Pasternak and the Revolution *

Halfway through the twentieth century the great Russian nineteenth-century novel has come back to haunt us, like King Hamlet’s ghost. That is the feeling that Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957) arouses in us, his first European readers. The reaction is a literary one, then, not a political one. Yet the term ‘literary’ is still not adequate. It is in the relationship between the reader and the book that something really happens: we fling ourselves into reading with the hunger for questions that typified our early reading, in fact just like when we first tackled the Russian classics, and we were not looking for this or that type of ‘literature’, but an explicit and general discussion of life, capable of putting the particular in direct relation to the universal, and of containing the future in its portrayal of the past. In the hope that it can tell us something about the future we rush towards this novel which has come back from the grave, but the shade of Hamlet’s father, as we know, wants to intervene in today’s problems, though always wanting to relate them back to the time when he was alive, to what happened before, to the past. Our encounter with Doctor Zhivago, which has been so dramatic and emotional, is similarly tinged with dissatisfaction and disagreement. At last, a book with which we can argue! But at times, right in the middle of a dialogue, we notice that each of us is talking about something different. It is difficult to talk with our fathers.

Even the systems that the great ghost uses to arouse our emotions are those of his own time. Hardly ten pages into the novel, one character is already grappling with the mystery of death, man’s purpose in life and the nature of Christ. But the surprising thing is that the appropriate climate for sustaining such weighty topics has already been created, and the reader is plunged back into that notion of Russian literature as something totally bound up with explicit exploration of the big questions, a notion which in recent decades we have tended to set aside, ever since, that is, we stopped considering Dostoevsky as Russian literature’s central figure but more as a gigantic outsider.

This first impression does not stay with us for long. To come towards us, the ghost knows full well how to find the battlements we most like to stalk: those of objective narrative, full of facts and persons and things, from which the reader can extract a philosophy only bit by bit, at great personal labour and risk; not those of novelised intellectual debate. This vein of earnest philosophising certainly courses throughout the book, but the vastness of the world which is portrayed in it is able to support much more than this. And the principal tenet of Pasternak’s thought – that Nature and History do not belong to two different orders but form a continuum in which human lives find themselves immersed and by which they are determined – can be articulated better through narration than through theoretical propositions. In this way these reflections become one with the broad canvas of all the humanity and nature in the novel, they do not dominate or suffocate it. The result is that, as happens with all genuine storytellers, the book’s meaning is not to be sought in the sum of the ideas enunciated but in the totality of its images and sensations, in the flavour of life, in its silences. And all the ideological proliferations, these discussions which constantly flare up and die down, about nature and history, the individual and politics, religion and poetry, as though resuming old conversations with friends long gone, create a deep echo chamber for the strictly humble events the characters undergo, and come forth (to adopt a beautiful image used by Pasternak for the revolution) ‘like a sigh which has been held back too long’. Pasternak has breathed into his whole novel a desire for the kind of novel which no longer exists.

