These notes were written during Zhivago’s first sojourn at Varykino (Part 9). They discuss creativity, art and the difficulty of writing during revolutionary times. I am assuming that Zhivago is expressing Pasternak’s ideas.

1

In this extract he connects hard physical work with creativity but goes on to put these thoughts in the context of “our accidentally chaotic situation.” 

What happiness it is to work from dawn to dusk for yourself and your family, to erect a shelter, to till the soil for food, and like Robinson Crusoe to create your own world, imitating the Creator when he made the universe and, following your own mother, bringing yourself again and again into the world!  

            So many thoughts pass through your mind, so many new ideas are conjured up while your hands are busy with the physical, muscular work of digging or carpentry; while you set yourself reasonable and physically practical tasks that reward you with the joy of success; while for six hours at a stretch you enjoy working with an axe or digging the soil under an open sky that burns you with its life-giving breath. None of such thoughts, conjectures or analogies appear in a notebook; they are transient and forgotten. This is not a loss but a gain. You city hermits, whipping up your imagination and shattered nerves with strong black coffee and tobacco, you are missing the most potent drug off all—real necessity and sound health.

            I won’t go any farther than this. I am not preaching a Tolstoyan simplicity and a return to the land, nor am I offering my own socialist solution to agrarian issues. I’m merely establishing a fact and am not elevating our accidentally chaotic situation into a system. Our example is questionable and not suitable for making conclusions. Our own economy here is too complex. Only a small part of it—the vegetable and potatoes—comes from our own labour. Everything else comes from other sources. 

            Our use of the land is illegal. We are hiding from the State authorities. The wood we use is stolen. It belongs to the State now, not the Krugers. We are protected by Mikulitsyn, who exists as we do. We are saved by our remoteness from town, where at the moment no one knows about our activities. 

            So that I don’t tie myself down, I’ve given up medicine and don’t admit to being a doctor.  But there’s always someone from the back of beyond who finds out that a doctor has settled in Varykino and trudges 30 versts for advice, bringing a chicken, eggs, butter or something else. It’s no use refusing payment because people don’t believe in free advice. And so my medical practice brings in a little. But our chief support, and Mikulitsyn’s, is Samdevyatov.

2

Pasternak seeks to define art as something beyond content or form. To add power to his definition—a definition that, he admits, cannot be described in words—he makes Zhivago feel art “in every fibre of [his] being. ”This feeling f or art is described as genius in the next excerpt (3). 

I’ve thought for a long time that “art” is not the name for a category or area that embraces innumerable concepts and their extended phenomena but, on the contrary, is something narrow and concentrated, the designation of a principle that becomes incorporated in a work of art. And it is my view that art is never an element or aspect of form, but rather a mysterious and hidden part of content. To me this is as clear as day; I feel it in every fibre of by being, but how can I formulate and express this idea?

            Works speak in many ways: themes, situations, plots, heroes. But most of all they speak through the art they contain. The presence of art in the pages of Crime & Punishment has much more impact than Raskolnikov’s crime.

            Primitive art or the art of the Egyptians, the Greeks or our own—all these are probably one and the same; art in the singular that has existed for millennia. It is some kind of thought, some kind of assertion about life, so broad and all-embracing that it cannot be broken down into separate words. And when a grain of that force enters a more complex mixture, the infusion of art outweighs all the other elements and turns out to be the essence, the soul and the foundation of the work.

3

Zhivago here describes the difficulty of writing in revolutionary times. He contrasts the high-blown rhetoric of communism with “the glorification of hard labour, duty and everyday life.” This glorification of everyday life was a dominant theme in Pasternak’s later works. His example of Pushkin is appropriate, but that poet can hardly be said to have lived a “quiet life”!

            How I’d like, as well as working, farming and doctoring, to create something important, to write something scientific or something artistic. Each one of us is born a Faust, needing to take in everything, to experience everything, to express everything. Faust became a scientist because of the errors of his predecessors and contemporaries. Any step forward in science is made through the law that rejects current errors and false theories.

            Faust became an artist because of the infectious examples of his teachers. Any step forward in art is made through attraction, by the imitation, and worship of beloved predecessors.

            So what is stopping me from working, practicing and writing? I don’t think it’s my wandering and deprivation. Nor is it instability and frequent changes. It’s the prevalence today of high-blown phrases like “dawn of the future,” or “building a new world,” or “lights of mankind.”  When you first hear these phrases, they seem imaginative and meaningful. But actually they are bombastic and simplistic.    

            The only fabulous things are ordinary things touched by the hand of genius. The best lesson in this respect is Pushkin. What a glorification of hard labour, duty and everyday life! Today “bourgeois” and “citizen” sound like words of reproach. This reproach is anticipated in the lines of  “My Genealogy”:

                        “I’m just a bourgeois Russian.”Doctor Zhivago: From Yury’s Notebook

These notes were written during Zhivago’s first sojourn at Varykino (Part 9). They discuss creativity, art and the difficulty of writing during revolutionary times. I am assuming that Zhivago is expressing Pasternak’s ideas.

1

In this extract he connects hard physical work with creativity but goes on to put these thoughts in the context of “our accidentally chaotic situation.” 

What happiness it is to work from dawn to dusk for yourself and your family, to erect a shelter, to till the soil for food, and like Robinson Crusoe to create your own world, imitating the Creator when he made the universe and, following your own mother, bringing yourself again and again into the world!  

