Read "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Hamlet
The hum dies down. I step out on the stage.
The night's darkness focuses on me / I love the stubbornness of your intent / But the order of the acts has been thought out.
March
The sun heats up to the seventh sweat, / The snow wastes away with anemia / Oh, these nights, these days and nights!
Everything wide open, stables and cowshed.
Holy Week
Still the gloom of night around.
Still the gloom of night around.
And the light and warmth of dawn / The earth's still bare as bare can be, / And from Great and Holy Thursday / And the woods are undressed, uncovered, / And in town, with very little / And their gaze is filled with terror.
And they see light by the royal doors, / And the procession makes its way / And March squanders its hoard of snow / And the singing goes on till dawn, / But at midnight creature and flesh.
White Night
I am dreaming of a far-off time, / You're sweet, you have admirers.
Streetlights like gas butterflies, / We are gripped by the very same / Far off at the dense confines, / The crazy trilling surges, rolls, / In those parts, night, the barefoot pilgrim, / To the echoes of talk heard aloud, / And the trees, like white apparitions, / 5Bad Roads in Spring / Sunset's fires were burning down.
The horse's spleen was tossed about, / When the rider dropped the reins / Someone laughed, someone wept, / And at sunset's conflagration, / Where the widowed willow bowed / What calamity, what ladylove / A demon, he seemed, about to step / Earth and sky, forest and field.
A Final Talk
Life has come back as causelessly / The same people and the cares the same, / Women in cheap workday clothes / Here one with a weary gait / I again ready my excuses.
Don't cry, don't pucker your swollen lips, / Take your palm off of my breast, / Years will pass, you will get married, / While at the miracle of a woman's arms, / But howsoever night may bind me.
Summer in Town
Talk in half whispers, / A woman in a helmet / But the night outside is hot / Abrupt thunder comes / A hushed stillness follows, / And when the intense, radiant / The still-flowering lindens.