Literary Views and Reviews PASTERNAK PRESENTS THE DRAMA OF RUSSIA

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28774, 20 December 1958, Page 3

Literary Views and Reviews PASTERNAK PRESENTS THE DRAMA OF RUSSIA

[Reviewed by R.L.G.J

Doctor Zhivago. By Boris Pasternak, Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari. Collins and Harvill Press. 510 pp.

The circumstances of the publication of Pasternak’s novel are p well known that there is little need to repeat them. Most people gre aware that “Doctor Zhivago” has never yet been published in Russia (nor is likely to be under the present regime), that it was published in Italy in spite of attempts on the part of the Russian authorities to recover the manuscript, and that it has since been awarded the Nobel Prize, which Pasternak first accepted and then—apparently under compulsion —refused. We are aware, too, that the period of the literary “thaw” in Russia, during which Pasternak was encouraged to write his novel, is now over. Like the political thaw, it was fairly quickly perceived by the authorities to be too dangerous; instead of a gentle melting of the ice they found themselves faced with the floodwaters of a Hungarian Revolution, and a “Doctor Zhivago.” There will be no more “Doctor Zhivagos.” There will probably be no more Pasternaks either. Future Russian novelists (if and when any of any stature emerge) will be Soviet-educated authors, with all that that implies. Pasternak, born in 1890, was educated in Russia and in Germany, before the First World War. His decision to continue living and working under the Soviet regime did not imply, as his novel amply demonstrates, any acquiescence in Communist doctrine or methods; though apparently, like many other middle-class intellectuals of the time intoxicated by the idea of an idealised students’ revolution, he did have his moments of initial enthusiasm for the Revolution, moments soon succeeded by the thought that assails Doctor Zhivago: “Was it possible that in one short moment of over-sensi-tive generosity he had allowed himself to be enslaved for ever?” As is generally known, Pasternak has kept himself alive all these years by innocuous employments that kept him out of trouble. He has worked in the Library of the Commissariat for Education; he has written poetry, said to be safely obscure; he has engaged in the politically innocuous work of translating Shakespeare. But his ambition, it would seem, has always been the ambition he ascribes in his novel to Doctor Zhivago (who is a poet as well as a doctor):

Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of writing a book in prose, a book of impressions of life in which he would conceal, like buried •ticks of dynamite, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about. He was too young to write such a book; instead he wrote poetry. He was like a painter who spent his. life making sketches for a big picture he had in rfiind.

Pasternak has brought this ambition to magnificent fruition in “Doctor Zhivago, ’ ’ which is not only, in his own apt image, political dynamite—for he has certainly spoken out and abandoned the politically innocuous this time—but a literary work of the highest order. It is by far the greatest novel to come out of Russia since the Revolution. In fact, it has no peer in Soviet writing, and can be compared only with the masterpieces of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, in whose tradition it belongs.

To examine the novel first from the political point of view: It tells the story of the life of Doctor Zhivago (born about 1890) through the years immediately before, during and after the Revolution, describing the continual frustration of his attempts to achieve a modicum of normal human happiness and tranquillity, to develop his outstanding talents, until he dies an ignominous death on a tram, a worn-out failure crushed by the machinery of the Revolution. Dr. Zhivago is a “non-political.” But the very nature of his non-involvement in politics is a fundamental criticism of Soviet and Marxist principles and practise. He believes that life is for living, not for remaking; “When I hear people speak of reshaping life it makes me lose my self-control and I fall into despair,’’ says Dr. Zhivago. And Lara, the woman Doctor Zhivago loves, echoes this idea at his death: j The riddle of life, the riddle of ®eath,. the beauty of genius, the beauty of loving—that yes, we under“ood- As for such petty trifles as je-shaping the world—these things, 00 thank you they are not for us.

Lare and Zhivago are united by w hat separates them from the jest of the world in the days following the Revolution; they do t>ot follow the herd: as Pasternak says, in the words of another character.

It is always a sign of mediocrity P ( eop!c when they herd together, “ er their group loyalty is to ®oloyyev or to Kant or to Marx. The ryjn is only sought by individuals, they break with those who do not love it enough.

