Suchergebnisse

The final subchapter of the prose text of Doctor Zhivago takes the narrative, at least by implication, beyond the Stalin era. In these last four brief paragraphs of the epilogue,1 lurii Zhivago's surviving childhood friends, Misha Gordon and Nika Dudorov, now at the twilight of their lives, are reflecting on Zhivago's literary legacy and on what lies ahead for Russia in the 1950s. In the first paragraph they are shown sitting at a window overlooking Moscow as a summer dusk slowly settles. They are reading from an album of Zhivago's writings that his half brother Evgraf had compiled some years previously.

On his return to Russia in July 1843 after a period of convalescence in Western Europe, Iazykov was confronted by a literary situation which bore little resemblance to the one he had left in July 1838, five years earlier. Many important nineteenth-century poets had already died by the time of Iazykov's departure: Ryleev (1826), Venevitinov (1827), Griboedov (1829), Delvig (1831), Gnedich (1833), Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, the fabulist Dmitriev (all in 1837), and Polezhaev (early 1838). Nevertheless, poetry continued to be the dominant form of literary expression, at least until April 1840, when Lermontov first published the full text of Geroi nashego vremeni. By late 1843, however, the tide had turned decisively in favor of prose. Many more poets had died—Davydov and Alexander Odoevsky (1839), Kozlov and Stankevich (1840), Lermontov himself (1841), and Koltsov (1842). Baratynsky and Krylov were to die in 1844.