Why was the poet of life permitted to survive? He was too well known to have been overlooked; yet, despite long periods of silence and diversion into translating, Pasternak never renounced his poetic course nor compromised himself by writing servile odes to Stalin and hymns to collectivization, Stalin himself must have willed or agreed.to his survival. Perhaps he was in some way moved by the uncorrupted quality of this pure poetic offshoot of Old Russia. Or perhaps Stalin sensed a certain occult power
in the one who defined the poet as 'brother to a dervish.'5 Certainly Pasternak had a singular record of nonconformity to the artistic mores of Stalinist Russia, beginning with his letter to Stalin at the time of the mysterious death of Stalin's first wife in November, 1932. Refusing to sign the stereotyped letter of consolation offered by other leading writers, Pasternak published a letter of his own to Stalin:
I align myself with the feelings of my comrades. On the eve I was thinking deeply and tenaciously about Stalin; for the first time as an artist. In the morning I read the news. I was shocked exactly as if I had been alongside, had lived and seen.6
Whatever the reasons, Pasternak survived and stayed on in Russia. With the coming of the first 'thaw' after Stalin's death, Pasternak published in April, 1954, ten poems described as 'poems from the novel in prose, Dr. Zhivago.' There was a good deal even in this first announcement. The statement that the poet had nearly finished his first and only novel created considerable anticipation, for it meant that he had for some time been occupied with a new kind of work. He had accepted the prosaic world of contemporary Russia, and decided to communicate at length with it apparently in the language it could understand. The description 'a novel in prose' indicated that he intended to replay with variations older literary themes, since Pushkin had characterized his Eugene Onegin as a 'novel in verse.' The idea that the novel would deal with Soviet reality and at the same time recapitulate some of the older Russian cultural heritage was quietly set forth in the author's explanatory note that Zhivago was to 'cover the period from 1903 to 1929,' and deal with 'a thinking man in search of truth, with a creative and artistic bent.'7
There are many ways of looking at this work, which was published abroad three years later despite strenuous Soviet objections, and then awarded a Nobel Prize which its author was forced to decline. Stalinists in Russia and sensationalists abroad have referred to it as a kind of anti-Revolutionary diatribe; literary specialists have demonstrated their critical sang-froid by calling it inferior to his poetry and assigning to it a kind of B+ to A- rating on their literary scorecards; students of the occult have looked at the work as a kind of buried treasure chest of symbols and allusions.8 Behind this critical din stand the massive shadows of two less articulate groups: the millions with no knowledge of Russia who have read and been moved by it; and the millions within Russia who have not been allowed to see it.
If Stalin would not permit Pasternak to be done away with altogether, neither would Stalin's successors permit him to publish freely. Pasternak's
last years were spent in forced isolation, surrounded by petty harassments and veiled threats. Indeed, no figure within the USSR was treated to a more shrill and vulgar chorus of official denunciation during 'de-Stalinization' than this mild poet. To the all-powerful Communist bureaucrats of Khrushchev's Russia he was the bearer of a 'putrid infection,' the producer of 'decadent refuse,' and generally 'worse than a pig,' because 'a pig will never befoul the place where it eats and sleeps.'9
There were good reasons why the campaign against Pasternak had to be pursued vigorously despite awkwardness and embarrassment. For Pasternak's Zhivago posed in effect a challenge to the moral basis of the regime. Rather than follow the approved path of criticizing the particular cheers which writers had previously rendered to Stalin, Pasternak was challenging the entire conception of writer-as-cheerleader. He presented in Zhivago a challenge to the moral superiority of the imitative activist who has externalized and materialized life, who accepts the constant rationalization that the individual self must be sacrificed for 'the good of the social collective.'10 By creating an essentially passive sufferer and giving him a credible, even appealing, inner life, Pasternak offered an alternative to the two-dimensional 'new Soviet man.'
The editors who rejected his novel for publication in the USSR seemed particularly peeved that Zhivago did not take sides in the Civil War, so that the familiar label of counter-revolutionary could be applied to him. He was, perhaps, a counter-revolutionary, but only in the deeper sense of advocating 'not a contrary revolution, but the contrary of a revolution.' Pasternak was the real alternative to social revolution: one which Stalinist activists could not understand because it could be neither labeled nor bought off. Even in humiliation, Pasternak preserved dignity and integrity in the eyes of his countrymen. He refused to flee abroad as he was urged to do by his primitive tormentors, who accused him of seeking nothing more than the 'delights of your capitalist paradise.' In his letter retracting acceptance of the Nobel Prize Pasternak insisted that 'with my hand on my heart, I can say that I have done something for Soviet literature.'11 It was obvious that his tormentors could neither place their hands over their hearts nor say that they had done anything for Russian literature. No Soviet writer of the first rank signed the official denunciation that accompanied the campaign of defamation.
Both his Soviet critics and his Western admirers agree that the book is in some sense a throwback to pre- Revolutionary Russia, a voice that has come 'as from a lost culture.'12 There is indeed a deliberate assertion of long silent themes at variance with official Soviet culture. Yet at the same time the book deals basically with the origins and development of the Soviet
period, and Pasternak clearly viewed the work as a kind of testament to his native land. In his last autobiographical sketch, written after the novel was completed, he pointedly described it as 'my chief and most important work, the only one of which I am not ashamed and for which I take full
responsibility.'18
The greatness of the book lies not in the affair that grew around it, still less in the plot of the novel itself, but rather in the alchemy with which he combines three main ingredients: recapitulation of the pre-Revolutionary literary tradition; rediscovery of the deeper religious and naturalistic symbolism in the Russian subconscious; and a new view of the Russian Revolution and the Russian future.
The attempt to recapitulate the Russian literary tradition is evident at every turn. The work is first described in a manner reminiscent of Eugene Onegin, and is structured like Tolstoy's War and Peace-telling the interrelated tales of a great national epic and a lonely search for truth, complete with two epilogues. Zhivago himself is a combination and fulfillment of two key types in nineteenth-century Russian literature: the obyvatel', or 'oppressed little man' who passively observes the misfortunes that fate has sent him, and the lishny chelovek, or 'superfluous aristocrat' incapable of effective action and alienated from both family and society. Symbols from the Russian literary past are played back slightly out of tune: the troika from Dead Souls, the train that crushes Anna Karenina. Long sections of Dostoevskian and Chekhovian dialogue are inserted, often at the expense of the narrative. The old opposition between the rich, uncomplicated world of nature and the artificial world of the machine is played antiphonally throughout the novel. Zhivago dies trying to let fresh air into a crowded
trolley car.
Above all stands the idea that increasingly obsessed the literary imagination of the late imperial period: the belief that a woman, some strange and mysterious feminine force, could alone show the anguished intellectuals the way to salvation. This was the missing Madonna of Russian romanticism: the 'beautiful lady' of Blok's early poetry,
