dynamism, speed, and machines. In 1912, David Burlyuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others issued their own manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.
16. mushroom rain: A warm rain with sunshine that is thought to encourage the growth of mushrooms.
PART SIX
1. annexates and contributses: “Annexations” and “contributions” were controversial terms in discussions of the Brest-Litovsk treaty of March 1918 between the new Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and Germany, Austria, and Turkey, ending Russia’s participation in World War I. The Russian negotiators, headed by Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein, 1879–1940), wanted no annexations of Russian territory and no payments of war reparations, but eventually agreed to both. The treaty was broken eight and a half months later.
2. Saint-Just: Louis de Saint-Just (1767–1794) was a French revolutionary and a close associate of Robespierre, with whom he was executed on 9 Thermidor (July 17, 1794), bringing an end to the Reign of Terror.
3. War and Peace … The Backbone Flute: These and Man, mentioned a little later, are titles of books of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) published during the years of the war and the revolution. Pasternak had great admiration for these early poems and for their author.
4. Ippolit … The Adolescent: Ippolit is the consumptive rebel in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Raskolnikov is the hero of Crime and Punishment; the first-person narrator-hero of The Adolescent is Arkady Dolgoruky. They are all rootless young intellectuals in great inner turmoil.
5. Mme Roland’s before the Convention: Manon Roland (1754–1793), an ardent republican and admirer of Plutarch, kept a salon in Paris that had considerable political influence and was frequented mainly by the party of the Girondins, who opposed the violent measures of the Montagnards. She was executed along with other Girondins on October 31, 1793. Her Memoirs are an important record of the time. The revolutionary National Convention governed France from September 1792 to October 1795.