Doctor Zhivago

Patrick, like Zhivago, is torn between his love for this woman and for his wife. Some sections from the notes were published in magazines between 1937 and 1939, but the manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1941. The cover, which survived, bears two crossed-out titles: When the Boys Grew Up and Notes of Zhivult. The odd name Zhivult, like the less odd name Zhivago, comes from the Russian root zhiv, meaning “alive.”

Pasternak found it impossible to continue work on the Notes in the face of the intensification of Stalin’s terror in the later thirties, particularly the great purges that began in 1937. As Lazar Fleishman has written:

All previous historical explanations and evaluations acquired new and unstable meaning in light of the repression directed against the old guard of revolutionaries, and in light of the unprecedented, bloody catastrophe that the great revolution turned out to be for the entire population in 1937. These events dramatically changed Pasternak’s attitude toward Russia, the revolution, and socialism.

Pasternak always had a double view of the revolution. He saw it, on the one hand, as a justified expression of the need of the people, and, on the other, as a program imposed by “professional revolutionaries” that was leading to a deadly uniformity and mediocrity. His doubts began as early as 1918 and increased as time went on.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, there was a power struggle within the Communist Party leadership, essentially between Stalin and Trotsky, which ended with Trotsky being removed from the Central Committee in 1927, exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and finally expelled from Russia in 1929. Stalin became the undisputed head of state and ruled with dictatorial powers. In 1928, he abolished the New Economic Policy (NEP), which Lenin had introduced to allow for private enterprise on a small scale, and instituted the first Five-Year Plan for the development of heavy industry and the collectivization of agriculture. On April 23, 1932, a decree on “The Restructuring of Literary Organizations” was published, aimed at ending “stagnation” in literature by putting a stop to rivalries among literary factions. This led to the creation of the Soviet Writers’ Union, a single body governing all literary affairs, of which every practicing writer was required to be a member. And in October 1932, Stalin defined “socialist realism” as the single artistic method acceptable for Soviet literature. The Writers’ Union drew up a statute at its first congress in 1934 defining socialist realism as a method that “demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of reality must be linked with the task of the ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of communism.” The historical theory behind socialist realism was the dialectical materialism of Marx; its necessary representative was the positive hero.

Pasternak made two trips to the Urals during that period. In 1931 he was sent as a member of a “writers’ brigade” to observe the Five-Year Plan in action and report on its successes—in other words, to be “re-educated.” He was curious to see what changes had occurred since his last trip there fifteen years earlier. What he found disturbed him very much—not the scale of the construction, but the depersonalization of the people. He quit the brigade early and returned home. In the summer of 1932, the official attitude towards Pasternak improved and a collection of his poems, entitled Second Birth, was published. He was rewarded with a new trip to the Urals, this time for a month’s vacation with his second wife, Zinaida Neuhaus, and her two sons. Here for the first time he saw the results of the forced collectivization of agriculture, which had led to the breakdown of farming on a vast scale and a famine that cost millions of peasant lives. These disastrous effects of Stalin’s policy went entirely unreported in the Soviet press. He wrote a letter to the directors of the Writers’ Union detailing what he had seen, but it was ignored.

In another letter, written to his parents in Berlin in the spring of 1933, on Hitler’s accession to power, Pasternak defined the tragedy that was being played out in Europe with remarkable clarity and in terms that reveal the essence of his historical understanding as it would finally be embodied in Doctor Zhivago:

 … however strange it may seem to you, one and the same thing depresses me in both our own state of affairs and yours. It is that this movement is not Christian, but nationalistic; that is, it runs the same danger of degenerating into the bestiality of facts. It has the same alienation from the age-old, gracious tradition that breathes with transformations and anticipations, rather than the cold statements of blind insanity. These movements are on a par, one is evoked by the other, and it is all the sadder for this reason. They are the left and right wings of a single materialistic night. (Published in Quarto, London, 1980)

After the appearance of Second Birth, Pasternak entered a more or less silent period, in terms of publication, which lasted until 1941. But he did address congresses of the Writers’ Union several times during those years. In an important speech to a plenum session of the union, held in Minsk in February 1936, he said:

The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it … Art is inconceivable without risk, without inner sacrifice; freedom and boldness of imagination can be won only in the process of work, and it is there that the unforeseen I spoke of a moment ago must intervene, and there no directives can help.

He went on to describe the inner change he was undergoing:

For some time I will be writing badly, from the point of view that has been mine up to now, and I will continue to do so until I have become used to the novelty of the themes and situations I wish to address. I will be writing badly, literally speaking, because I must accomplish this change of position in a space rarefied by abstractions and the language of journalists, and therefore poor in images and concreteness. I will also be writing badly in regard to the aims I am working for, because I will deal with subjects that are common to us in a language different from yours. I will not imitate you, I will dispute with you …

To earn his living during this time, Pasternak turned to translation. In 1939, the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold invited him to make a new version of Hamlet. Other commissions for Shakespeare plays followed during the war years, but the work on Hamlet had a profound effect on Pasternak (twelve versions of the play were found among his papers). During the war years, there was a spirit of genuine unity among the Russian people in the opposition to a real enemy, after the nightmarish conditions of the terror—a spirit reflected in the epilogue to Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak believed then that the changes brought about by necessity would lead to the final liberation that had been the promise of the revolution from the beginning. What came instead, starting in August 1946, was a new series of purges, an ideological constriction signaled by virulent denunciations of the poet Anna Akhmatova and the prose writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, new restrictions on film and theater directors, and the “bringing into line” of the composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev. And a campaign also began against Pasternak, who was effectively silenced as a writer until after Stalin’s death.

Pasternak lived through a profound spiritual crisis at this time, what might be called his “Hamlet moment.” The change in him is suggested by the two versions of the poem “Hamlet” that he wrote in 1946. The first, written in February, before the denunciations of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, has just two stanzas:

Here I am. I step out on the stage.

Leaning against a doorpost,

I try to catch the echoes in the distance

Of what will happen in my age.