"'Ladies and gentlemenn...I should like...Misha! Gogochka! Tonia, what am I to do, they won't listen! Ladies and gentlemen, let me say a word or two. Unprecedented, extraordinary events are approaching. Before they burst upon us, here is what I wish you: May God grant us not to lose each other and not to lose our souls. Gogochka, you can cheer afterwards, I haven't finished. Stop talking in the corners and literen carefully.When Yurii claims "titanic events" have no beginnings, and that it is foolish to look for them, I strongly DISAGREE. Everything had a beginning. Except God. He is perfect and infinite and does not have a point of origin. But revolutions, wars, national conflicts, even the movements of weather, earthquakes and tornadoes- all mammoth events have beginnings, as well as small famils quarrels. It is ignorance to label the researching of such things "petty". With the discover of its causes and roots, we are equipped and prepared to understand it, and destroy it, if necessary. Perhaps Pasternak was using Yura, at this point in the novel, to conjure up some of his old bravado (or the bravado he saw in other, Mayakovsky, for example) that so infiltrated the believers of the revolution. Something beautiful had to come from all this misery. It was what they had been told. Again and again. They must believe in the revolution. Lenin was the only one that promised to take away all the pain, replacing it with a dream of freedom and community so glimmering and lovely, they fell before it in awe.
In this third year of the war the people have become convinced that the difference between those on the front line and those at the rear will sooner or later vanish. The sea of blood will rise until it reaches every one of us and submerge all who stayed out of the war. The revolution is this flood.
During the revolution it will seem to you, as it seemed to us at the front, that life has stopped, that there is nothing personal left, that there is nothing going on in the world except killing and dying. If we live long enough to read the chronicles and memoirs of this period, we shall realize that in these five or ten years we have experienced more than other people do in a century. I don't know whether the people will rise of themselves and advance spontaneously like a tide, or whether everything till be done in the name of the people. Such a tremendous event requires no dramatic proof of its existence. I'll be convinced without proof. It's petty to explore causes of titanic events. They haven't any. It's only in a family quarrel that you look for beginnings- after people have pulled eachother's hair and smashed the dishes they rack their brains trying to figure our who started it. What is truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It confronts us as suddenly as if it had always been there or had dropped out of the blue.
I too think that Russia is destined to become the first socialist state since the beginning of the world. When this comes to pass, the event will stun us for a long time, and after awakening we shall have lost half our memories forever. We'l have forgotten what came first and what followed, and we won't look for causes. The new order of things will be all around us and as familiar to us as the woods on the horizon or the clouds over our heads. There will by nothing else left.'
He said a few more things, and by then he had sobered up completely. As before, he could not hear clearly what people were saying, and answered them pointlessly. He saw that they liked him, but could not rid himself of the sadness that oppressed him. He said:
'Thank you, thank you. I apreciate your feelings, but I fon't deserve them. it's wrong to bestow love in a hurry, as though otherwise one would later have to give much more of it.
They all laughed and clapped, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he did not know where to escape from his forebodings of disaster and his feeling that despite his striving for the good and his capacity for happiness, he had no power over the future."
I believe that Pasternak himself felt all these things. Perhaps he was swept away in the drama, but even so, felt that all was not as it should be. Forebodings, the unknown horrible that peered in so close, just a hair's breadth away, yet invisible to him.