Welcome to week 13 of my 16-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
Yury Zhivago finally makes it back to Yuryatin — ragged, half-starved and presumed dead — to the flat opposite the house of the caryatids. What he finds waiting there sets in motion the great love affair at the centre of Pasternak's novel.
In this episode of the slow read we cover the chapter titled "Opposite the House of the Caryatids" in the Hayward and Harari translation (it's "Opposite the House with Figures" in the Pevear and Volokhonsky). We follow Yury's return and Lara's letter, his weeks of fever and his recovery under Lara's care, the long shadow Komarovsky still casts over her, the hunted figure of Strelnikov, the Gajda rising, Sima Tuntseva's meditation on the Gospels, and the heartbreaking farewell letter from Tonya.
Along the way we look at the real-life parallels between Yury and Lara and Boris Pasternak's own affair with Olga Ivinskaya — drawn from Anna Pasternak's book Lara — and get into the questions the novel keeps circling: romance versus duty, and duty at what cost.
A printable version of this essay, plus the audio podcast, is available at camscampbellreads.substack.com — free to download and read at your leisure.
What do you think happens now that Yury knows he has a daughter he may never meet? Let me know in the comments. If you're enjoying the slow read, a like and subscribe helps more than you'd think. Thanks for reading along — see you in the next one.
📖 Follow along with the essay and printable version at https://camscampbellreads.substack.com/p/doctor-zhivago-chapter-13
Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago, Anna Pasternak
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, Peter Finn, Petra Couvée
A People's Tragedy, Orlando Figes
It's also available as a YouTube video here.
All quotations are from the Hayward/Harari translation. Buy the Everyman's Library edition from Amazon, Blackwells, Waterstones or Bookshop.org with this affiliate link: https://geni.us/bZsI
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