The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The approach to human problems of the official Soviet philosophy has been based on a crude misconception. It has always talked about “remaking life,” but “people who can talk in this way—even though they may have seen a good deal of the world—have never known life at all, have never felt its spirit, its soul. For them, human existence is a lump of raw material which has not been ennobled by their touch, which has never been worked over by them. But life is not a material, it is not a substantial thing. It is something that eternally renews itself, a principle that is always taking different shapes; it is always remaking and re-creating itself; it is away out of reach of our stupid theories.” The Communists are always thinking in terms of “building new worlds, transition periods.… That is all they have been taught, and it is all they understand. And do you know why they make all this fuss about these eternal preparations? From sheer lack of any definite competence, from the absence of real ability. Man is born to live and not to prepare to live. And life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life is such an absorbing and serious matter! So why try to substitute for it this childish harlequinade of immature fantasies,” such escapades as that of the schoolboys in Chekhov’s story, who decide to run away to America but who never get farther than the nearest Russian town. (The translators have omitted this amusing reference.)

  As for Marxism: when a provincial lawyer who professes the official creed while continuing to carry on his bourgeois business tells Zhivago that Marxism is “a positive science, the study of reality, the theory of historical conditions,” “Marxism a science?” the Doctor replies. “To argue that with someone one hardly knows is of course rather imprudent—but never mind about that. Marxism is too little in control of itself to be considered a science. The sciences are better equilibrated. Marxism and objectivity? I don’t know of any movement more completely shut in upon itself and remoter from the facts than Marxism. Everybody is preoccupied with proving himself in practice, and the people who are in power are compelled by the fable of their infallibility to exert their utmost efforts to keep their eyes averted from the truth. Politics mean nothing to me. I cannot care for people who are indifferent to truth.” The whole attempt on the part of Marxism to see everything in terms of classes, to force people into social camps and to align them against one another—Reds against Whites, peasants and workers, on the one hand, against nobility and bourgeoisie, on the other—is contrary to the real character of human nature. It disregards the fundamental Christian truth: that the vital unit is the individual. The very self-discipline, to some degree heroic, which has transformed the railroad worker’s young son into an uncompromising commissar imposes a false mold which in the long run would prove fatal. The thing that redeems him as a human being is that he cannot quite submit to this mold. When Zhivago confronts him, the Doctor discovers that this young man is not quite what his formidable reputation has led Zhivago to expect to meet. “It is a good thing,” Zhivago says, “when a man fails to live up to your expectation, when he is different from your previously conceived idea. To run true to type is the extinction of a man, his condemnation to death. If he cannot be assigned to a category, if he is not a model of something, a half of what is needed is there. He is still free from himself, he has acquired an atom of immortality.”

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  But now let us proceed to the story itself to see how this immortality is realized.

  The first chapters—except for the poetic impressionism—sound rather like Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. You are quickly switched from one to another of several groups of characters: a little boy attends his mother’s funeral and spends the night with his uncle in a monastery; a little Jewish boy, travelling with his lawyer father, sees a man throw himself out of the train; a little girl comes to Moscow with her French mother, a widow in reduced circumstances, who takes over a dressmaking business; a railroad workers’ strike on the eve of the 1905 revolution; a big Christmas-tree celebration in a well-to-do Moscow home. All these characters are interconnected, but one does not at first get the hang of them. In childhood and adolescence, we do not yet know whom we see, where we stand in relation to one another; we are simply a lot of young people together. But the pattern of the narrative soon changes with the coming of the First World War. Young Yury Andreyevich studies medicine and becomes Dr. Zhivago; he marries the daughter of a chemistry professor whose grandfather was an industrialist and landowner. Larisa, the daughter of the impoverished Frenchwoman, marries the studious son of a railroad worker who has been exiled for his political activities. The narrative now concentrates on Zhivago and Larisa; they emerge as the hero and heroine. Though married to others, they are separated from their families and thrown together at intervals by the vicissitudes of the war and the Revolution, and their intermittent, inescapable, and mutually inspiring love affair provides the vitalizing central charge that makes them resistant to pressures and clairvoyant in the midst of confusion. When the great social crisis comes, the background of their cultivated bourgeois world melts away, with many of its figures; other figures fall into place in the drama of the Civil Wars and the establishment of the new society; but Yury Andreyevich and Larisa Fyodorovna are both at once too much individualists, too much naturally immune to the materialistic doctrine, and too much products of the old education—and Larisa is not even a Russian—to accept the Communist creed and that method of dealing with human problems which it suggests to uneducated men recently risen to power.

