Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago. Translated form the Russian by Max Hayward and
Manya Harari. 510 pages, London (Collins and Harvill Press), [1958], 21 shillings.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
Poor Pasternak.
This distinguished lyric poet — treated as a lay-figure, picked up like a handy club by the political propagandabruisers of West and East to belabor each other over the head with in the most spectacular international literary cause célèbre for many a year — must be feeling morally blackand-blue. And all he did was to write a novel — a novel of no particular distinction which, authored by someone else or published in other circumstances or at another time, would have passed relatively unnoticed.
This is not to say that the novel is either untalented or uninteresting.
As for talent, its language, we might expect from Pasternak, is repeatedly lighted by flashes of poetry - a candle-flame in a window "keeping a watch on the passing carriages and waiting for someone" ; a "moonlit night as astonishing as mercy' ; thunder "as if a plough had been dragged right across the sky" : "a loud talkative wind in the night" - such brilliant touches are legion. Descriptions of nature and atmosphere, which in most novels are skipscanned by the impatient reader, here hold him — sometimes breathless. Conceived in the broad-canvas many-charactered tradition of Gogol or Tolstoï, the first third of the book, devoted to the early and separate lives of the personages who are later to interweave a tangled skein, builds up increasing interest in them. With the exception of a few excessive coïncidences, the plotting is not implausible. It is, in sum, a competently planned and skilfully written book by a man of patently great literary gifts.
What about it is disappointing, boring, and even at times positively embarrassing, is its content, particularly in the second half. Dr Zhivago turns out to be just one more novel of petty-bourgeois intellectual disillusion with life in the world as it is, like hundreds published in the West since Mr TS Eliot opened the period with his tone-setting poem, The Waste Land, one more novel of disappointment in the revolution by people who never understood it in the first place, like scores published in the West by tired-radical writers. In such works, the principal characters are typical "advanced" middle-class intellectuals of the period of the exhaustion of bourgeois culture sagging toward ultimate collapse: intellectuals in the sense that they are neither creative "makers" nor active "doers" but merely critical observers, who sit around thinking sensitively about their souls, enquiring what is life's "meaning,' " groping for some all-explanatory philosophy or religion, and resenting changes that they cannot predict, guide, prevent, accept, or even explain. Vaguely "liberal" and "progressive" in politics, they do not join in them, and, expressing their own political notions in language of lofty imprecision and intuitional impressionism, consider the scientific terminology of Marxism to be so much insupportably repetitious jargon. Their intellectuality has outrun their intelligence, and their fascination with their own psyches has distorted their judgment of the comparative importance of their individual actions and of external events. Their resultantly pretentious selfcentredness makes them, to anyone with a more objective sense of proportion, passably tedious. In fine, they are not particularly evil or malevolent, but just supernumerary.
Against a Paris, New York, or London background in some commonplace year, such accounts of ever so sensitive introversion have proved tiresome enough ; what makes Dr Zhivago rather shocking and indeed a little grotesque is that the egocentric activities and solipsistic soul-searchings of
65 its principal characters are played out against the titanic background of some of the most tremendous events in the world's history - the Russian revolutions and the consequent upheavals - in which these personages are non-committed, non-participant, and pretty nearly non-partisan.
Granted, a portrayal of the civil war in Siberia, for example, mounting reciprocally through brutality, reprisal, and counter-reprisal to a hallucinating horror of cruelty, is a more realistic picture than the usual portrayal by the highacters are plainly unable to distinguish which side started the civil war and began this nightmare of competitive/terror, and indifferent to the fact that one side was fighting for the ideals of liberating socialism and the other for the reëstablishment of the overthrown regime of exploitation of man by man, then what we face is not objectivity but just plain insensitivity, and on a historic scale.
The fact that so large a part of the action is laid in Siberia results from the protagonist's decision to get away from the central arèna, to withdraw from history, as it were, by abandoning the medical profession in Moscow and taking his ‚family to a remote rural spot where he can try to engage in self-sufficient subsistence farming. This decision is "nowise fortuitous but most characteristically flows from the hero's entire egocentric attitude to the gigantic struggle by which he is surrounded and which he sees only in terms of the undoubted privations and vexations in daily life that result. It also very probably reflects the author's sense of his inability to handle the tremendous period in its full scope and sweep and his resultant need to reduce his canvas by this device to a few figures (if possible a microcosm), much in the same vay and for the same reasons that Mr Ernest Hemingway did in his far better (indeed, very fine) novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls - and as Tolstoï in his masterwork, War and Peace (to which Dr Zhivago has been ludicrously compared by interested Western propagandists), did not.
It is also characteristic that, in a gallery of quite elaborate portraits of people in the period of the revolution and the civil war, there is not one of a serious communist. The antiWhite partisan leader, Liberius Avercievich Mikulitsin, though fighting on the Red side, is hardly a communist by any serious definition. And the others, briefly touched on in passing, are sketched as clowns and chatterers. It is tempting to hypothesize that Pasternak, living decade after decade in an ambience where Stalin's nightmare distortions were presented as communism, fell into the vulgar booby-trap of assuming that Stalinism is somehow inherent in Bolshevism, and unconsciously committed the anachronism of treating the Leninism of 1917-23 as if it were the Stalinism of 20 to 30 years later. But it is far more probable that Pasternak, no party member, simply never understood communism in the first place, and that his offhandedly pejorative treatment of it in Dr Zhivago comes not from any vengeful and misdirected hatred of communism, but from an ignorant private dismissal of it.