And yet we could say, paradoxically, that no book is more typical of the USSR than Doctor Zhivago. Where else could it have been written except in a country in which girls still wear pigtails? Those boys and girls of the start of the century, Yura, Misha Gordon and Tonja, who form a triumvirate ‘based on an apologia for purity’, probably also have the same fresh, distant faces as the Young Communists that we met so often on our delegation visits. On those visits we often saw the Soviet people’s enormous reserves of energy, which had been spared the dizzying strains (the pointless phases of fashion, but also the urge for new discoveries, trials and truths) experienced by Western consciences in the last forty years (in culture, the arts, morale, and way of life), and we wondered what fruit would come forth from their constant and exclusive concentration on their own classics if it were ever confronted with a lesson in reality which was as harsh, solemn and historically new as ever could be. This book by Pasternak is a first response to that question. It is not a young man’s response, which was more what we expected, but that of an elderly man of letters, which is all the more significant, perhaps, because it shows us the unexpected direction taken by Pasternak on his interior journey in his long period of silence. This last survivor of the Westernising, avant-garde poets of the 1920s has not detonated in the ‘thaw’ a display of stylistic fireworks long held in reserve; after the end of the dialogue with the international avant-garde, which had been the natural space for his poetry, he too has spent the years reconsidering the nineteenth-century classics of his own country, and he too has been directing his gaze at the unsurpassable Tolstoy. However, his reading of Tolstoy is quite different from the official literary line, which all too easily pointed to him as the canonical model. And he has also reread his own years of experience in a different way from the official line. What emerges from this is a book far removed from the rehashed nineteenth-century fiction which is ‘socialist realism’, but it is also, unfortunately, the most harshly negative book as regards socialist humanism. Do we have to repeat that stylistic choices do not come about by chance? that if the avant-garde Pasternak concerned himself with the problems of the revolution, the Tolstoyan Pasternak could not but turn to a nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary past? But this too would be only a biased judgment. Doctor Zhivago is and is not a nineteenth-century novel written today, just as it is and is not a book of nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary period.

From the bloody years of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, Pasternak has conserved their aspiration towards the future, the emotional questioning on how history is made; and he has written a book which, like a late fruit from a great tradition which has now ended, reaches us at the end of its lonely itinerary and manages to be a book contemporary with the more important works of modern Western literature, to which it gives an implicit assent.

In fact I believe that today a book structured ‘as in the nineteenth century’, containing a plot covering many years, with huge descriptions of society, must of necessity lead to a nostalgic, conservative vision. This is one of the many reasons why I disagree with Lukács: his theory of ‘perspectives’ can be turned back against his own favourite genre. I believe that it is no accident that our age is the age of the short story, or short novel, of autobiographical testimony. Today a genuinely modern narrative can only bring its poetic charge to bear on the times (whatever they be) in which we live, showing their worth as a decisive and infinitely significant moment. It therefore has to be ‘in the present’, with a plot that takes place before our eyes, unified in time and action as in Greek tragedy. And conversely whoever wants today to write the novel of ‘an epoch’, unless this is pure rhetoric, ends up writing a book whose poetic tension weighs on ‘the past’.¹ Pasternak does the same, but not quite: his position as regards history is not so easy to reduce to such simple definitions; and his is not an ‘old-fashioned’ novel.

As far as technique goes, to situate Doctor Zhivago ‘before’ the twentieth-century deconstruction of the novel does not make sense. There are two major ways of deconstructing it, and they are both present in Pasternak’s book. The first is to fragment realistic objectivity into an immediacy of sensations or into an impalpable dust-cloud of memory; the second is to make the plot technique part of the plot itself, so that it is considered in its own right, like a geometric outline, which then leads to parody, and to the ludic ‘novel within the novel’. Pasternak takes this playing with the ‘novelistic’ to its ultimate consequences: he constructs a plot of continual coincidences, across all of Russia and Siberia, in which about fifteen characters do nothing but bump into each other, as though they were the only ones there, like Charlemagne’s knights in the abstract geography of Renaissance chivalric poems. Is this just the writer having fun? It is meant to be something more, at the outset; it is intended to represent the network of destinies which bind us without our knowing, the disintegration of history into a complex mingling of human stories. ‘They were all together, close by, and some did not know the others, others never got to know each other, and some things remained for ever unknown, while others waited for the next opportunity, the next meeting before coming to fruition’ (Italian tr., p.157; English tr., p.113). But the emotion aroused by this discovery does not last long: and the constant series of coincidences in the end merely shows the author’s consciousness of his conventional use of the novel form.

