Why Read the Classics? (27 page)

We who, as direct or indirect descendants of Hegel, understand history and man’s relationship with the world in a different, if not diametrically opposite, way, find it difficult to agree with Pasternak’s ‘ideological’ passages. But the narrative parts, inspired by his moving vision of history-nature (particularly in the first half of the novel), communicate that aspiration towards the future which we recognise as something with which we can identify.

The mythical moment for Pasternak is the 1905 revolution. The long poems written during his ‘committed’ phase, in 1925-27, dealt with that epoch,
⁴
and
Doctor Zhivago
starts from there. It was a time when the Russian people and the intelligentsia entertained very different potential and hopes: politics, morality and poetry all marched together without any order but at the same pace. ‘ “Our lads are firing”, thought Lara. And she was not referring only to Nika and Pasha, but to the whole city which was firing. “Good, honest lads”, she thought. “They are good, that’s why they’re firing” ’ (p.69; 55). The 1905 revolution contained for Pasternak all the myths of youth and all the points of departure for a certain kind of culture; it is a peak from which he surveys the jagged terrain of this first half-century and he sees it in perspective, sharp and detailed in the nearer slopes, and, as we move towards today’s horizon, smaller and less focused in the mist, with only the odd sign standing out.

The revolution is the key moment for Pasternak’s essential poetic myth: nature and history become one. In this sense, the heart of the novel, the point where it reaches its peak in terms of style and thought, is part V, the revolutionary days of 1917, at Melyuzeyevo, a little hospital city full of back streets:

At Melyuzeyevo we see Zhivago living a moment of suspended happiness, between the fervour of revolutionary life and the idyll, still only hinted at, with Lara. Pasternak conveys this state in a wonderful passage (p. 184; 131) about nocturnal noises and perfumes, in which nature and human bustle
mingle together, as in the houses of Verga’s Aci Trezza, and the tale unravels without needing anything to happen, composed entirely of the relationship between the facts of existence, as in Chekhov’s The Steppe’, the story that is the prototype for so much modern narrative.

But what does Pasternak mean by revolution? The novel’s political ideology is summed up in that definition of socialism as the realm of authenticity, which the author puts into the mouth of his protagonist, in spring 1917:

An ideology of ‘spontaneity’, as we would say in political jargon: and we well understand the subsequent disillusionment. But it does not matter that these words (and the other excessively literary ones which Zhivago utters when applauding the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October) will be proved bitterly wrong several times in the course of the novel: its positive pole always remains that ideal of a society of authentic beings, glimpsed in the springtime of the revolution, even when the portrayal of reality emphasises more and more the negative character of that reality.

Pasternak’s objections to Soviet communism seem to me to move in two directions: against the barbarism, the ruthless cruelty unleashed by the civil war (we shall return to this topic, which has a preponderant role in the novel); and against the theoretical and bureaucratic abstractions in which the revolutionary ideals become frozen. This second polemic, which is the one that most interests us, is not objectified in characters, situations or imagery,
⁵
but only in occasional reflections. And yet there is no doubt that the really negative pole is this one, implicitly or explicitly. Zhivago returns to the town in the Urals after spending several unwilling years with the partisans, and sees the walls covered with posters:

We must not forget that the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1917 actually stemmed from protests against a period of ‘abstraction’, that of the First World War:

(It is easy to see in these lines—written, I believe, after the Second World War—that Pasternak is probing sore points which are much more recent.)

Against the reign of abstraction there is a hunger for reality, for ‘life’, which pervades the whole book; that hunger for reality which allows him to greet the Second World War, ‘its real horrors, its real danger and its threat of a real death’, as ‘something positive compared with the inhuman domination by abstractions’ (p.659; 453). In the Epilogue, which takes place during that very war,
Doctor Zhivago
—like the novel of alienation it becomes—throbs once more with the passion of involvement which had animated it at the beginning. In that war Soviet society becomes genuine again, tradition and revolution are once more present side by side.
⁶

Pasternak’s novel thus also manages to take in the Resistance, in other words the epoch which for the younger generation in the whole of Europe corresponds to what 1905 was for Zhivago’s contemporaries: the point from which all roads started out. It is worth pointing out that this period retains even in the Soviet Union the value of an active ‘myth’, of the image of a real nation as opposed to an official nation. The unity of the Soviet people at war, on which Pasternak’s book closes,
⁷
is also the reality which is the starting point for younger Soviet writers, who hark back to it and contrast it with abstract, ideological schematisation, as though wanting to affirm a socialism that belongs ‘to everyone’.
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However this appeal to a real unity and spontaneity is the only link
which we can discern between the elderly Pasternak’s ideas and those of the younger generations. The image of a socialism ‘for everyone’ can only start from a confidence in the new forces generated and developed by the revolution. And this is precisely what Pasternak denies. He declares and proves that he does not believe in the people. His notion of reality is shaped more and more in the course of the book like an ethical and creative ideal based on a private, family-centred individualism: man’s relations with himself and his neighbour are restricted to the circle of his affections (and beyond that on cosmic relations, with ‘life’). He never identifies with the classes who are born to consciousness, and whose very errors and excesses can be welcomed as the first signs of an autonomous awakening, as the signs, always pregnant with meaning for the future, of life, against abstraction. Pasternak restricts his support and compassion to the world of the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie (even Pasha Antipov, who is a workers’ son, has studied, is an intellectual), all the others are bit-parts, there to make up the numbers.