            So many thoughts pass through your mind, so many new ideas are conjured up while your hands are busy with the physical, muscular work of digging or carpentry; while you set yourself reasonable and physically practical tasks that reward you with the joy of success; while for six hours at a stretch you enjoy working with an axe or digging the soil under an open sky that burns you with its life-giving breath. None of such thoughts, conjectures or analogies appear in a notebook; they are transient and forgotten. This is not a loss but a gain. You city hermits, whipping up your imagination and shattered nerves with strong black coffee and tobacco, you are missing the most potent drug off all—real necessity and sound health.

            I won’t go any farther than this. I am not preaching a Tolstoyan simplicity and a return to the land, nor am I offering my own socialist solution to agrarian issues. I’m merely establishing a fact and am not elevating our accidentally chaotic situation into a system. Our example is questionable and not suitable for making conclusions. Our own economy here is too complex. Only a small part of it—the vegetable and potatoes—comes from our own labour. Everything else comes from other sources. 

            Our use of the land is illegal. We are hiding from the State authorities. The wood we use is stolen. It belongs to the State now, not the Krugers. We are protected by Mikulitsyn, who exists as we do. We are saved by our remoteness from town, where at the moment no one knows about our activities. 

            So that I don’t tie myself down, I’ve given up medicine and don’t admit to being a doctor.  But there’s always someone from the back of beyond who finds out that a doctor has settled in Varykino and trudges 30 versts for advice, bringing a chicken, eggs, butter or something else. It’s no use refusing payment because people don’t believe in free advice. And so my medical practice brings in a little. But our chief support, and Mikulitsyn’s, is Samdevyatov.

2

Pasternak seeks to define art as something beyond content or form. To add power to his definition—a definition that, he admits, cannot be described in words—he makes Zhivago feel art “in every fibre of [his] being. ”This feeling f or art is described as genius in the next excerpt (3). 

I’ve thought for a long time that “art” is not the name for a category or area that embraces innumerable concepts and their extended phenomena but, on the contrary, is something narrow and concentrated, the designation of a principle that becomes incorporated in a work of art. And it is my view that art is never an element or aspect of form, but rather a mysterious and hidden part of content. To me this is as clear as day; I feel it in every fibre of by being, but how can I formulate and express this idea?

            Works speak in many ways: themes, situations, plots, heroes. But most of all they speak through the art they contain. The presence of art in the pages of Crime & Punishment has much more impact than Raskolnikov’s crime.

            Primitive art or the art of the Egyptians, the Greeks or our own—all these are probably one and the same; art in the singular that has existed for millennia. It is some kind of thought, some kind of assertion about life, so broad and all-embracing that it cannot be broken down into separate words. And when a grain of that force enters a more complex mixture, the infusion of art outweighs all the other elements and turns out to be the essence, the soul and the foundation of the work.

3

Zhivago here describes the difficulty of writing in revolutionary times. He contrasts the high-blown rhetoric of communism with “the glorification of hard labour, duty and everyday life.” This glorification of everyday life was a dominant theme in Pasternak’s later works. His example of Pushkin is appropriate, but that poet can hardly be said to have lived a “quiet life”!

            How I’d like, as well as working, farming and doctoring, to create something important, to write something scientific or something artistic. Each one of us is born a Faust, needing to take in everything, to experience everything, to express everything. Faust became a scientist because of the errors of his predecessors and contemporaries. Any step forward in science is made through the law that rejects current errors and false theories.

            Faust became an artist because of the infectious examples of his teachers. Any step forward in art is made through attraction, by the imitation, and worship of beloved predecessors.

            So what is stopping me from working, practicing and writing? I don’t think it’s my wandering and deprivation. Nor is it instability and frequent changes. It’s the prevalence today of high-blown phrases like “dawn of the future,” or “building a new world,” or “lights of mankind.”  When you first hear these phrases, they seem imaginative and meaningful. But actually they are bombastic and simplistic.    

            The only fabulous things are ordinary things touched by the hand of genius. The best lesson in this respect is Pushkin. What a glorification of hard labour, duty and everyday life! Today “bourgeois” and “citizen” sound like words of reproach. This reproach is anticipated in the lines of  “My Genealogy”:

                        “I’m just a bourgeois Russian.”

And in “Onegin’s Journey”:    

                        My ideal is a housewife,

                        My desire is peace and quiet

                        And a big pot of cabbage soup.

            What I like most of all in Russian writing is the childlike quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their modest lack of concern over such high-blown things as the purpose of man or their own salvation. They of course knew all about such things but were too unpretentious to be concerned with them. Not their business and not on their level! Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky prepared themselves for death. They worried, sought meanings, drew conclusions. On the other hand, Pushkin and Chekhov were diverted by the everyday details of their artistic calling, and they solved those details one by one while living a quiet life of no one else’s concern. And now those details have become everyone’s business and like unpicked apples those details pass on to posterity and ripen increasingly with sweetness and meaning.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

And in “Onegin’s Journey”:    

                        My ideal is a housewife,

                        My desire is peace and quiet

                        And a big pot of cabbage soup.

            What I like most of all in Russian writing is the childlike quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their modest lack of concern over such high-blown things as the purpose of man or their own salvation. They of course knew all about such things but were too unpretentious to be concerned with them. Not their business and not on their level! Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky prepared themselves for death. They worried, sought meanings, drew conclusions. On the other hand, Pushkin and Chekhov were diverted by the everyday details of their artistic calling, and they solved those details one by one while living a quiet life of no one else’s concern. And now those details have become everyone’s business and like unpicked apples those details pass on to posterity and ripen increasingly with sweetness and meaning.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

 The translations from the Russian are mine, but I benefitted from consulting the three translations of Doctor Zhivago by Hayward and Harari, Pevear and Volokhonsky, and Pasternak Slater.