The Magical Chorus

The letter is in the style of an enamored flirtatious high school girl: “I am tormented that I did not follow my first desire…. Should I have been bolder and without thinking too long, followed my first impulse?…I wrote to you the first time…obeying something secret that, beyond all that is understandable and shared by everyone, ties me to you.” And in conclusion: “In the name of that mystery, your fervently loving and devoted B. Pasternak.”⁵

Just as personal was his poem dedicated to Stalin and first published in the New Year’s 1936 issue of the government newspaper Izvestiya, in which Pasternak described Stalin as the “genius of action.” It wasn’t an act of servility, for Pasternak eschewed servility all his life. He was apparently truly fascinated by Stalin.

Commenting on this enchantment, the clear-headed Lydia Ginzburg drew a parallel with young Hegel, who declared upon seeing Napoleon that an absolute spirit had ridden into the city on a white horse. Ginzburg stated that a certain part of the Soviet (and Western) cultural elite perceived Stalin in that Hegelian key as “world and historical genius.”⁶

Pasternak, for one, retained this attitude toward Stalin even after the ruler’s death, as can be seen in his letter to Fadeyev dated March 14, 1953. In it, Pasternak gives Stalin his due as one of the elect who “travel to the end past all forms of petty pity for individual reasons to a common goal”—the establishment of a new social order in which world evil “would be unthinkable.”⁷

Because of Pasternak’s romantic “cult of personality” of Stalin (as Sholokhov, Pasternak’s rival in the competition for the Nobel Prize, later observed, “Yes, there was a cult, but there was also a personality”), the poet never became an ardent admirer of Khrushchev the way Akhmatova did.

Pasternak had been circling prose for a while, and in late 1945 he began work on Doctor Zhivago, an epic novel about the path of the Russian intelligentsia in the twentieth century, which he completed ten years later. He understood from the beginning that the novel was “not intended for current publication.”⁸

Pasternak meant the Soviet censors, who clearly would not accept an untrammeled narrative, without regard to Party demands, about the causes and meaning of the Russian revolution and the horrors of the Civil War, a narrative imbued with the author’s openly Christian philosophy.

He considered Doctor Zhivago his most important work. He tried to achieve, in his own words, “unheard-of simplicity.” Here Pasternak’s ideal was, of course, Leo Tolstoy, in parallel to whom Pasternak renounced his own early complex and modernist works. Sometimes the connection between Pasternak and Tolstoy is denied since Doctor Zhivago is not a “realistic” novel as Tolstoy understood it. That is true, but the overall ideological influence of the late Tolstoy on Pasternak is indisputable.

Pasternak’s father, a well-known artist, worked with Tolstoy in 1898 on illustrations for his novel Resurrection. Tolstoy considered Leonid Pasternak’s portraits of him the most successful. The Pasternak house revered Tolstoy and that left a profound mark on the poet. In order to bring himself closer to the great writer, Pasternak in his later years even made up a story about seeing Tolstoy when he was four.

Following the late Tolstoy, Pasternak rejected the innovations of modern art and sought to write Doctor Zhivago in the manner of a Christian parable “understood in a new way,” as he put it. Pasternak probably envisioned some kind of Christian revival similar to what happened under Tolstoy’s influence at the turn of the century. This was noted in the West, and Czeslaw Milosz considered the novel a rare example of truly Christian literature.⁹

Tolstoy’s departure from Yasnaya Polyana in 1910 and his dramatic death made him a model for Pasternak of a great person who went beyond cultural frontiers to produce an example of Jesus-like sacrifice. Of course, Pasternak was not an equal of Tolstoy’s nor did he have his position and authority in Russia or abroad; still, in writing Doctor Zhivago he took a rather bold step that could be compared to Tolstoy’s struggle against censorship in tsarist Russia.

Pasternak not only wrote a wholly independent novel, but he sent it to the West for publication, bypassing official channels—an act that required more personal courage than Tolstoy’s behavior. The count was protected by his world fame and his social position from physical repression. Pasternak could not have felt insured against such danger: too many of his close friends had been destroyed by the Soviet regime, and in 1949 his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya (the prototype for Lara in Doctor Zhivago), was arrested and given a five-year sentence in the camps. During her interrogation, the investigator told Ivinskaya that Pasternak “has been a British spy for a long time.”¹⁰

Pasternak’s decision to smuggle Doctor Zhivago abroad broke the rules of permitted behavior set by the state for a Soviet writer. His confrontation with the Soviet authorities turned into an international scandal in 1958, when two years after its publication in the West, Pasternak was given the Nobel Prize “for his important achievements both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.”

The Swedish Academy clearly signaled that it was anointing Pasternak as a successor of Leo Tolstoy (correcting once again, as in the case with Bunin, its injustice toward the author of War and Peace). The mention of Pasternak the poet was in this case a fig leaf, and it fooled no one. In the old days, the tsarist government created censorship barriers for Tolstoy, and the Holy Synod excommunicated him from the Church. Now the Soviet authorities swiftly orchestrated Pasternak’s expulsion from the Writers’ Union.

On the wave of the worldwide publicity surrounding the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West and the Nobel Prize, the anti-Pasternak actions in the Soviet Union outraged intellectuals in democratic countries. But the Soviet regime had almost no choice. Giving the most prestigious cultural prize to a comparatively little-known author, and for a novel that was still not published in the Soviet Union, could only be seen as a hostile anti-Soviet move, which one official compared to a “literary atom bomb.”¹¹

Khrushchev added heat to the campaign against Pasternak in his inimitable way. There was nothing personal in his relationship with Pasternak, unlike Stalin. For him, Pasternak did not have the authority of Sholokhov, Tvardovsky, or even Alexander Korneichuk, a mediocre playwright but a Khrushchev favorite. It goes without saying that Khrushchev had not read Pasternak’s poetry, much less his novel, and who would expect an extremely busy leader of a superpower to have the time to do so?

Stalin might have read Doctor Zhivago, as he did dozens of other novels by Soviet writers; there are reliable sources confirming his interest in current literature. As stated Simonov, who attended many discussions of literary works nominated for the Stalin Prize at which Stalin was present, “everything that was in the least bit controversial and caused disagreement, he had read. It was quite obvious each time I attended these meetings.”¹²

Khrushchev was briefed on the matter (as world leaders usually are) with a few typed pages with selected quotations from Doctor Zhivago; for him, they just proved the novel’s presumed anti- Soviet attitude. That was quite enough for Khrushchev. He used Pasternak in his attempt to scare Russian writers who might see the smuggling of Doctor Zhivago into the West and its subsequent triumph as a tempting precedent.