The proof of this is his language. All the proletarian characters speak in the same way, the rather childish, folksy, picturesque chatter of the
muzhik
in Russian classic novels. A recurring theme in
Doctor Zhivago
is the anti-ideological nature of the proletariat, and the ambivalence of its stances, in which the most diverse strains of traditional morality and prejudice are fused together with historical forces which it never fully comprehends. This theme allows Pasternak to sketch some really very attractive figures (Tiverzin’s old mother, protesting against the charge by the Czar’s cavalry and at the same time against her revolutionary son; or the cook Ustin’ja insisting on the truth of the miracle of the deaf-mute against the commissar from the Kerensky government) and it culminates in the grimmest apparition of the whole book, the partisan witch. But by then we are already in another climate: as the avalanche of civil war gathers pace, this crude proletarian voice is heard louder and louder, taking on a single name: barbarism.

The barbarism inherent in today’s world is the great theme of contemporary literature: modern narratives drip with the blood of all the slaughter which our half-century has witnessed, and their style affects the immediacy of cave-graffiti, while their morality aims to rediscover humanity through cynicism, ruthlessness or atrocity. It feels natural for us to place Pasternak in this literary context, to which the Soviet writers of the civil war in fact belonged, from Sholokhov to the early Fadeyev. But
whereas in most contemporary literature violence is accepted as something one has to go through to get beyond it poetically, to explain it and to cleanse oneself of it (Sholokhov tends to justify and ennoble it, Hemingway to confront it as a testing ground for virility, Malraux to aestheticise it, Faulkner to consecrate it, Camus to empty it of significance), Pasternak expresses only weariness in the face of violence. Can we salute him as the poet of non-violence, which our century has never had? No, I should not say that Pasternak makes poetry out of his own rejection of violence: he records it with the weary bitterness of someone who has had to witness it all too often, who cannot talk of anything but atrocity upon atrocity, recording each time his dissent, his own role as outsider.
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The fact remains that although so far we have found also represented in
Doctor Zhivago
our own idea of reality, not just the author’s, nevertheless in the account of his long enforced stay with the partisans the book, far from expanding to a wider, epic dimension, restricts itself to Zhivago-Pasternak’s point of view, and drops in poetic intensity. One could say that up until the magnificent journey from Moscow to the Urals Pasternak seemed to want to explore a universe in all its good and evil, representing the motivations of all the sides involved; but after that his vision becomes one-sided, simply piling up events and negative verdicts, a sequence of violence and brutality. The author’s emphatic partisanship necessarily elicits our own emphatic partisanship as readers: we can no longer separate our aesthetic judgment from our historical and political one.

Perhaps that was exactly what Pasternak intended, to make us reopen questions that we tend to consider closed: by we I mean we who accepted the mass revolutionary violence of the civil war as necessary, though we did not accept as necessary the bureaucratic running of society and the fossilisation of ideology. Pasternak takes the discussion back to revolutionary violence, and subsumes under it the subsequent bureaucratic and ideological inflexibility. Against all the most widespread negative analyses of Stalinism, nearly all of which start from Trotsky’s or Bukharin’s position, that is to say they talk of the system’s
degeneration
, Pasternak starts from the mystical-humanitarian world of pre-revolutionary Russia,
¹⁰
to end up with a condemnation not only of Marxism and revolutionary violence, but of politics as the main testing ground for the values of contemporary humanity. In short, he ends up with a rejection of everything, but this in turn borders on an acceptance of everything. His sense of the sacred qualities of history-nature dominates everything, and the advent of
barbarism acquires (even in Pasternak’s wonderfully restrained style) a kind of halo, as though it were a new millennium.

In the Epilogue, the laundry girl Tanya tells her story. (This is the final surprise, worthy of a serialised novel, with its allegorical touch: she is the illegitimate daughter of Yuri Zhivago and Lara, whom Yuri’s brother, General Yevgraf Zhivago, goes in search of through the battlefields.) The style is primitive, elementary, so much so that it resembles that of a lot of American narrative; and a crude, adventurous episode from the civil war resurfaces from memory like a text from a book on ethnology which has become twisted, illogical and exaggerated like a folktale. And the intellectual Gordon brings the curtain down on the book with these emblematic and enigmatic words: