Boris Pasternak
WITHOUT LOVEI
A CHAPTER FROM A NOVEL
He had a brother and it was the brother who walked
round the house, his feet crunching in the snow, and on the
frozen steps as he went up them to knock on the door, to knock
as one does on the door of a blizzard-swept house when the
wind turns your fingers.Jg)ce and, whistling and howling, roars
into your ears that you should knock even louder, if you know
what's good for you ... and all the time the same wind hammers
on the shutters to drown your knocking and confuse the people
inside.
They heard
him
and opened. The house stood on a hill.
The door was torn from his
grasp
together with one of his
gloves and, as the door flew to and fro and they tried to
catch it, the grey snow-swept countryside rushed into the hall
1.
This early prose fragment was originally published in an obscure and
ephemeral Social-Revolutionary newspaper
Liberty of Labor (Volya
Truda),
on November 20, 1918, and has only recently come to light.
It will be of interest to readers of
Dr. Zhivago
since it shows that already
in 1918 Pasternak had arrived at the central conception of
his
novel,
published forty years later. Moreover, it contains three names (Galliula,
Gimazetdin and Mekhanoshin) which later appeared in
Dr. Zhivago,
and the episode of the tramcar accident foreshadows three important
events
in
the novel: the death of the hero's father, the interruption
of
a concert because of an accident to one of the performers, and the death
of Zhivago himself. But most interesting of all is the attitude to the
revolution and revolutionaries suggested by Kovalevsky's reflections as
he travels with his Zhivago-like companion to Moscow, presumably after
having heard the news of the abdication of the Czar and of the February
. Revolution. This aspect of the fragment is discussed at greater length
in
-. Mr. Hayward's introduction.