This sort of thing can hardly Popular with the Kremlin, any p°re than the idea that “what has for centuries raised men above lhe beast is not the cudgel but hu inward music: the irresistible p^er . of unarmed truth, the attraction of its example.” Pasyoak has no belief in the kind 01 nationalism that has been Pushed by the Soviet authorities — there are no nations but only Persons”— and bitter experience has proved to him that nothing han be built up by violence and destruction: “People must be drawn to good by goodness.” His contempt for the Soviet regime lies partly in that —like all totalitarian regimes—it has engaged the second-rate and the Faustian element in “fan, his genius and originality: Ur -_ Zhivago, a Faustian figure, Writes in his diary:

t Wat is it that prevents me from ueing useful as a doctor or a writer? Uk k is not so much our pri.’Pon® or out wanderings or our Instantly changing and unsettled riv?’ as 1116 Power in our day of of th e cliche—all this S?, of the future,’ ‘building a new Th. c’ ‘torch-bearers of mankind. first time you hear it you think: fn « . Wea lth of imagination.’ But wet the reason it is so pompous X that ther? is no imagination at back of it, because the thought * *®cond-rate.

.He finds revolutionaries horrifyZ,? *‘ n °t as criminals, but as •“ichines that have got out of

I 1 ? 5 ® a run-away train,” and his chief quarrel with them is that, above all, they have no gift for ordinary living:

out ,that those who inini?nvthinJe^ lutl P n l . aren,t at home mon” th e^ e P t cha P«e and turmoil, that s their native elementSS. a > r .S\ 1 , happy with Inmmg For ’ tISS, tha P ° n ,, a world scale transitional periods. about n2 ?i?ithi e J Se ’ don,t know aoout anything except that And cessant Shirt S? y there 18 thls in " cessant whirl of never-endine nrp. parations? It’s because they haven’t g3ted real th f y are un “ giiied. Man is bom to live not to prepare for life. ’

, o ? aBternak names no names (Stalin never occurs, Lenin and 1 rotsky only once or twice in passing) and he makes few specific political indictments, except for one or two attacks on coland a reference to the NEP as “the most false and ambiguous of all Soviet periods.” But his whole attitude to life is in patent opposition to the way of the Kremlin. At the end of the book one of his characters

describes with particular force how the coming of the Second World War to Russia meant a tremendous feeling of liberation to the whole Russian people:

I think that collectivisation was both a mistake and a failure, and because that couldn’t be admitted, every means of intimidation had to be used to make people forget how to think and judge for themselves, to force them to see what wasn’t there, and to maintain the contrary of what their eyes told them . . . And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the life, a relief because it broke the spell of the dead letter. It was not only felt by men in your position, in concentration camps, but by everyone without exception, at home and at the front, and they all took a deep breath and flung themselves into the furnace of this deadly, liberating struggle with real joy, with rapture. But there is a sad irony in what Pasternak says about the postwar years in Russia. Although the enlightenment and liberation which had been expected to come after the war had not come with victory a presage of freedom was in the air throughout these post-war years, and it was their only historical meaning. The fate of his own book has been denial enough of this tempered optimism.

The attitude to life from which Pasternak’s criticism of communism springs might be called a near-Christian attitude. He expresses it through the words of an atheist uncle of Dr. Zhivago right at the beginning of the novel:

It is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels. Now what is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain upsurge of spirit. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment, and for this, everything necessary has been given us in the Gospels. What is it? Firstly, the love of one’s neighbour—the supreme form of living energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself And secondly, the two concepts which are the main part of the make-up of modern man —without them he is inconceivable —the ideas of free personality and of life regarded as sacrifice.

But “Doctor Zhivago” is a novel, not just a philosophical statement or a political document. There have been other Russian philosophers, like Berdyaev, who have thought along these lines, other writers, both Russian and foreigners—notably men like Barmine, Kravchenko and Gouzenko —who have told us the truth about life in Soviet Russia. But none of these have been artists. Valuable as their political testimony has been, they have given us only the facts, and as Dr. Zhivago says in one of several discussions on the nature of art that occurred in the novel, “facts don’t exist until man puts into them something of his own, some measure of his own wilful, human genius—of fairy tale, of myth.” The emotional tension built up by Pasternak’s literary method has exactly this tremendous quality of bathing the facts in the light of myth. It depends very largely on an extensive and highly charged use of image and symbol in keeping with Zhivago-Pasternak’s preoccupation with “the relation between imagery in art and the logical structure of ideas.” It is a literary method at first sight unfamiliar to modern Western readers. With our mental habits induced by the reading of purely realistic novels, we are at first distracted by the extravagant use of coincidence in the narrative. And the symbolism, even the Christian symbolism, is at first as unfamiliar as a Russian ikon. But the whole effect is magnificently real. This, we feel overwhelmingly, is what life in Russia during the revolutionary years was really like. And each episode in the novel is as full of the concrete detail of everyday life as it is of and symbolism. (In fact, it is one of Pasternak’s recurring ideas that the greatest art, like the art of Pushkin and Chekov, and the greatest religious ideas, especially those of Christ, have always been close to everyday life and commonplace things.) We are at first reading also confused by the very large number of minor characters of all types and classes—-peasant,