  It should be noted in this connection that one of the most startling features of the book is Pasternak’s abstention—in spite of the sympathy with which he presents them—from any idealization, of either Tolstoy’s or Lenin’s kind, of the peasantry, “the toiling masses.” Not that the bourgeoisie is flattered. Nobody is flattered, nor is anyone condemned on the basis of office or class. There are no caricatures and no glorifications. The author never departs from his Christian ideal of taking every individual seriously as a soul which must be respected. Komarovsky, the shady lawyer, who stands for the worst of the old bourgeoisie, who is more or less responsible for the suicide of Zhivago’s reckless father (the man who throws himself off the train), who sets up Larisa’s mother in business and then seduces the daughter, is shown struggling against a real love for Larisa. And Pasha, the railroad worker’s son, whom Larisa afterward marries, is first made sympathetic by reason of his diligence and ambition; then arrogant and unpleasant when, having taken the name of Strelnikov (which suggests shooting people), he appears as the formidable commissar the very mention of whose name creates terror, and baits Zhivago in a menacing way as a potential counter-revolutionary; then made a pathetic figure when the Party authorities are after him and he takes refuge in the same house as Zhivago.

  There is a wonderful scene here: “They had been talking a long time, for hours, as only Russians in Russia talk, as talked particularly the frightened and anxious, the frantic and raving people that all Russians were at that time.… He was unable to stop talking, he held on as tightly as he could—in order not to be alone—to his conversation with the Doctor. Was he afraid of the gnawing of conscience or of his load of depressing memories, or was he burdened by the self-dissatisfaction in which a man becomes unbearable and hateful to himself and ready to die of shame.… This was the malady of the age, the revolutionary madness of the period. What really went on in their minds was quite different from their words and their outward appearance. The conscience of no one was clean. Everyone had good grounds for feeling that he was as guilty as possible, a secret criminal, an unmasked impostor. As soon as any pretext presented itself, there would burst forth and run to extravagant lengths a debauch of self-torturing imagination. People would run on into fantasies, they would falsely denounce themselves, not merely from the working of fear but as the result of a morbid destructive impulse, deliberately, in a state of metaphysical trance and that passion for self-condemnation which cannot be stemmed when one has once given way to it.”

  The commissar, now under
suspicion, has hoped to clear himself of the charges against him, but he knows from his own methods with others that he will not be given a chance to defend himself. The interesting point is made that he has elicited so many confessions of counter-revolutionary guilt that he is tempted by the guilt of his inhuman acts to make a “self-unmasking” confession not of these but of political offenses which he has not committed. He shoots himself in the morning, but not before, in the talk of the previous night, he has poured out—it is the first time in the novel that we have had a full statement of this—the whole apologia for his generation. This passage is too long to quote, but in its insight into the sources of the Communist faith of the early days of the Revolution, it is as important as the negative passages of Pasternak’s political commentary which are currently being printed in the press, out of context and in a way that is quite misleading. Zhivago, Pasha-Strelnikov begins by telling him, cannot understand his point of view: he has grown up in a different world from the one that Pasha came out of; and Pasha describes this world of overcrowding and dirt and privation, and describes the animus it gave the young people, who had always been aware of the indifference to them of the rich in the smart streets, to turn the social world upside down. Marxism has shown them “the root of the evil and where to find the remedy for it.” This resentment had been seething all over Europe through the whole of the nineteenth century, and the great revolutionary movement—with “its pitiless instruments devised in the name of pity”—had found its full expression in Lenin, with the result that “the immense figure of Russia, impossible to disregard,” had “suddenly risen before the eyes of the world, blazing up like a candle of redemption for all the slackness and the misfortunes of humanity.”

