Literary Views and Reviews

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28920, 13 June 1959, Page 3

Literary Views and Reviews

PASTERNAK’S APPRENTICESHIP FOR THE “ZHIVAGO” TASK

LReviewed by H.L.G ]

gfft Conduct, an Early Autobiography. and Other Works. (Translated by Alec Brown). Five Lyric Poems. (Translated by Lydia PasternakSlater). By Boris Pasternak. Elek Books. 304 pp.

The great public interest roused by the publication ot Pasternak's “Dr. Zhivago" and its 'steadily growing reputation as one of the' great novels of the century have naturally stimulated curiosity about Pasternak's earlier work. The novelist himself in “Zhivago” alluded to all his previous writings as only an apprenticeship’ or preparation for his masterpiece- to come: “He was like a painter who spent his life ' making sketches for a big picture he had in mind:” But even if the masterpiece had never come, he would have been among the best of modem writers. In spite of the difficulties of translation, which in Pasternak's ease are very great, it can be seen from the contents’of this volume that his poems, the product always of deep personal feeling, have a striking vigour and originality, and that his prose style is full of subtle impressions and powerful symbols. “Everything that went to the making of ‘Zhivago’,” as one of his translators has remarked, “was already present in his earlier work with the exception only of the suffering that enabled him to create a defeated character.”

The prose and poetry appearing in this selection, with the exception of one poem, ail appeared before 1933. During the Stalinist period Pasternak fell, silent, publishing only his translations (said to be magnificent) of Shakespeare Goethe, and poets of the smaller Soviet republics. He broke his silence only in 1941 to publish a few poems, mainly with patriotic l h ™“,' nSpired by the Second World War, but even these were disparaged as too personal by official Soviet critics; and he fell silent for another 12 years until the no n-religious poems from Zhivago” were published in periodicals.

The actual dates of publication of the earlier works here selected are, with one exception in a dedication, not indicated—an odd intentional on tte part of the editor, perhaps only an indication of the pub“Shers haste in getting the bobk out while the demand was likely to be good. (“The book which helped him to win the Nobel , lze ' , the dust-jacket proclaims.) But the dates can be ascertained from elsewhere The A arl !? s !. piece is “ n Tratto di Apelie (1915), a pre-Revolu-nonary work which reveals a light-hearted, youthful yet sophisticated Pasternak quite unlike his later self. It is a short story recounting the poet Heine’s answer to a challenge that he prove his “aristocracy of blood and spirit’’ in matters of love; gay and ribald, it would not be out of place in the “Decameron” or the “Canterbury Tales.” The light-heartedness has gone in the three other short stories—‘‘Zhenia’s Childhood,” sometimes known as “The Childhood of Lu vers,” “Letters from Tula” and “Aerial Ways”—which all appeared about: 1924-5. The autobiographical essay “Safe Conduct” came out in 1931. And the poems selected include “1905,” Pasternak’s long poem celebrating the abortive Revolution of that year which was published in 1927, poems from “My Sister, Life” (1918), “Themes and Variations” (1923), and one from “Vast Earth” (1945). The five poems translated by Pasternak’s sister, who lives in England, are from a longer selection of his verse which she first published in English in 1958. To most readers, “Safe Conduct” will be the most interesting piece in the volume, and it

is also the most straightforward and easy to read. Pasternak was born in 1890; he is half-Jewish, the eldest son of cultivated middle-class parents, who counted such men as Tolstoy and Rilke among their friends; his father was a painter and his mother a musician. In this short autobiography he -describes his devotion first to music, then to philosophy, and finally to poetry. Encouraged in his passionate desire to be a composer by Scriabin, a friend and neighbour of his parents, he gave it up because he had not absolute pitch, which he thought, in his youthful demand for perfection, was essential to a great composer. Philosophy, pursued with equal passion, first at the University of Moscow and then in Germany at the post-Hegelian Marburg School, was abandoned in its turn, too, because of Pasternak’s temperamental inclination to “live” the study “more powerfully than the subject as such demands.” How powerfully Pasternak lived is abundantly clear throughout “Safe Conduct,” and especially in the desperation of his first rejection in love, an experience which precipitated the abandonment of philosophy.

After some further travels in Europe—Venice, in particular, giving Pasternak intense delight—he returned about 1912 to Moscow and the career in literature which he had by now finally determined upon. He joined the ‘group of young experimental poets of the day, futurists and surrealists, but it was their Arch-Enemy, Mayakovsky, who excited his greatest admiration: Mayakovsky seemed to him genius incarnate.

