GUEST REVIEWER Pasternak's Russian Novel In The Great Tradition

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28702, 27 September 1958, Page 3

GUEST REVIEWER Pasternak's Russian Novel In The Great Tradition

(In Europe, and the United States, critics are proclaiming as a momentous event in literature Boris Pasternak’s epic novel which reflects as never before the tortured history of Russia’s great revolution. This article from the “New York Times” both tells how the book came to be available to Western readers, and reviews and evaluates the book. The article is by Marie Slonim, a Russian-born American scholar.) .'. Doctor Zhivago. By Boris Pasternak. Translated from the Russian by Max Hairward and Manya Harari. 559 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. The English publication by Collins. At last we have the English version of “Doctor Zhivago,” the great novel from Russia that suddenly sprang into prominence last year in Europe and became the subject of passionate discus-' sion among critics and readers. It is easy to predict that Boris Pasternak’s book, one of the most significant of our time and a literary event of the first order, will have a brilliant future. It also has had an extraordinary past.

Boris Pasternak, son of a wellknown Russian painter and -illustrator of Tolstoy’s novels, was born in Moscow in 1890, was taught music by Scriabin, studied philosophy in Germany and, in general, was formed in the Western tradition of the Russian intelligentsia. He emerged in the early twenties as Russia’s most original and gifted poet. While connoisseurs admired his bold and difficult poems and compared him with T. S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke, Communist bureaucrats tabbed him “a decadent formalist and an enemy of the people?’ By 1933 he was reduced to silence and isolation, arid his occasional barbed remarks, such as “in the era of rapid tempos

one should think and write slowly” or “in the days of the Great Soviet the job of the poet is useless or .vacant,” certainly did not help him with the authorities. He earned his living through translatfons (those he made of Shakespeare’s tragedies and Goethe’s “Faust” are truly magnificent), and because his rendering of some poets from Soviet Georgia was favourably received by Stalin, he was saved from persecution.

In the solitude of his bungalow in the neighbourhood of Moscow, Pasternak wrote between 1948 >and 1953 a long work in prose. “I always dreamt of a novel,” he said, “in, which, as in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.” This novel, “Doctor Zhivago.” was accepted after Stalin’s death by the State Publishing House; but following a closer examination of the manuscript (and instructions from higher party echelons),-the work was barred. In the meantime, Pasternak had sold the foreign rights to Feltrinelli, a Milan publisher. Moscow, seeking to prevent the publication of “Doctor Zhivago” abroad, compelled Pasternak to wire Feltrinelli, asking him not to publish the Italian translation Of the hovel and begging him to return the manuscript “for revisions.” Feltrinelli’s refusal brought about all sorts of pressure, including intervention by the Soviet Embassy. Neverthe- '' less* the Italian version of “Doctor Zhivago” came out in Novem--1957, and immediately provoked a great stir (seven reprints >fn less than a year). Translations > into most European languages and made the name of universally known. The ’ hovel is still not available, how- * ever, in its original Russian text.

5 The central figure in the novel ». is Turii Zhivago, son of a rich Siberian industrialist and orphan at the age of 10. He is brought £up in the house of Moscow inteli lectuals and patrons of the arts '•.and becomes a typical product of * upper class, pre-revolutionary e. Russian culture. Yet as an indigyvidual, Zhivago cannot be so f easily classified. An i he studies philosophy •arid literature, and has decidedly i personal views on many matters. ♦He writes poems, and 24 of them the ending of the novel. His -*main aim is to preserve his own * spiritual independence. In a way * he is an outsider, and does not * become completely ’ involved ip > current events. Zhivago’s refusal to become “enC gaged,” however, is of an entirely > different nature from the aloof■•fness of a Camus “stranger”: Zhivago loves life and lives in- > tensely, but he does not want to be limited in his freedom. He •J welcomes the revolution, enjoy- > ing its stormy sweep, its dream of > universal justice and its tragic beauty. Yet when the Communists begin to tell him how to live > and how to think, he rebels. He ** leaves Moscow with his family S and takes refuge in a forlorn > hamlet beyond the Urals. To < reach this haven he crosses the 5 whole of Russia, going through > burning cities and villages in uproar, through districts hit by J famine and regions ravaged by civil war. •* In the Urals he enjoys calm, £ but only for a short time. Soon > his whole existence is upset by Chis passion for the fascinating Lara, whom he had met earlier, and by his wanderings in Siberia \with the Red partisans, to whom he is forcibly attached as a physix cian. At the end of the civil strife

he finds himself all alone; his family has been banned from Russia by the Soviet Government; his mistress has had to flee to Manchuria. Zhivago returns to Moscow, a broken man, to die in the street of a heart attack. This vast epic of about 200,000 words has varied layers of narrative. Chronologically it encompasses three generations- and gives a vivid picture .of Russian life during the first quarter of our century, between 1903 and 1929 (its epilogue takes place at the end of World War H). It is primarily a chronicle of Russian intellectuals, but it contains some 60 characters from all walks of society. All form part of a complex and often symbolic plot, and the interdependence of individual destinies constitutes one of the main themes of the novel. Pasternak’s heroes^and heroines are shown not as puppets .in a historical show, but as human beings obeying the laws of attraction and hatred, in an open universe of change and coincidence. This is particularly true of the love affair between Zhivago and Lara —a highly romantic and beautifully written story of chance, choice, joy and death.

