Posted Wednesday night, May 27, 2020.
Detail from “The Umbrella” by Marie Baskirtseff. 1883. The Russian Museum, Saint Petersburgh. Via Wikipedia.
I think Pasternak captures Lara’s youth and her naivete perfectly in having the only way she can begin to understand what happened to her---what was done to her---is to see herself as a character in a what she regards as a grown-up’s novel and in how she can only see what happened as her fault...
The weather was trying to get better. “Drip, drip, drip,” the drops drummed on the iron gutter and cornices. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw.
She walked all the way home as if beside herself and only when she got there did she realize what had happened.
At home everyone was asleep. She again lapsed into torpor and in that distraction sank down at her mother’s dressing table in her pale lilac, almost white dress with lace trimmings and a long veil, taken from the shop for that one evening, as if for a masked ball. She sat before her reflection in the mirror and saw nothing. Then she leaned on her crossed arms on the table and dropped her head on them.
If mama finds out, she’ll kill her. Kill her and take her own life.
How did it happen? How could it happen? Now it’s too late. She should have thought earlier.
Now she’s---what is it called?---now she’s---a fallen woman. She’s a woman from a French novel, and tomorrow she will go to school and sit at the same desk with those girls, who, compared to her, are still unweaned babies. Lord, Lord, how could it happen!
Someday, many years from now, when it was possible, she would tell Olya Demina. Olya would clutch her by the head and start howling.
Outside the window the drops prattled, the thaw was talking away. Someone in the street banged on the neighbors’ gate. Lara did not raise her head. Her shoulders shook. She was weeping.
---from “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
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