"She had noticed a sharp change around her recently. Before, there had been obligations of all kinds. sacred duties- your duty to your country, to the army, to society. But now that the war was lost (and that was the misfortune at the bottom of all the rest) nothing was sacred any more.
Everything had changed suddenyl- the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no judgement you respected. At such a time you felt the need of commiting yourself to something absolute- life ot truth or beauty- of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to some ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you hed ever done in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good...Moscow was going through a disturbed, exciting time and was on the eve of something important, that there was growing discontent among the masses, and that grave political events were imminent."

I wonder how much of these thought were Pasternak's own, recalled from the time before, in his youth, as he and his literary contemporaries were preparing for some great unknown upheaval.