bourgeois and revolutionary—who fill the vast pattern of the narrative. They occur briefly, swiftly characterised in a vivid but apparently isolated incident, then disappear not to recur for perhaps 50 or a 100 pages. But if the novel is read with enough attention, not only can the characters all be recognised as they appear and re-appear but something of Pasternak’s marvellously intricate construction can begin to be appreciated. Each incident and character falls into place in the grand design. And we begin to feel the effect of the symbolism, which is attached to every character and incident and can be discovered at several different levels.

■ The word “zhivago” apparently comes from a Russian root suggesting “life,” and when this is known the symbolism associated with the figure of the doctor-poet becomes fairly obvious. Similarly, Lara, the woman with whom he is isolated after the Revolution, appears to represent Russia and her sufferings; “her shadow on the wall was the shadow of helpless, watchful self-defence.” Before the Revolution she is betrayed by a seducer of the Old School; later her husband (an idealistic and logical revolutionary) abandons her to “right her wrongs” by becoming a military leader of the Reds in the Civil War; eventually she, too, is crushed by the machinery of Society and disappears “forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camp in the north.” And if Lara represents Russia, then Yezhov, Dr. Zhivago’s mysterious half-brother with the Khirgiz eyes who is a power in the Communist regime, represents death. But there is also Christian symbolism, with associations between Lara and Mary Magdalene, and perhaps implicit suggestions of Christ about Doctor Zhivago. The method provokes endless possible suggestions, for the symbolism becomes very complicated at times; in fact, some episodes are perhaps overcharged with symbolism. But even to grasp a little of it immensely increases the meaning and emotional impact of the novel.

It is easier to apprehend the simpler symbolism in which Pasternak—like the poet that he primarily is—uses the Russian climate or countryside to heighten the drama going on in the minds of his characters, or to presage events to come, in the manner of Shakespeare. Wolves howl before Dr. Zhivago and Lara are parted for ever, a blizzard rages as he stands in the street reading the news of the formation of the first Soviet of People’s Commissars in Petersburg, the scene in which the “Cossacks’* charge into the crowd in the riots of 1905 stands out in a prophetic red glow, the frozen crimson rowanberries fall on. the snow, and the rowanberry tree holds out its white- arms (like the white arms of Lara) above a scene of fearful sufferings when the Red partisans are fighting the White Russians. Russia itself is constantly present. The novel, which includes in its tremendous sweep city, village and countryside from Moscow to Siberia, is steeped in Pasternak’s almost mystic love of his country. He loves and knows the people, the country and the literature of Russia with an extraordinary intensity. His knowledge of Russian thought and writing permeate the conversations with his intimates and the extracts from Dr. Zhivago’s diary (which are interspersed throughout the novel and, together with the poems that appear at the end, combine to elucidate his spiritual development). It is probably this kind of mystic patriotism and belief in Russia’s destiny (a belief which has a long history in Russian thought, and which persists in Pasternak in spite of everything) that made Pasternak unable to leave Russia at the beginning; Dostoyevsky in his place might easily have done the same. The figure of Tonya in the novel suggests the tension in Pasternak’s mind on this subject. Tonya is Dr. Zhivago’s wife: in the symbolism of the novel she seems to represent Old Russia and its virtues. Tonya and Dr. Zhivago are separated by the events following the Revolution, and eventually Tonya is forced to emigrate. Dr. Zhivago, like Pasternak, remains to write “what he should have written long ago and had always wished to write, but never could.”

It obviously took great courage and faith for Pasternak to write “Doctor Zhivago.” The world admires his courage. But if the question should be asked, as it quite legitimately might: has this novel been over-praised because of the outside world’s intense interest in the circumstances of its publication? Or has the Nobel Prize perhaps been awarded as much in recognition of the author’s courage as on the merits of his novel? then the answer must surely be that it is not only Pasternak’s courage we admire: the novel stands on its own literary merit as a superb work of art.