Given this convention, and its overall structure, Pasternak enjoys total freedom in writing the book. Some parts he sketches in fully, others he leaves only in outline. At times a minute chronicler of the days and months, at others suddenly changing gear, he covers several years in a few lines: for instance, in the epilogue, where in twenty pages of great density and vigour, he runs before our eyes the epoch of ‘purges’ and the Second World War. Similarly, amongst the characters there are some whom he constantly flits over, not bothering to give us a deeper knowledge of them: even Zhivago’s wife, Tonya, is in this category. In short, this is an ‘impressionistic’ type of narrative. Impressionistic even in psychology: Pasternak refuses to give us a precise justification for his characters’ behaviour. For instance, why is the conjugal harmony between Lara and Antipov suddenly shattered, and he finds no other way out except to leave for the front? Pasternak says many things about it, but none is either sufficient or necessary: what counts is the general impression of contrast between the two characters. He is not interested in psychology, character, situations, but in something more general and direct: life. Pasternak’s prose is simply a continuation of his verse.

As far as their basic core myths are concerned, there is a strict unity between Pasternak’s lyrics and Doctor Zhivago: the movement of nature which contains and informs every other event, act or human emotion, and an epic élan in describing the spatter of rainstorms and the melting of snow. The novel is the logical development of this élan, for the poet tries to include in a single discourse nature and human history, both private and public, to provide a total definition of life: the smell of the limes and the noise of the revolutionary crowds as Zhivago’s train travels towards Moscow in 1917 (Part V, chapter 13). Nature is no longer the romantic source of symbols for the poet’s inner world, a kind of dictionary for his subjective thoughts; it is something which exists before, and after, and everywhere, which man cannot change but can only try to understand, by science and poetry, and to be worthy of it.² Pasternak continues Tolstoy’s polemic against history (‘Tolstoy did not push his thoughts to their conclusion …’, p.591; 406): it is not great men who make history, but it is not made by small men either; history moves like the plant realm, like a wood changing in springtime.³ From this derive two fundamental aspects of Pasternak’s conception: the first is his sense of the sacrality of history, seen as a solemn coming into being, transcending man, uplifting even in its tragicity; the second is an implicit lack of trust in what man does, in his capacity to construct his own destiny, in his deliberate modification of nature and society. Zhivago’s experience leads to contemplation, to the exclusive pursuit of interior perfection.

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:

Yesterday I went to a night-time rally. An extraordinary spectacle. Mother Russia is on the move, cannot stay still, is walking, does not know where she is, is talking and knows how to express herself. And it is not only the men who are talking. The trees and the stars have met up and are talking, the nocturnal flowers are philosophising and the stone houses are holding rallies. (p.191; 136)

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:

Everyone has been reanimated, reborn, everywhere there are transformations, upheavals. One could say that two revolutions have taken place within each one of us: our own, individual, one and the other general revolution. Socialism seems to me to be a sea into which all these single, individual revolutions have to flow like rivulets, the sea of everyone’s life, the sea of everyone’s authenticity. The sea of life, I say, of that life that you can see in paintings, of life as geniuses understand it, creatively enriched. Today, though, men have decided not to experience life through books any more, but in themselves, not in the abstract, but in actual practice. (p.191; 136)

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:

What were these words? from the year before? from two years before? Once in his life he had been elated by the incontrovertibility of that language, the linearity of that thought. Was it possible that he would have to pay for that careless enthusiasm by having nothing in front of him now for the rest of his life except those cries and claims, which never changed in the course of the years, in fact with the passing of time they became less and less vital, more and more incomprehensible and abstract? (p.497; 343)

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:

War was an artificial break in life, as though one could delay existence even for a moment: what an absurd idea! The revolution broke out almost unintentionally, like a sigh held back too long. (p.192; 136)

(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’.⁸

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.⁹

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:

This is how it happened many times in history. What had been lofty and noble in conception, has become crude matter. Thus did Greece become Rome, thus the Russian Enlightenment became the Russian Revolution. If you think of Blok’s phrase, ‘We, the children of Russia’s terrible years’, you will instantly see the difference in the times. When Blok said this, we must understand it in a metaphorical, figurative way. The ‘children’ were not literally the sons, but the creatures, the products, the intelligentsia; and the terrors were not terrible, but providential, apocalyptic, which is quite different. But now all that was metaphorical has become literal: the sons are literally the sons, and the terrors are genuinely terrible, that’s the difference. (p.673; 463)