Presented as a succession of scenes, dialogues, descriptions* or reflections, “Doctor Zhivago” deliberately avoids any psychological analysis. Allusive and symbolic, fragmentary and impressionistic, the novel breaks away from a strange, illuminating quality: a light shines in those beautiful pages (unfortunately dulled in an honest but uninspiring translation) in which realistic precision alternates with romantic, yet perfectly controlled, passion.

To those who are familiar with Soviet novels of the last 25 years, Pasternak’s book comes as a surprise. The delight of this literary discovery is mixed with a sense of wonder: that Pasternak, who spent all his life in the Soviet environment, could resist all the external pressures and strictures and could conceive and execute a work of utter independence, of broad feeling and of an unusual imaginative power, amounts almost to a miracle. The Communist fiction of today always depicts man as a “political animal,” whose acts and feelings are being determined by social and economic conditions.

In “Doctor Zhivago,” man is shown in his individual essence, and his life is interpreted not as an illustration of historical events, but as a unique, wonderful adventure in its organic reality of sensations, thoughts, drives, instincts, and strivings. This makes the book, in spite of all its topical hints and political statements, a basically anti-political work, in so far as it treats politics as fleeting, unimportant, and ex--3s the unchangeable fundamens of human mind, emotion, and safivity. The main efforts of Zhivago, his family and his beloved Lara are bent towards protecting their privacy and defending their personal values against the distorting and destroying impact of events. They are victims and not agents of history, which is what makes their world so distinct and so contrary to that of revolutionary leaders. They are not reactionaries. Turii Zhivago does not want to turn the clock back; he accepts social and economic changes brought about by the revolution. His quarrel with the epoch is

hot political but philosophical and moral. He believes in human virtues formulated by the Christian dream, and he asserts the value of life, of beauty, of love and of nature. He • rejects violence, especially when justified by abstract formulas and sectarian rhetoric. Only through goodness do we reach the supreme good, shys Zhivago; if the beast in man could be overcome through fear and violence, our idea would be a circus tamer with a whip and not Jesus Christ. Life cannot be forced into an artificial pattern by death sentences and prison camps, and it cannot be made better by legislation. Zhivago laughs at the Partisan chief, Liberius, for whom “the interests of the revolution and the existence of the solar system are of the game importance.” “Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying not because they are criminals but because they are like machines that have got out of control, like runaway trains,” says Zhivago.' And when a Communist speaks to him of Marxism as a science he replies: “Marxism is too uncertain of its ground to be a science. I do not know a movement more self-centred and further removed from the facts than Marxism . . Men in power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they do the utmost to ignore the truth. Politics do not appeal to me. I don’t like people who don’t. care about truth.”

Of course it would be wrong to attribute to Pasternak all the statements made by his protagonists pnd to identify the author completely with Doctor Zhivago. But there is .no doubt that the basic attitudes of Pasternak’s chief hero to reflect the poet’s intimate convictions. He believes fhat “every man is born a Faust, with a longing to grasp and experience and express everything in the world.” And he sees history as only part of a larger order. Every reader of “Doctor Zhivago” will he struck and enchanted by its beautiful descriptions of landscapes and seasons. Where time and space are the great protagonists of- Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” nature is at the centre of Pasternak’s work. Before his death Zhivago “reflected again that he conceived of history of what he called the course of history, not in the accepted way but by analogy with the vegetable kingdom.” Leaves and trees change during the cycle of seasons in a forest, but the forest itself rejnains the same—and so does history with its basic immobility beneath all external changes. And so does life, which can be understood and felt and lived only within the framework of nature.

This organic, I would say cosmic, feeling gives a particular dimension to Pasternak’s writing. Despite all*the trials and horrors and death it depicts, despite the defeat of its heroes, his novel leaves the impression of strength and faith. It is a book of hope and vitality. And it is a book of great revelation. Even if we admit that communism represents a part of Russian life, mentality and history, it does not encompass all the Russian people and all the country’s traditions and aspirations. A whole world of passion, yearnings, ideals and creativity exists next to or underneath the Communist mechanism. It lives, it stirs, it grows. Pasternak’s novel is the genuine voice of this other Russia.