1. They appeared in Italo Calvino, The Literature Machine. Essays, translated by Patrick Creagh (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987), with the following titles: ‘Why Read the Classics?’; ‘The Odysseys Within The Odyssey’; ‘Ovid and Universal Contiguity’; ‘Man, the Sky, and the Elephant’; ‘The Structure of Orlando Furioso’; ‘Cyrano on the Moon’; ‘Candide: an Essay on Velocity’; ‘The City as Protagonist in Balzac’; ‘Stendhal’s Knowledge of the “Milky Way”’; ‘Guide to The Charterhouse of Parma for the Use of New Readers’; ‘Montale’s Rock’.
* Page references to Doctor Zhivago in this essay are both to the Italian edition (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957) and to the standard English translation, Doctor Zhivago, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (London: Collins Harvill, 1988).
1. Even in the nineteenth century, on closer inspection, it was often nostalgia for the past that enlivened the mimesis of the great novels, but it was a nostalgia with a critical, even revolutionary, approach towards the present, as Marx and Lenin clearly showed with, respectively, Balzac and Tolstoy.
2. Someone should study and analyse this surrender of man to nature (which is no longer felt as an alterity), which has been constantly expressed in recent years: from Dylan Thomas’ poetry to the paintings of the ‘aformalists’.
3. There seem to me to be two uses of the word ‘history’ in Pasternak: the one used here means history assimilated into nature, and the other means history as the realm of the individual, founded by Christ. Pasternak’s ‘Christianity’ – particularly as expressed in the aphorisms of uncle Nikolai Nikolaevich and his disciple Misha Gordon – has nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s terrible religiosity, but belongs in the context of a symbolic, aestheticising reading and dynamic interpretation of the Gospels, in which Gide had also indulged (the only difference being that here it rests on a more profound sense of human compassion).
4. Italian translations of the poems ‘The Year 1905’ and ‘Lieutenant Schmidt’, by Angelo Maria Ripellino, are in Boris Pasternak, Poesie (Turin: Einaudi, 1957).
5. In fact we never manage to see the communists clearly, face to face. The cocaine-addicted partisan commander, Liverij, is not a fleshed-out character. Much is said about Antipov the father and Tiverzin, two old workers, now Bolshevik chiefs, but we are never told how they exist, what they think, why they have become bureaucratic ogres after being fine revolutionary workers at the beginning of the book. And Yuri’s brother, Yevgraf Zhivago, who appears to be a communist of some authority, a deus ex machina who descends every now and again down from the heaven of his mysterious authority: who is he? what does he do? what does he think? what is his significance? The rich gallery of Pasternak characters also has some empty frames.
6. In these pages on the Second World War there is also the indirect, distant appearance of the only ‘positive communist hero’ of the book: a woman (p.656; 451). And she is (as we learn from another fleeting reference on p.627; 431) the daughter of a Tikhonovite priest. While still a child, in order to eliminate the shame of her father being in prison, she becomes ‘a childishly passionate follower of what seemed to her to be the least dubious elements of communism’. When the war comes, she has herself parachuted beyond the Nazi lines, performs a heroic partisan action and ends up being hanged: ‘they say that the Church counts her among the saints.’ Is Pasternak trying to tell us that Russia’s ancient religiosity lives on in the communists’ spirit of sacrifice? The juxtaposing of the two attitudes is not new; and to those of us who espouse a totally secular communism it has been rather hard to take. But the tone of the story of Christina Orletsova, contained in just a few lines of the novel, links up immediately in our memory with the tone – in fact identical in human attitude, though existing in different faiths and ideals – of the Lettere dei condannati a morte della Resistenza (Letters of the (Italian and European) Martyrs of the Resistance).
7. There is still a final chapter, barely a page long, about our times, with a little optimistic fanfare, but it is stuck on, rather sugary in tone, almost as if it were not by Pasternak at all, or as if the author wanted to show that he had written it with one hand tied behind his back.
