Doctor Zhivago

poetry not as a rare exception, but often and continuously, as one paints or writes music.” His first book, A Twin in the Clouds, was published in December of that year.

Pasternak described these metamorphoses in his two autobiographical essays, Safe Conduct, written between 1927 and 1931, and People and Situations (published in English under the titles I Remember and An Essay in Autobiography), written in 1956. Different as the two books are in style and vision, they both give a good sense of the extraordinary artistic and philosophical ferment in Russia in the years before the First World War. The older generation of Symbolists had begun to publish in the 1890s, the second generation, which included Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, in the early years of the twentieth century. Then came the new anti-Symbolist movements: the Futurists (Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, among many other poets and painters), whose manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, was published in 1912; and the Acmeists (Nikolai Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova), who favored Apollonian clarity over Symbolist vagueness. In his essay “The Morning of Acmeism,” Mandelstam wrote banteringly:

For the Acmeists the conscious sense of the word, the Logos, is just as splendid a form as music is for the Symbolists.

And if, among the Futurists, the word as such is still creeping on all fours, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed a more dignified vertical position and entered upon the stone age of its existence.

Which gives at least a small idea of the lively polemics that went on in those years.

Pasternak first associated with the younger Symbolists around the journal Musaget and its publishing house. To a gathering of this group, in 1913, he read a paper entitled “Symbolism and Immortality.” The text was later lost, but in People and Situations, he summarized its main points:

My paper was based on the idea that our perceptions are subjective, on the fact that the sounds and colors we perceive in nature correspond to something else, namely, to the objective vibrations of sound and light waves. I argued that this subjectivity was not the attribute of an individual human being, but was a generic and suprapersonal quality, that it was the subjectivity of the human world and of all mankind. I suggested in my paper that every person leaves behind him a part of that undying, generic subjectivity which he possessed during his lifetime and with which he participated in the history of mankind’s existence. The main object of my paper was to advance the theory that this utterly subjective and universally human corner or portion of the world was perhaps the eternal sphere of action and the main content of art. That, besides, though the artist was of course mortal, like everyone else, the happiness of existence he experienced was immortal, and that other people centuries after him might experience, through his works, something approaching the personal and innermost form of his original sensations.

These thoughts, or intuitions, were to reach their full realization decades later in Doctor Zhivago.

In January 1914, Pasternak and some of his young friends shifted their allegiance from the Symbolists to the Futurists, forming a new group that called itself Centrifuge. There were other groups as well—the Ego-futurists and the Cubo-futurists, the latter including Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom Pasternak met at that time. These groups were all somewhat fluid and loosely defined, and their members kept forming new alliances and creating new antagonisms.

On August 1, 1914, the First World War broke out, which somewhat curtailed the skirmishing among literary movements. Pasternak was exempted from military service because of an old injury caused by a fall from a horse in 1903, which had left him with one leg slightly shorter than the other. He supported himself by working as a private tutor and later as a clerk in the office of a chemical factory. In connection with this work he spent the winters of 1915 and 1916 in the region of the Urals, which forms the setting for most of Book Two of Doctor Zhivago. During that time he wrote the poems of his second book, Above the Barriers, published in 1917. When news of the February revolution of 1917 reached him in the Urals, he immediately set out for Moscow.

In the summer of 1917, between the February and October revolutions, Pasternak found his true voice as a poet, composing poems that would go into his third book, My Sister, Life, one of the major works of twentieth-century Russian poetry. He knew that something extraordinary had come over him in the writing of this book. In Safe Conduct, he says:

When My Sister, Life appeared, and was found to contain expressions not in the least contemporary as regards poetry, which were revealed to me during the summer of the revolution, I became entirely indifferent as to the identity of the power which had brought the book into being, because it was immeasurably greater than myself and than the poetical conceptions surrounding me.

Between that summer and the eventual publication of the book in 1922 came the Bolshevik revolution and the harsh years of War Communism, years of hunger, confusion, and civil war. In 1921, Pasternak’s parents and sisters immigrated to Berlin. (After Hitler’s accession to power they immigrated again, this time to England, where they remained.) Pasternak visited them in Berlin in 1922, after his first marriage, and never saw them again. He himself, like so many of his fellow poets and artists, was not opposed to the spirit of the revolution and chose to stay in Russia.

My Sister, Life was followed in 1923 by Themes and Variations, which grew out of the same lyric inspiration. In the later twenties, Pasternak felt the need for a more epic form and turned to writing longer social-historical poems dealing specifically with the ambiguities of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917: Lieutenant Schmidt (1926), The Year 1905 (1927), The Lofty Malady (1928), and the novel in verse Spektorsky, with an extension in prose entitled “A Tale” (1925–1930). Spektorsky covers the pre-revolutionary years, the revolution, and the early Soviet period, almost the same span of time as Doctor Zhivago. Its hero, Sergei Spektorsky, a man of indefinite politics, apparently idle, more of a spectator than an actor, is in some ways a precursor of Yuri Zhivago.

At the same time, Pasternak kept contemplating a long work in prose. In 1918 he had begun a novel set in the Urals, written in a rather leisurely, old-fashioned manner that was far removed from the modernist experiments of writers like Zamyatin, Bely, and Remizov. Only one part of it, The Childhood of Luvers, was ever published. He also wrote short works such as “Without Love” (1918) and “Aerial Ways” (1924), which sketch situations or characters that would reappear in Doctor Zhivago. And in 1931 he completed and published his most important prose work before the novel, the autobiography Safe Conduct.

In 1936 Pasternak went back to his idea of a long prose work, this time to be narrated in the first person, and in a deliberately plain style, as the notes and reminiscences of a certain Patrick, covering the period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Here there were still more foreshadowings of the later novel: Patrick is an orphan who, like Zhivago, grows up in the home of a family named Gromeko and marries their daughter Tonya; there is a woman reminiscent of the novel’s Lara Antipova, whose husband is also a teacher in Yuriatin in the Urals; and