That is how Pasternak’s novel ends: without him being able to detect in this ‘crude matter’ a spark of anything ‘lofty and noble’. The ‘lofty and noble’ elements were entirely concentrated in the late Yuri Zhivago, who in his increasing asceticism manages to reject everything, reaching a crystalline purity of spirit which leads him to live like a beggar, after abandoning medicine and earning his living for a while writing small volumes of philosophical and political reflections which ‘sold out to the last copy’ (!), until finally he dies of a heart attack in the tram.

So Zhivago takes his place in that gallery – so crowded in contemporary Western literature – of heroes of negation, those who refuse to integrate, the étrangers, the outsiders.¹¹ But I would not say that he has a particularly prominent artistic place there: the étrangers, though they are hardly ever rounded characters, are always strongly defined in the extreme situation in which they move. By comparison Zhivago remains a shadowy character; and it is that part 15,¹² the one which deals with his last years, in which we expect an assessment of his life, that strikes us for the disproportion between the importance that the author would like to attribute to Zhivago and his insubstantial presence in the novel.

In short, I have to say that the thing with which I least agree in Doctor Zhivago is that it is the story of Doctor Zhivago, in other words that it can form part of that vast sector of contemporary narrative called the intellectual biography. I am not speaking so much about the explicit autobiography, whose importance is far from diminished, but of those professions of faith in narrative form which have at their centre a character who is a spokesman for a particular philosophy or poetics.

Who is this Zhivago? Pasternak is convinced that he is a person of boundless fascination and spiritual authority, but in fact the reasons we like him are all to be found in his status as an average man. It is his discretion and mildness, his always sitting, as it were, on the edge of his chair, the fact that he always lets himself be persuaded by externals, and be overcome by love bit by bit.¹³ Instead, the halo of sanctity that Pasternak at a certain point wants him to wear weighs heavily on him; we readers are asked to worship Zhivago, which we cannot do, since we do not share his ideas or choices, and this ends up by undermining even that all too human sympathy which we feel for the character.

The story of another life runs through the novel from beginning to end: that of a woman, who appears to us as a rounded, distinct character (even though she says very little about herself, and her story is narrated more from the outside than from within) in the terrible events we see her live through, in the resolution which she draws from them, in the sweetness that she manages to spread around her. This is Lara, Larisa: she is the great character of the book. We find that by shifting the axis of our reading so that Lara’s story, not Zhivago’s, remains at the novel’s centre, we place Doctor Zhivago in the full light of its literary and historical significance, reducing to secondary ramifications its imbalances and digressions.

The life of Lara is in its linearity a perfect story of our times, almost an allegory of Russia (or of the world), of the possibilities which gradually opened up for her (or it), or which were all presented to her (or it). Three men revolve around Larisa. The first is Komarovskij, the unscrupulous racketeer who has made her live from childhood with an awareness of the brutality of life, who represents vulgarity and unscrupulousness, but also a basic, concrete practicality, the unostentatious chivalry of a man who is sure of himself (he never fails her, not even after Lara tries to kill the impurity of her previous links with him by firing a revolver at him). Komarovskij who personifies everything that is base about the bourgeoisie, but whom the revolution spares, making him – still through dubious means – still a sharer in power. The other two men are Pasha Antipov, the revolutionary, the husband who leaves Lara so as to have no obstacles to his solitary determination to be a moral but ruthless subversive, and Yuri Zhivago, the poet, the lover whom she will never have entirely for herself, because he has surrendered totally to the things and opportunities of life. Both occupy the same level of importance in her life, and the same poetic importance, even though Zhivago is constantly in the spotlight, and Antipov hardly ever. During the civil war in the Urals, Pasternak shows us both men as though they were already destined for defeat: Antipov-Strel’nikov, the Red partisan commandant, terror of the Whites, has not joined the Party and knows that as soon as the fighting is over he will be outlawed and eliminated; and Doctor Zhivago, the reluctant intellectual, who does not want to or is not able to be part of the new ruling class, knows he will not be spared by the relentless revolutionary machine. When Antipov and Zhivago face each other, from the first encounter on the armed train to the last one, when they are both being hunted in the villa at Varykino, the novel reaches its peak of poignancy.