8. See my article on Viktor Nekrasov’s In His Home Town, in Notiziario Einaudi, 5:1–2 (January-February 1956).
9. This anguish at the civil war reminds me of Cesare Pavese’s Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Crows). The second story, La casa in collina (The House on the Hill), seemed to me, when it appeared in 1948, to have a tone of resignation; but rereading it today, I think that in it Pavese went further than anyone else down the road of a moral conscience engaging with history, and all this in an area which has nearly always been the preserve of the others, of mystical and transcendental conceptions of the world. In Pavese too we find the same terrified compassion for any blood spilled, even enemy blood, of those who died without knowing why; but just as Pasternak’s pity is the latest incarnation of a Russian tradition of mystical relations with one’s neighbour, Pavese’s pity is the most recent incarnation of a tradition of stoic humanism, which has influenced so much of Western culture. In Pavese too we find: nature and history, but on opposite sides; nature is the countryside of the first discoveries of childhood, the perfect moment, outside history, the ‘myth’; history is war, which ‘will never end’, which ‘ought to bite deeper into our blood’. Like Zhivago, Pavese’s Corrado is an intellectual who does not want to escape the responsibilities of history: he lives on the hill because it has always been his hill, believing that the war does not concern him. But the war populates that world of nature with the presence of others, of history: evacuees, partisans. Nature too is history and blood, wherever he turns his eyes: his flight is an illusion. He discovers that even his previous life was history, with his own responsibilities and failings: ‘Every man who dies resembles the man that survives and asks him to account for it.’ Man’s active involvement with history stems from the necessity of making sense of the bloody march of man. ‘After shedding his blood we must placate it.’ Man’s real historical and civic commitment is in this ‘placating’, in this ‘accounting for it’. We cannot be outside history, we cannot refuse to do everything in our power to give a reasonable and humane stamp to the world, all the more so, the more the world presents itself to us as senseless and vicious.
10. We really need, from the subject specialists, an analysis of Pasternak’s cultural roots, of the way he develops many of the key discourses relating to Russian culture.
11. The Outsiders is the title of a book about this type of literary character, written by a young, rather confused Englishman, Colin Wilson, who has risen to undeserved fame in his native land.
12. The exceptions are the chapters evoking Zhivago’s final wanderings through Russia, the horrific march amongst the rats: all the journeys in Pasternak are wonderful. Zhivago’s story is exemplary as an Odyssey of our time, with his uncertain return to Penelope obstructed by rational Cyclops and rather unassuming Circes and Nausicaas.
13. Some of these qualities make this imaginary doctor-author resemble (and many have already noted this) a real doctor-writer from the previous generation, Chekhov; Chekhov the man, with the force of his sense of balance, as we can see from his letters (soon to be published by Einaudi). But in other ways Chekhov is the exact opposite of Zhivago: the plebeian Chekhov, for whom refinement is a wild flower with its natural grace, whereas Zhivago is refined both in terms of his birth and his origins, looking down on ordinary people; the mystical-symbolist Zhivago and the agnostic Chekov, who did pay homage with a couple of short stories to mystic symbolism, but these are such isolated examples in an oeuvre which is the exact opposite of any mysticism, that they can be considered as a mere tribute to a fashion.
14. In the end they obliterate her from us, dispatching her hurriedly to a Siberian concentration camp; this too is a ‘historical’ death, not a private one like Zhivago’s.
15. Perhaps the period on which Pasternak’s book dwells most is the very one to which this argument applies least. In writing, Pasternak reflected on to the past his consciousness of the present. Probably, in the portrait of the doctor held prisoner by the partisans, who while still regarding himself as their enemy still works with them and ends up fighting alongside them, Pasternak wanted to express the situation in his homeland under Stalin. But these are all conjectures: we would really need to know above all whether Pasternak ended Zhivago’s story deliberately in 1929, or whether, after starting a story that was meant to come down to our own times, he realised at that point that he had already fully expressed everything he wanted to say.
1. In John Cruikshank (ed.), The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction 1935–60 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 79–101.
2. A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Leçons sur la phénoménologie de l’esprit professées de 1933 à l’École des Hautes Études, réunies et publiées par R. Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
3. ‘Sur Nietzsche’, in G. Bataille, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard), VI, 416.
4. On this subject see D. Hollier, Le Collège de sociologie (1937–1939) (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
5. Les Écrivains célèbres, vol. II. Before editing Gallimard’s Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, Queneau edited for the publisher Mazenod the three large folio volumes of Les Écrivains célèbres, as well as compiling an ‘Essai de répertoire historique des écrivains célèbres’, published as an appendix. The chapters on each author were entrusted to experts or to famous writers. It is significant which authors Queneau himself chose to write on: Petronius, Boileau, Gertrude Stein. He also wrote the introduction to the final section: ‘Twentieth-century masters’, where he discusses Henry James, Gide, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Gertrude Stein. Queneau never included his entries in this work in his collected essays; I have inserted in this Italian translation the pieces on Petronius and on the ‘Twentieth-century masters’. Another editorial initiative typical of Queneau was the enquiry Pour une Bibliothèque idéale (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), which he organised and edited: the most famous French writers and scholars were each invited to suggest his or her own choice of titles for an ideal library.
6. R. Queneau, Una storia modello, ed. by R. Romano (Milan: Fabbri, 1973).
7. J. Roubaud, ‘La mathématique dans la méthode de Raymond Queneau’, Critique, 359 (April, 1977).
8. In Cahiers de Linguistique Quantitative (1963).
9. In Subsidia Pataphysica, vol. 29.