In spite of the fact that they ultimately drifted apart politically —Mayakovsky becoming a selfappointed poet laureate of the new Communist regime—Pasternak was overwhelmed with grief at Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930: the description of the scene at Mayakovsky’s death cannot fail to remind many readers of the death of Zhivago; there is even a tram going by (symbolising “Moscow’s movement ... so Clearly part and parcel of the man who had shot himself) to recall the tram in which Zhivago died. Similarities will also be noticed _ in the treatment of Nature in “Safe Conduct.” As in “Zhivago,” there are the marvellously fresh and vivid pictures’of natural events, which always correspond to events in man. Pasternak’s vision of the unity between man and Nature is constant in his work; natural occurrences and poetical emotions are treated as aspects of one and the same unity. The passage in which he describes the outbreak of the First World War in “Safe Conduct” is characteristic: ’ _

When War was declared, the weather turned bad, rains began and the first tears of the womenfolk flowed. War was still a novelty and thereby a nasty jolt. People did not quite know how to take it. Plunging into a war was rather like taking one’s first summer dip in icy water. The passenger trains taking local men to call-up centres left by the old time-table. A train pulled out, to be followed, banging its head on the rails, by a surge of unnaturally tender lamenting, not at all like ordinary sobbing, and bitter as rowan berries. . . Such lamenting, which was maintained only during the first few months, was vaster far than the grief of the young Wives and mothers which it expressed. By special train it ran all along the line, station-masters saluted it when it came in sight, the telegraph poles let it pass. Visible from all sides in the leaden countenance of the

foul weather, it transformed the whole countryside, for it was a thing of burning fierceness, untouched since former wars, a thing to which people had become unused, but had dragged out overnight from some secret place to cart it down to the station, but which as soon as they could they would lead away again and through mire-deep forest rides transport back to its home. In the story “Aerial Routes” Pasternak is writing on two levels

as he does in “Zhivago.” Superficially, it is a story of adulterous love: at another level it is a comment upon the Revolution and its outcome (but not the favourable comment which- the editor in his misleading introduction seems to think, from his allusion to “the healthy logic of the revolution, with its new social demands”). The characters are symbolic, and the historical meaning of the story is to be sought both in the characters and in the fleeting images. Here again is ZhivagoPasternak’s interest in “the relation betwben imagery in, art and the logical structure of* ideas.” But by the time became to write “Dr. Zhivago” Pasternak had

achieved much greater clarity as an artist; and as a man, he was ready to take the risk of speaking out more clearly and less elusively.

In the rather difficult story “Letters from Tula” he does, however, at one or two points speak fairly clearly of the kind of

mediocrity that flourishes in postRevolutlonary Russia, the mediocrity that Zhivago so detests; and

of the terrible isolation of the poet in the midst of “lies, and the chaotic loss of clear ways.” And again, in a typical image, he speaks of “the forgotten, furious, fiery word ‘conscience’ ” lying buried under a pile of rubble. The story “Zhenia’s Childhood.” a study in the developing consciousness of a young girl, is of interest not only because it contains many of Pasternak’s recurring symbols, but because it shows what a remarkable perception of the movements of the human heart Pasternak has, and how good a writer in the narrower field of the personal life he could have been if he had not chosen to be a student of the age rather than of the individual isolated from his age. He has always been excited by external events and has wanted to take part in the modern age. At Marburg, as a student of philosophy, he was delighted at his teachers’ very lively approach to philosophy, not through lifeless “isms” but through the “white hot” source books of twentieth century scientific thought, and through the history of changing attitudes of mind. Returning to Moscow and the Revolution, he was exhilarated to be living in an age of cataclysm: this mood is reflected in the poem “1905.”

Like all the Russian middleclass intelligentsia, he did not sigh over the disappearance of Tsarism. But he was always an attentive observer of the Revolution rather than an active participant. He responded wholeheartedly at first to its dynamism and its aspiration, but as far as its actual achievements went he was one to wait and see. “In an epoch of rapid tempos it behoves one to think slowly,” he said once at a writers’ inference, when prodded to comments on the Soviet regime. He understood that this attitude meant isolation, and even danger:

In vain during the days of the Great Soviet, When seats are assigned to Supreme Authority, Is the poet’s place reserved; It is dangerous if it is not vacant. But he continued to write poetry—though it was poetry of the inner life, never political rhetoric. The poetry is always distinguished by its emotional intensity; Soviet critics tried to call it “decadent,” but this it never was. It was rather obscure because of Pasternak’s often unexpected yoking of images and association of ideas, his sudden interjections of colloquial speech, his breaking down of conventional rhythms and styles. But .it was never decadent. Pasternak was more revolutionary as a poet than many of the Poets Laureate of Communism: he had no desire to be popular.

To give your all—this is creation, And not—to deafen and eclipse. How shameful, you have no meaning, To be on everybody’s lips. Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in his poetry there is always the idea that permeates “Dr. Zhivago” —that Kfe lived intensely and honestly is more important than revolutionary politics.

It is not revolutions and upheavals That clear the road to new and better days, But revelations, lavishness and torments Of someone’s soul, inspired and ablaze.

He has always been deeply involved in the twentieth century, but he has preferred to live his life in retirement and obscurity, writing of his own feelings, the violence of the age only finding expressions in the images in his poetry, until the time was ripe to bear witness to the times he has lived through in “Dr. Zhivago.”