If we retain Lara as the novel’s protagonist, we see that the figure of Zhivago, relegated to the same level as Antipov, is no longer overpowering, he no longer tends to turn the epic account into ‘the story of an intellectual’, and the long narrative about the doctor’s partisan experiences is then confined to a marginal digression which does not now outweigh and crush the linearity of the plot.

Antipov, the enthusiastic and ruthless applier of the revolution’s laws, under which he knows he himself will perish, is an imposing figure of our times, full of echoes of the great Russian tradition, portrayed with clarity and simplicity. Lara, a hard but delightful heroine, is and remains his woman even when she is and remains Zhivago’s woman. In the same way – or rather in an inexplicable and indefinable way – she is and remains Komarovskij’s former woman. It is by him, after all, that she is taught the fundamental lesson: it is because she has learned the rough taste of life from Komarovskij, from the smell of his cigar, from his gross, philanderer’s sensuality, from his arrogance at being simply physically stronger, that Lara knows more than Antipov and Zhivago, the two naïve idealists of violence and non-violence respectively; and it is for this reason that she is more important than they are, she more than they represents life, and we come to love her more than them, to follow her and seek her out amidst Pasternak’s elusive periods which never reveal her to us in her entirety.¹⁴

I have tried in this way to bring out the emotions, questions, disagreements that the reading of a book like this – or rather the struggle with it – arouses in someone who is concerned with the same set of problems, and who admires the immediacy of its representation of life, without sharing its fundamental thesis: history as transcending humanity. On the contrary I have always sought the exact opposite in literature and in thought: an active involvement of man with history. Not even the operation that was a crucial part of our literary education, of separating the ‘poetic’ elements from the author’s ideological world, works here. This idea of history-nature is that same idea that gives Doctor Zhivago the quiet solemnity that fascinates me as well. How can I define my relationship with this book?

An idea which is realised artistically can never be without meaning. But being meaningful does not correspond at all to uttering a truth. It means indicating a crucial point, a problem, a source of alarm. Kafka, thinking he was writing metaphysical allegory, described contemporary man’s alienation in a way that has never been surpassed. But Pasternak, so terribly realistic? On closer inspection, this cosmic realism of his consists of one single lyric moment through which he filters the whole of reality. It is the lyric moment of man seeing history – either admiring or execrating it – as a distant sky above his head. That in today’s Soviet Union a great poet should elaborate such a vision of man’s relations with the world – the first vision in many years to have developed autonomously, not in conformity with official ideology – has a deep historical and political significance. It confirms that the ordinary man has had very little sense of having history in his control, of creating socialism, and expressing within it his own liberty, responsibility, creativity, violence, interest or disinterest.¹⁵

Perhaps Pasternak’s importance resides in this warning: history – whether in the capitalist or socialist world – is not yet history enough, it is not yet a conscious construct of human reason, it is still too much a succession of biological phenomena, of brute nature, not a realm of liberties.

In this sense Pasternak’s idea of the world is true – true in the sense of assuming the negative as a universal criterion, just as Poe’s and Dostoevsky’s and Kafka’s ideas were true in this way – and his book has the superior utility of great poetry. Will the Soviet world know how to make use of it? Will socialist literature in the world be able to elaborate a response to it? This can be done only by a world which is in a ferment of self-criticism and creativity, and only by a literature which can develop an even stricter adherence to things. From today onwards, realism means something deeper. (But has it not always meant that?)

[1958]