  Pasha has been wrecked as a human being by his attempt to play a Marxist role. Zhivago and Larisa, who do not attempt roles, will outlive him, but they, too, are to be destroyed. Life in Moscow becomes so difficult in the days after the Revolution that Yury Andreyevich decides to get as far away as possible, to take his family to the Ural Mountains, where his father-in-law had had an estate and where he hopes to find some peace of mind. But the East, he finds, is even more disrupted and dangerous. He is kidnapped and pressed into service by a band of wandering partisans who are fighting the White leader Kolchak in Siberia. He has come upon Larisa again in the nearby town of Yuratin, in which, before Pasha’s enlistment, she had been living with him and teaching school. She had married her young proletarian out of a kind of feeling of duty that she ought, on account of her own disadvantages, to identify her interests with his, yet her natural “affinity,” her deep understanding, is all with Yury Andreyevich. Pasha had already become aware that Larisa could not really love him—“he was jealous of her very thoughts, of the mug from which she drank, of the pillow on which she lay”—and he goes away to the war to prove himself to himself, to impress her, to compete with what she represents (and this in spite of the fact that his original revolutionary impulse has been spurred by his desire to protect her, a finer nature than his, from the indignity of her early helplessness). Missing in action and supposed to be dead, he has escaped from his German captors and re-created himself as “Strelnikov”—also, as Larisa knows, partly to build up something so strong that she cannot refuse to admire it. But he has never—for all his impressive exterior—succeeded in getting his inner morale to the point where he dares to come back to her. And in the meantime, Yury Andreyevich, escaped from the partisan band, has returned to Larisa. His wife, as the result of his disappearance, has made her way back to Moscow and so to Paris. He had already been having a love affair with Larisa, and he now begins living with her in Yuratin. But they both now come under suspicion, she as “Strelnikov’s” wife, he on account of his original thinking. While working in a local hospital, he lectures on evolution, and his views about the adaptation of organisms to environment are not sufficiently mechanical for the provincial Marxists. Though he is valued as a diagnostician, he finds that when he talks about intuition, they begin to shy away from him: they are afraid of a trap, a heresy. He and Larisa do not have “the right attitude.” A counter-revolutionary group with a hidden store of arms is discovered at this point in Yuratin, and they know that they may be pounced upon at any moment. They get away to the place in the country—the estate of his wife’s father—in which Yury Andreyevich has lived with his family.

  This episode of their life in the country—the last, desperate phase of their love—is unlike anything else in fiction: full of the tension of anguish and terror yet also of nobility and exaltation. It is winter; the house is freezing. Zhivago has to keep the stove going; Larisa has to clean up the rooms. Larisa’s little daughter is with them. Her mother tries to give her lessons, and sometimes, when she is out with her sled, the lovers’ hands happen to touch, and they drop their time-consuming housework for interludes of passionate tenderness. (The translators have castrated this passage by omitting “the minutes ran into hours” and by changing its whole rhythm.) They know that it is only a question of time before the police will find them. Yet Zhivago, when Larisa has gone to bed, returns to his early poetry, and in the course of these nocturnal sessions, his creative activity renews itself. “After two or three stanzas that came pouring and several metaphors by which he was himself surprised, the work took possession of him, and he began to feel the presence of what is called inspiration. The correlation of the forces that govern artistic genius had as it were been turned upside down. It is no longer the man and the state of his soul, for which he is seeking expression, that are in the ascendancy now, but the language with which he seeks to express it. This language, which is the place of origin and the repository of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and to speak for the man and is completely transformed into music, not in terms of outward audible sonorities but in terms of the impetuosity and the power of its inward current. Now, like the great rolling mass of the torrent of a river, by its own movement turning as if on a lathe the stones that lie on its bed and revolving the wheels of mills, the onrushing speech itself, by force of its own laws, molds in its course, in passing, the music and the rhythm of the poem, and a thousand other forms and configurations which are even more important than these but which have not yet been recognized or taken into consideration, which have not yet even been given names. At such moments, Yury Andreyevich felt that the main work was not done by him but somehow somewhere above him, that it had found him and taken control of him—the poetry and thought of the world in its present phase and that which is coming, that which is following in orderly progression, the next step which has become inevitable in poetry’s historical development. And he felt himself only the occasion, the point d’appui, for it to get itself into movement.” He looks at the girl and Larisa asleep side by side in their bed. “The cleanness of the linen, the cleanness of the rooms [the achievement of the women’s work], the purity of their features, fusing with the purity of the night, the snow and the stars” make him “exult and weep with a feeling of the triumphant purity of existence.” Then at three o’clock he is torn from his concentration by a plaintive and dismal sound. He sees far off, over the wild waste of snow, four shadows that make little marks on it. Starved wolves have smelled the horse in the stable.

  This chapter, at the end of which Zhivago is to lose Larisa, is the emotional climax of this extraordinary book, in which everyone is degraded or ruined or crushed but in which the positive values—Christianity and love and art—are presented with such overwhelming power that the barbarities against which they must assert themselves seem lacking in long-range importance. But Komarovsky, the indestructible rascal who has been both Larisa’s and her mother’s lover, and whom Larisa has once tried to shoot, eventually turns up in Yuratin, and Zhivago—to save Larisa’s life—allows him to take her to the Far East. To induce her to go, he has promised her to follow, but when she has left, he makes his furtive and difficult way—mostly on foot—back to Moscow, where it is possible for him only to a limited extent to pick
up his former life. His old friends have managed to adapt themselves. One of them has been arrested, imprisoned, and exiled for his unorthodox opinions, and he sickens Yury Andreyevich by telling him how much good has been done him by a brainwashing at the hands of the examining magistrate. Zhivago has lost first his family, then Larisa; though he continues to practice medicine, he has no chance for a real career, and though he publishes, in a semi-private way, a few papers on historical and scientific subjects, and though these papers make a certain impression, his work cannot be freely accepted. He marries the daughter of his former servant.

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  It is impossible, however, to summarize, in an article such as this, what happens in Doctor Zhivago, and any attempt at a thorough analysis would be likely to reach almost the proportions of the studies devoted to Joyce. The story itself is so long and complex—it covers so much ground—that a mere recapitulation would be impossible within the scope of a review, and one finds, threaded in and out of the story, a phase-by-phase chronicle of Soviet policy, and a discussion of the development of Russian literature which touches on almost all its great figures from Pushkin to the school of modern poetry which is represented by Pasternak himself. There is also involved in the story a historical-political fable—see Larisa’s relations with Zhivago, Komarovsky, and Pasha—of the kind that since the time of Turgenev has been traditional in Russian fiction, as well as (what for Pasternak is far more important) a kind of religious parable. The reader will not at first notice this last, though it constitutes the core of the novel. The incidents succeed one another with so much invention and vivacity, with such range of characterization and description, each submerges us so completely in the atmosphere of its moment of Russian life, we are carried along so absorbedly by the vodka parties, the unexpected encounters, the journeyings (the chaotic interminable train trip of Zhivago and his family to the Urals that occupies a whole long chapter), the campaigns (the adventures of the partisans in the forest is a whole story in itself), the conversations (the nocturnal talks, both comic and desolating, between Zhivago, bored, irritated, and sleepy, and the fervent young partisan leader, who shoots his men for distilling vodka but has discovered the virtues of cocaine as an ideological stimulus and is depleting the Doctor’s medical store and keeping him awake at night with his hopped-up pep talks), and the intensely personal love affairs, at once so exciting and so dolorous, that are always being broken up by public events—we have so much the illusion of following life that we only come gradually to realize the poetic significance of these happenings. For if Gogol’s Dead Souls is, as he called it, a “poem,” Doctor Zhivago is also a poem. Though we may think, when we begin it, that we are entering again the familiar world of social fiction—the “group” novel of intertwined strands, such as Sartre’s Existentialist series, “Les Chemins de la Liberté,” which has now been bogged down for so long, simply, it would seem, for the reason that Sartre has changed his political line, or Leonov’s Road to the Ocean, in which a real Russian talent falsifies and nullifies itself by submitting to a Soviet formula—we presently become aware that Doctor Zhivago is more like an epic than even War and Peace, that the landscapes, the personalities, the tragic outbursts, the comic anecdotes (usually as much horrible as comic) are poetic in their relief and their meaning. This book, in which everything seems real, is not at all “realistic.” It exhibits, in fact—as a whole as well as in individual episodes—in spite of its immediacy of detail, of all the costumes and accents and jargon and paraphernalia and living conditions of twentieth-century Russia, something of the technique and the spirit of the skazka, the Russian folk tale. The narrative is full of coincidences, each of which is in itself quite plausible but the repeated occurrence of which might shake our “suspension of disbelief” if we were not so much under the spell of what is really a legend, a fable. We are no more surprised or put out by the fact that the characters of Doctor Zhivago are always meeting one another again in different guises and changed states of mind than we are in a fairy tale when the wretched old crone whom the youngest of three brothers has been the first to treat with courtesy turns out to be a powerful spirit who can determine success or failure.