“One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book”

Lara quotes “One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book” from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet while speaking about her husband, Pavel. The phrase gives literary form to their shared suffering, but her account also reveals the distance that has grown between the man she remembers and the figure power has made of him.

The Shakespearean Reference

Yurii asks Lara to tell him more about her husband, introducing the phrase as a quotation from Romeo and Juliet. Lara asks where Shakespeare wrote it, and Yurii identifies the play. The brief exchange makes the line a point of entry into her account: rather than treating Pavel only as an absent spouse or political figure, it places him in a language of intimate misfortune.

Shared Misfortune and Recognition

Lara’s description links the phrase to her own experience of searching for Pavel in Meliuzeievo and later hearing that his men had arrested Yurii and taken him to Pavel’s train. She recalls seeing Pavel from a distance as he got into his car, surrounded by guards. Her recollection establishes both separation and recognition: she had found him almost unchanged, with the handsome, honest, resolute face and straightforward character she remembered.

The Changed Face

That recognition is unsettled by what Lara sees beneath Pavel’s familiar appearance. She says an abstract quality seemed to have entered his face, making it colorless, as though a living person had become the image of an idea. She interprets the change as the consequence of his surrender to a superior force—one she regards as deadening and pitiless—and fears it marks him for doom. The Shakespearean phrase therefore carries a tension: Lara still recognizes Pavel as a fellow sufferer, while her account suggests that the force shaping his life has begun to erase the individual she knew.