“Time to wake up”

“Time to wake up” is a refrain that joins natural spring renewal to the resurrection in Yurii Andreievich Zhivago’s poem “Turmoil.” First voiced as a call to rise amid images of death and corruption, it returns in the nightingales’ song at Varykino, where the phrase becomes both a sound in the landscape and an imperative of spiritual renewal.

The phrase in “Turmoil”

While writing a poem he had long wanted to compose, Yurii Andreievich Zhivago found himself assisted and interrupted by a boy in a reindeer coat. He understood the boy as the spirit of his death, yet could not reconcile that presence with the help it gave him in writing. The poem, titled “Turmoil,” was not about the entombment or the resurrection themselves, but about the three days between them.

Its imagined earth is black, raging, and worm-filled, assailing the deathless incarnation of love with rocks and rubble. The violence advances and retreats like waves storming a coast. Against this assault, the poem’s brief phrases—“We are glad to be near you” and “Time to wake up”—turn attention from destruction toward awakening.

Death, spring, and resurrection

The refrain gathers together the poem’s opposing proximities. Hell, dissolution, corruption, and death are near, but so are spring, Mary Magdalene, and life. The call to wake therefore does not erase the presence of death: it sounds within the same interval of turmoil, urging movement from sleep and stillness toward rising and resurrection.

This placement gives the phrase its force. It is at once a summons in the poem and a hinge between the assault on the dead body and the possibility of renewed life. The subject is the suspended time between death and resurrection, and the refrain gives that interval a direction: it is time to awake, get up, and arise.

The nightingales at Varykino

The wording recurs in Yurii’s account of early spring at Varykino. The trees—alder, nut, and wild cherry—grow green in the ravine below Mikulitsyn’s house, and the nightingales begin to sing. Yurii marvels at the suddenness with which nature reaches the richness and uniqueness of their trills, and distinguishes two phrases in their song.

One is a greedily repeated “tiokh-tiokh-tiokh,” answered, in his description, by dew-covered vegetation trembling with delight. The other, grave and imploring, sounds like an appeal or warning: “Wake up! Wake up!” The phrase from “Turmoil” thus reappears not as a formal statement about resurrection but as a heard pattern in spring birdsong. The novel places the poem’s call beside a landscape visibly coming into leaf, allowing the natural recurrence to echo its movement from death toward life.