began with an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta (“The Literary Gazette”) suggesting that the publication of the book and the award of the prize were merely a political provocation. On October 26, the campaign expanded to the national press with a vicious article in Pravda (“Truth”). On October 27, Pasternak was tried in absentia by the governing board of the Writers’ Union and expelled from the union, which meant losing his right to living quarters and all possibility of earning money by his work. His house in Peredelkino was surrounded by the secret police, and it was hinted that if he went to Sweden for the award ceremony, he might not be allowed to return. This last possibility, along with the danger in which he had put those closest to him, finally led him to refuse the prize. On October 29, he sent a second telegram to the Swedish Academy: “In view of the meaning attributed to this award in the society to which I belong, I must refuse the undeserved prize that has been bestowed on me. Do not take my voluntary rejection with any ill will.”
Though this second telegram might seem to be a capitulation on Pasternak’s part, it shows no repentance and clearly places the blame on Soviet society. In official circles this was taken as a still greater offense. The attacks on him continued. And the fact that very few of those who attacked him had read the book was no obstacle. At a meeting in Moscow on October 31, some eight hundred writers voted in favor of a resolution asking the government to “deprive the traitor B. Pasternak of Soviet citizenship.” The text of the resolution was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta the next day. In response, Pasternak’s close friends drew up a letter to Khrushchev in his name, asking that this extreme measure not be carried out. Pasternak contributed only two brief sentences to the letter: “I am bound to Russia by my birth, my life, and my work. I cannot imagine my fate separated from and outside Russia.” The letter was published in Pravda on November 1 and eased the tensions somewhat. A second public statement, also drawn up with very little participation from Pasternak, was published in Pravda on November 6 and more or less ended the “Nobel scandal.” Pasternak died a year and a half later. In December 1989, his son, Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, was finally able to go to Stockholm to receive his father’s Nobel medal and diploma.
Pasternak had maintained friendships with some of the best of the proscribed writers of his time—Boris Pilnyak, Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova—who are now acknowledged as among the major figures of twentieth-century Russian literature. He also befriended and encouraged younger dissident writers like Varlam Shalamov and Andrei Sinyavsky. But he was the first to oppose the Soviet regime and its ideology so openly and so effectively. And yet Pasternak was not at all a political man; the public realm and the conflict of ideologies did not interest him. Doctor Zhivago speaks in the name of something else entirely.
That “something else” caused a certain confusion among readers and critics in the West when the novel first appeared. It was criticized for not being what it was never meant to be: a good, old-fashioned, nineteenth-century historical novel about the Russian revolution, an epic along the lines of War and Peace. It was also praised for being what it was not: a moving love story, or the lyrical biography of a poet, setting the sensitive individual against the grim realities of Soviet life. Western Marxists found that Pasternak failed to portray the major events and figures of the revolution—something he never set out to do. Others devised elaborate allegorical readings of the novel, though Pasternak stated explicitly, in a letter to Stephen Spender (August 9, 1959), that “a detailed allegorical interpretation of literature” was alien to him. Critics found that there was no real plot to the novel, that its chronology was confused, that the main characters were oddly effaced, that the author relied far too much on contrived coincidences.
These perplexities are understandable, but they come from a failure to pay attention to the specific composition of the novel, its way of representing reality, its way of making experience felt. Doctor Zhivago is a highly unusual book, an incomparable book in the most literal sense. Pasternak suggested its unique quality in his reply to a letter from an English schoolteacher:
The objective world in my habitual, natural grasping, is a vast infinite inspiration, that sketches, erases, chooses, compares and describes and composes itself … living, moving reality in such a rendering must have a touch of spontaneous subjectivity, even of arbitrariness, wavering, tarrying, doubting, joining and disjoining elements … Over and above the times, events and persons there is a nature, a spirit of their very succession. The frequent coincidences in the plot are (in this case) not the secret, trick expedients of the novelist. They are traits to characterize that somewhat willful, free, fanciful flow of reality. (Letter in English to John Harris, February 8, 1959; published in Scottish Slavonic Review, 1984)
To embody this “living, moving reality” required formal innovation, and therefore Doctor Zhivago had necessarily to be an experimental novel. But it is not experimental in a modernist or formalist way. Modernism is essentially defined by absence (Godot never comes). Pasternak’s vision is defined by real presence, by an intensity of physical sensation rendered in the abundance of natural description or translated into the voices of his many characters. Pasternak delights in the pathetic fallacy: in his world so-called inanimate nature constantly participates in the action. On the other hand, there is no historical or psychological analysis in his narrative, no commentary on the causes of events or the motives of characters. This gives a feeling of chaos, random movement, impulsiveness, chance encounters, sudden disruptions to the action of the novel. The trains and trams keep breaking down. But owing to the breakdowns, surprising new aspects of life appear. The Russia of three revolutions, two world wars, civil war, and political terror is portrayed in living detail, but from unexpected angles, and with no abstract ideological synthesis. Pasternak portrays happening as it happens, which is what Tolstoy also set out to do. But in Doctor Zhivago the seeming chaos of events will suddenly be pierced through by forces of a higher order, coming from a greater depth in time—folkloric, cultural, ultimately religious— which are also really present, which reassert their continuing presence, in the most ordinary everyday life. Now, fifty years after its first publication, when the circumstances of the Cold War are more or less behind us, we may be able to read the novel in a new way, to see more clearly the universality of the image that Pasternak held up against the deadly fiction of his time. As Viktor Frank wrote in his essay “Vodyanoi Znak” (“Watermark: The Poetic Worldview of Pasternak,” 1962): “Pasternak rolled the stone from the tomb.”
2
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890. His father, Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, was a painter and illustrator; his mother, Rozalia Isidorovna Kaufman, was a concert pianist. They belonged to the cultivated Jewish milieu of Odessa, and moved to Moscow only a few months before Boris, the eldest of their four children, was born. Leonid Pasternak had considerable success as an artist, taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and became an outstanding portraitist, which led to a close acquaintance with Leo Tolstoy, whose works he illustrated and of whom he painted several portraits, the last just after the writer’s death in November 1910 at the railway station in Astapovo. The twenty-year-old Boris accompanied his father to Astapovo on that occasion.
The young Pasternak showed considerable talent for drawing and might have become an artist himself, but in the summer of 1903, while the family was staying in the country, he chanced to meet the composer Alexander Scriabin, whom he overheard composing his Third Symphony at the piano in a neighboring house, and decided that his real calling was music. For the next six years, he devoted himself to a serious study of composition. But at a key moment in 1909, after playing some of his compositions for Scriabin, who encouraged him and gave him his blessing, he abandoned music. Meanwhile, he had discovered the poetry of Rilke and had joined a group of young admirers of the Symbolists that called itself Serdarda—“a name,” as he wrote later, “whose meaning no one knew.” And he had begun to write verse himself.
It was a member of Serdarda who persuaded Pasternak to give up music in favor of literature, but it was Scriabin himself who suggested that he switch his field at Moscow University from law to philosophy. He graduated in 1913, after six years of study, including a semester at the University of Marburg under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, but by then he had decided to abandon philosophy. In the summer after his final examinations, he stayed with his parents in the country, and there, as he recalled, “I read Tyutchev and for the first time in my life wrote
