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Trains came and went. They were shunted, coupled, and uncoupled to the waving of furled and unfurled signal flags. Locomotives hooted, guards tooted their horns, and shunters blew their whistles. Smoke rose in endless ladders to the sky. Hissing engines scalded the cold winter clouds with clouds of boiling stream.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Pantheon, a division of Random House, New York, 1958, p. 27.
PLACE: Moscow
TIME: 1905, a cold October morning
CIRCUMSTANCE: At the railway station, at a time when there was unrest among the railway workers on the Moscow network.
It was warm in the hotel lobby. Behind the cloakroom counter the porter dozed, lulled by the hum of the ventilator, the roar of the blazing stove, and the whistle of the boiling samovar, to be awakened occasionally by one of his own snores.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Pantheon, a division of Random House, New York, 1958, p. 58.
PLACE: Moscow
TIME: 1906
CIRCUMSTANCE: Inside the Montenegro Hotel on a cold evening in January.
It was a hot morning and a storm was brewing. Through the open classroom windows came the distant droning of the town, as monotonous as a beehive, and the shriek of children playing in the yard.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Pantheon, a division of Random House, New York, 1958, p. 72.
PLACE: Moscow
TIME: Spring of 1906
CIRCUMSTANCE: During schoolclasses
The bells of Moscow's countless churches clanged in the darkness overhead and the trolleys rang as they scurried through the streets, but Lara was also deafened by the gaudy window displays and glaring lights, as if they too emitted sound of their own, like the bells and the wheels.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Pantheon, a division of Random House, New York, 1958, p. 93.
PLACE: Moscow
TIME: ca. 1911
CIRCUMSTANCE: While sick in bed, Lara remembers her first impressions of Moscow after her arrival there from the Urals as a young girl (ca. 1904).
When the even, incessant chatter of gunfire was occasionally interrupted by a deep bang that shook the ground as though a heavy steel-bound trunk were being dragged across the floor, scraping the paint. Zhivago interrupted the conversation as if out of respect for the sound, paused for a while, and said, "That's a Bertha, a German sixteen-inch. A little fellow that weighs twenty-four hundred pounds."
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Pantheon, a division of Random House, New York, 1958, p. 115.
PLACE: In a Gallician village.
TIME: ca. 1915-16
CIRCUMSTANCE: Zhivago as an army doctor involved in the war.
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