Pasternak wrote it all down

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"Bravery is contagious."

~ Patrick Leahy
   U.S. Senator from Vermont
   September 27, 2018

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------------------- [excerpt, Doctor Zhivago] -------- 

2

     They spent the night at the monastery, where Uncle Nikolai was given a room for old times' sake.  It was on the eve of the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin.  The next day they were supposed to travel south to a provincial town on the Volga where Uncle Nikolai worked for the publisher of the local progressive newspaper.  

They had bought their tickets and their things stood packed in the cell.  The station was near by, and they could hear the plaintive hooting of engines shunting in the distance.



     It grew very cold that evening.  The two windows of the cell were at ground level and looked out on a corner of the neglected kitchen garden, a stretch of the main road with frozen puddles on it, and the part of the churchyard where Maria Nikolaievna had been buried earlier in the day.  

There was nothing in the kitchen garden except acacia bushes around the walls and a few beds of cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold.  With each blast of wind the leafless acacias danced as if possessed and then lay flat on the path.

     During the night the boy, Yura, was wakened by a knocking at the window.  The dark cell was mysteriously lit up by a flickering whiteness.  With nothing on but his shirt, he ran to the window and pressed his face against the cold glass.


     Outside there was no trace of the road, the graveyard, or the kitchen garden, nothing but the blizzard, the air smoking with snow.  It was almost as if the snowstorm had caught sight of Yura and, conscious of its power to terrify, roared and howled, doing everything possible to impress him.  

Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it.  The blizzard was alone in the world; it had no rival.

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{Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak.  Feltrinelli (first edition), Pantheon Books.  1957.}

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