The parallelism of the disenchantment between Pasternak's novel and the spate of similar novels in Western countries is also not fortuitous, but has identical class origins. That is, it arises from the fact that they treat characters whose attitudes and interests reflect bourgeois culture in decline. What! in the Soviet Union? But yes. Fully formed long before the revolution exploded around them, and on the
66 whole uninterested in if not hostile to it, these people continued to be fundamentally unchanged by the social change around them. The "solutions" to which they cling in their stoïcal depression are enough to make a reader heave a discouraged sigh : Zhivago at the end is still clutching some vague notions of Christianism and other philosophies, much as his Western opposite numbers sit around practising Zen Buddhism or seriously discussing Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and
In fine, if Dr Zhivago is, because of its footling characters' tiresome solipsism, disappointing as an artistic production, it has great documentary interest precisely as a portrayal of this disappearing sub-class, and if, in half a century, it is no longer read as literature, it will very probably be still providing a rich mine for social anthropologists.
Pasternak would of course have the formal right, like any novelist, to reply that the beliefs of his protagonist are not necessarily his own, and that he was only objectively, with no interjection of auctorial opinions, portraying ideas and behavior for which he has no sympathy; and indeed he might plausibly back up this argument by pointing out that the gradual demoralization and ultimate collapse of his hero are intended to show the bad end to which persons of such mentality are very likely to come (the mediocre poems of Dr Zhivago also contribute to this hypothesis in that it seems impossible that they were ever seriously written as his own by Pasternak). If this hypothesis were true, the novel would have constituted a remarkable tour de force, and the East-West battle over it would prove to have been such a gargantuan irony (since each side would thus have been defending, by misunderstanding, the opposite of the position that it thought it was) that one is tempted gleefully to accept the hypothesis. But alas, from the internal evidence, the author's identification with his hero and his sympathy for the circle around him are too obvious, and one must with regret psychologically equate Pasternak and Zhivago.
The East-West dispute itself gives grounds for further speculation, and also requires the rectification of some exaggerations created in its course by Western propagandists.
On the question whether, in attributing Pasternak the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Committee was actuated primarily by stupidity or malice, there seems little doubt. It can of course take refuge behind the fact that the prize given for the work of a writer's whole lifetime, and Pasternak's reputation as a poet is a solid one. But his main poetic work was written and published prior to 1934, and the Committee's timing in awarding the prize only when Pasternak had just written a first novel that was largely suppressed by the Soviet authorities, really gives the show away, and any pretense that the Committee was naïve can be met only by benign or angry incredulity.
POURTH INTERNATIONAL
Where there was stupidity, equaled by malice, was in the hysterical and foul-mouthed reaction of a sector of the Soviet bureaucracy. Even from its own ignoble point of view, its behavior was selt-deteating, since, instead of letting a nine-days' wonder pass and be forgotten, capitalism's provocative honor a further aureole of martyrdom. And more seriously, from the viewpoint of those of us who call untiringly for cultural liberty in the US S R, China, and the "people's democracies," it was undeniably a discouraging set-back.
But here it is necessary to make a sharp corrective in the picture of cultural Schrecklichkeit luridly daubed by capitalist propagandists. The attack on Pasternak was very far from being unanimous. No top writer contributed to the
No top party leader participated in the attacks, the highest-ranking violent) detractor being the Moscow Komsomol leader. The majority of writers and of students did not take part in the campaign of denigration. There is even some reason believe that Pasternak may have been protected sub rosa by Khrushchev himself. For the attack was obviously launched by the Stalinist intellectual die-hards against the general liberal policy in the sector of the arts, and it is quite possible that through Pasternak it was Khrushchev himself who was ultimately aimed at. But the Stalinist apparatniki this time ran into broad resistance in both artistic and university circles.
Nor were the measures taken, though spectacular, extremely
Pasternak was not arrested, or molested, or even deprived of his government-provided dasha (like poets of his calibre in Western countries, whose governments also naturally supply them with country-houses and secure incomes [?]). Though his book was not published in mass editions, he was forced to refuse the Nobel Prize, and he was expelled from the writers' union, he was not prevented from further writing ; and it now appears that he was able to print and distribute privately several thousand copies of his book. In short, bad as the situation is, something has changed in the Soviet Union: there has been a deplorable relapse in freedom on the cultural front, but it is only partial, there is no return to the Stalin-Zhdanov period, and the pattern continues to be two steps forward, one step back.
Within the framework of this process, the Pasternak "case" will soon diminish from the grotesque hullabaloo of recent months to its proper proportions, which are, in terms of the novel's merits, relatively minor. Poor buffeted Pasternak: let us hope that, after this infelicitous incursion into the field of the novel, he will return to Helicon and produce more poetry of the early quality that gave him fame.
PATRICK O'DANIEL
Ners of the World Workers'
Movement and of the International