CALENDAR OF THE REVOLUTION
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hundreds of miles away from the centers of the revolutionary upheaval.
He returns to Moscow almost on the eve of the October insurrection and
stays there during the insurrection. What he sees, experiences, and has
to say about it consists of a few flat and meaningless sentences which do
not add up to half a page. Throughout the rising, which in Moscow lasted
much longer and was much bloodier than in Petrograd, he stays in his
rooms. His child has a cold, his friends come, talk about the fighting out–
side, get stuck at the Zhivagos' for three days, after which they go home
at last. "Yuri had been glad of their presence during Sasha's illness and
Tonya forgave them for adding to the general disorder. But they had felt
obliged to repay the kindness of their hosts by entertaining them with
ceaseless chatter; Yuri felt exhausted by it and was glad to see them
go."
This is all we hear or learn of the upheaval: not a single person ap–
pears that participates in it. On the next page we are told abruptly that
Zhivago was "shaken and overwhelmed by the greatness of the moment
and the thought of its significance for centuries to come." We must be–
lieve the author upon his word; we have seen no one "shaken and over–
whelmed." Zhivago did not even look at the event, so full of "significance
for centuries to come" through the window of his flat or even through
the chinks of his shutters. The revolution had only added to the "general
disorder" in his household and exposed him to the "ceaseless chatter" of
his friends. What curious lack of artistic sense the author shows here, and
what intellectual infantilism!
There follow a few thin and incoherent pages in which we are shown
how the revolution adds further to the "general disorder" in the house–
hold. Then, Moscow succumbs to starvation, epidemics, cold; Zhivago
himself falls
ill
with typhus and recovers. By now the author and his hero
have began to brood over the breakdown of civilized life and the calami–
tous deterioration of human nature. "In the meantime the Zhivagos
were tried to the limits of endurance. They had nothing and they were
starving. Yuri went to see the party member he had once saved, the one
who had been the victim of a robbery. This man helped him as far as
he could, but the civil war was beginning and he was hardly ever in
Moscow; besides, he regarded the privations people were suffering in
those days as only natural, and himself went hungry, though he con–
cealed it." And so the Zhivagos pack up and leave for the Urals, hoping
to recoup there and to enjoy some quiet well-being on what used to be
their family estate.
Thus we have left behind the famished, tense, and severe Moscow
of the early months of civil war, without getting even as much as a hint
