2. the law on food requisitioning: In January 1919, a decree was issued calling for the requisitioning without compensation of what was described as “surplus agricultural produce.” The procedure was open to abuse and resulted in great unrest among the peasants, which was brutally suppressed.
3. Church Slavonic … Russian: The language of the Russian and some other Orthodox Churches is Church Slavonic. Ultimately derived from Middle Bulgarian, it differs from Russian, which leads to misunderstandings such as those that follow here. The lines quoted are from Psalm 91 in the King James Version.
4. Dukhobor community … Tolstoyism: The Dukhobors (meaning “Spirit-Fighters,” a name coined by their opponents) emerged as a Christian sect in Russia in the eighteenth century, but may go back further. They rejected the authority of state and church, the Bible as divine revelation, and the divinity of Christ, lived in egalitarian farming communities, and refused military service, for which they were repeatedly persecuted. Their beliefs are close to the teachings of Tolstoyism (see part 1, note 5), and in fact Tolstoy contributed money to their cause when they petitioned to move to western Canada in the late nineteenth century.
5. You are angry, Jupiter … the Moor can go: The saying about Jupiter, which is proverbial in Russia, comes from the Latin: Iuppiter iratus ergo nefas (“Jupiter is angry, therefore he is [it is] wrong”), which is attributed to Lucian of Samosata (ca. 125–180 AD). The phrase about the Moor, also proverbial, comes from The Conspiracy of Fiesco in Genoa (1783), a play by the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).
6. Darwin met with Schelling: Charles Darwin (1809–1882) formulated the principle of natural selection in the process of biological evolution in his Origin of Species (1859). The German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), a friend and later a critic of Hegel, proposed the idea, in his Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie, 1797), that the ideal springs from the real in a dynamic series of evolutionary processes. Zhivago’s thoughts thus unite naturalist and idealist notions of evolution.
7. Razin and Pugachev: Stepan (“Stenka”) Razin (1630–1671) was a Cossack who led a band of robbers in the late 1660s. He was joined by discontented peasants and non-Russian peoples like the Kalmyks and in 1670 went into open rebellion against the Russian state. After some successes, he was defeated and captured, and in 1671 he was executed in Moscow. For Pugachev, see part 7, note 5.
PART TWELVE
1. Oprichniki: An order of special troops organized by Ivan the Terrible (1530–1584), loyal to him alone, living on their own separate territory (the name comes from an old Russian word meaning “apart” or “separate”), and opposed to the traditional nobility (boyars). They were given unlimited power and used it ruthlessly. Their number increased from 1,000 in 1565 to 6,000 in 1572, when the tsar abolished the order.
2. a heretic witch from the Old Believers: The Old Believers, also known as Raskolniki (from the Russian word raskol, “schism”), separated themselves from the Russian Orthodox Church in protest against the reforms introduced by the patriarch Nikon in 1653. Women among the Old Believers sometimes took the role of “Mothers of God” or “Brides of Christ.”
3. A little hare … my beautiful one: According to the commentary of E. B. and E. V. Pasternak, this “folk song” is entirely the work of Pasternak himself.
4. Kolchak … Ivan Tsarevich: For Kolchak, see part 10, note 1. Ivan Tsarevich (“Ivan the Prince”) is a hero of Russian folktales, often the third of three sons, who struggles with Koshchei the Deathless, goes to catch the Firebird, and eventually marries the princess.
5. Or else, for instance … the Novgorod or the Ipatyev …: Kubarikha’s speech, as well as what she speaks about, is drawn from texts collected by Alexander Afanasiev (1826–1871) in his Poetic Notions of Nature Among the Slavs (1865–69). The Novgorod Chronicle, covering the years from 1016 to 1471, is the oldest record of the Novgorod Republic; the Ipatyev Chronicle contains material going back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is a major source for the early history of southern Russia.
6. the book of the living word: The verse comes from a hymn from the service for the Nativity of the Mother of God, but Kubarikha connects the Slavonic word zhivotnogo (“living”) with the Russian word zhivotnoe (“animal”) and applies it to the cow.
7. He cut down … Flenushka: Pasternak based the stories of the butchered man and of Pamphil Palykh on published accounts of partisan life during the war with Kolchak.
PART THIRTEEN
1. O Light … presence?: The first line of the fifth hymn of the canon in the eighth tone, sung at matins. Zhivago repeats it along with the second line a little further on.
2. the Gajda uprising: Radola Gajda (born Rudolf Geidl, 1892–1948) joined the Czech Legion in Russia in 1917. During their evacuation across Siberia in 1918, violence broke out between the Czechs and the Bolsheviks, and Gajda and his troops combined with Kolchak’s forces, but in July 1919, after a falling out with Kolchak, he was dismissed. He then involved himself in a mutiny of SRs, which came to be known by his name, and when it failed, he escaped from Siberia and made his way back to Czechoslovakia, where he later took up the cause of fascism.
3. Romeo and Juliet: The words are spoken by Romeo in his last speech (act 5, scene 3, line 82). Pasternak quotes from his own translation, made during the early years of World War II.
4. a man in a case: Lara is referring to the hero of Chekhov’s story “The Man in a Case” (1898), who for Russians typifies a man physically and mentally trapped in his own narrow views and inhibitions.
5. Rosa Luxemburg: The political writer and activist Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (see part 4, note 1), and in 1914, with Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919), founded the antiwar Spartakusbund (“Spartacus League,” from Liebknecht’s pen name, Spartacus), which on January 1, 1919, became the German Communist Party. She was shot along with Liebknecht and others after the crushing of the Spartacist uprising later that same month, and thus became one of the first martyrs of the Communist cause.
6. Goethe’s … neo-Schellingism: In his Naturphilosophie, Goethe, like Schelling (see part 11, note 6), sought to establish a universal order of metaphysical as well as pragmatic validity.
7. In the Red Sea … remained intact: The quotations come from the Dogmatik (Hymn to the Mother of God) in the fifth tone, sung at vespers. The earlier references are to the Old Testament books of Exodus, Daniel (see part 8, note 8), and Jonah.
8. to make Adam God: The quotation comes from verses sung in the second tone at the vespers of the Annunciation. The essential notion that “God became man so that man could become God” is attributed to several early church fathers, among them St. Irenaeus of Lyons (second century) and St. Athanasius of Alexandria (293–373).
9. Christ and Mary Magdalene … God and a woman: This entire passage is based on the traditional identification of Mary Magdalene with the woman taken in adultery in John 8:3–11, and with the unnamed woman who anoints Christ’s feet from an alabaster flask and wipes them with her hair in Matthew 26:6–13, Mark 14:3–9, and Luke 7:36–50. In John’s version of this incident (12:1–8), the woman is Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who is neither a prostitute nor the Magdalene. Sima mentions this confusion herself. St. Mary of Egypt was indeed a repentant prostitute, but she lived in the fourth century. Sima goes on to quote hymns from the matins of Holy Wednesday, the middle of Holy Week, in which the woman with the alabaster vessel confesses to having been a harlot. The longest of these hymns, from which Sima quotes most fully, known as “The Hymn of Cassia,” is attributed to the Byzantine abbess and hymnographer Cassia (ca. 805–867). Zhivago’s two poems about Mary Magdalene follow the same tradition.