Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

It remains to tell the uncomplicated story of the last eight or nine years of Yuri Andreevich's life, in the course of which he declined and went more and more to seed, losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and as a writer, would emerge from this state of depression and despondency for a short time, become inspired, return to activity, and then, after a brief flash, again fall into prolonged indifference towards himself and everything in the world. During these years his longtime heart ailment, which he himself had diagnosed earlier, though he had no idea of the degree of its seriousness, advanced greatly.

He arrived in Moscow at the beginning of the NEP,1 the most ambiguous and false of Soviet periods. He was more emaciated, overgrown, and wild than at the time of his return to Yuriatin from his partisan captivity. Along the way he had again gradually taken off everything of value and exchanged it for bread, plus some cast-off rags, so as not to be left naked. Thus, as he went, he ate up his second fur coat and his two-piece suit and appeared on the streets of Moscow in a gray papakha, foot cloths, and a threadbare soldier's greatcoat, which, lacking its buttons, which had all been cut off, had turned into a wraparound prisoner's robe. In this outfit, he was in no way distinguishable from the countless Red Army soldiers whose crowds flooded the squares, boulevards, and train stations of the capital.

He did not arrive in Moscow alone. A handsome peasant youth, dressed like himself in soldier's clothes, had followed on his heels everywhere. In this guise they appeared in those surviving Moscow drawing rooms where Yuri Andreevich had spent his childhood, where he was remembered and received with his companion, following delicate inquiries into whether they had gone to the bathhouse after the trip-typhus was still raging-and where Yuri Andreevich was told, in the first days of his appearance, the circumstances of his family's leaving Moscow for abroad.

They both shunned people, but from acute shyness they avoided the chance of appearing singly as guests, when it was impossible to be silent and one had to keep up the conversation. Usually their two lanky figures showed up at a gathering of their acquaintances, hid in some inconspicuous corner, and silently spent the evening without taking part in the general conversation.

In the company of his young comrade, the tall, thin doctor in homely clothes looked like a seeker of truth from the common people, and his constant attendant like an obedient, blindly devoted disciple and follower. Who was this young companion?

For the last part of the trip, closer to Moscow, Yuri Andreevich had gone by rail, but the first, much bigger part he had made on foot.

The sight of the villages he passed through was no better than what he had seen in Siberia and the Urals during his flight from forest captivity. Only then he had passed through that region in winter, and now it was the end of summer and the warm, dry autumn, which was much easier.

Half the villages he passed through were deserted, as after an enemy campaign, the fields abandoned and unharvested, and in fact these were the results of war, of civil war.

For two or three days at the end of September, his road followed the steep, high bank of a river. The river, flowing towards Yuri Andreevich, was on his right. To the left, from the road to the cloud-heaped skyline, unharvested fields spread far and wide. They were broken up here and there by deciduous forests, with a predominance of oaks, elms, and maples. The forests ran down to the river in deep ravines, and cut across the road with precipices and steep descents.

In the unharvested fields, the rye, not holding to the overripe ears, flowed and spilled from them. Yuri Andreevich filled his mouth with handfuls of the grain, which he had difficulty grinding with his teeth, and fed on it on those especially difficult occasions when the possibility did not present itself for boiling the grain into porridge. His stomach poorly digested the raw, barely chewed feed.

Yuri Andreevich had never in his life seen rye of such a sinister dark brown, the color of old, dull gold. Ordinarily, when reaped in time, it is much lighter.

These flame-colored fields, burning without fire, these fields calling for help with a silent cry, were bordered with cold tranquillity by the big sky, already turned towards winter, over which, like shadows over a face, long stratus snow clouds with black middles and white sides ceaselessly drifted.

And everything was in movement, slow, regular. The river flowed. The road went the opposite way. The doctor strode along it. The clouds drew on in the same direction as he. But the fields did not remain motionless either. Something was moving about on them; they were covered by a tiny, restless, disgusting swarming.

Mice had bred in the fields in unprecedented, as yet unheard-of numbers. They scurried over the doctor's face and hands and ran up his trouser legs and sleeves when night overtook him in the fields and he had to lie down and sleep somewhere by a boundary. Swarms of the enormously multiplied, glutted mice darted underfoot on the road by day and turned into a slippery, squealing, slithering mush when stepped on.

Frightening, shaggy village mongrels gone wild, who exchanged looks among themselves as if holding a council on when to fall upon the doctor and tear him to pieces, trudged after him in a pack at a respectful distance. They fed on carrion, but did not scorn the mouse flesh teeming in the fields, and, glancing at the doctor from afar, confidently moved after him, expecting something all the time. Strangely, they would not enter the forest, and on approaching it would drop behind little by little, turn tail, and vanish.