the 'sophia' of Solov'ev's theosophy, the 'Ophelia' of Olesha's fantasy. As often in Dostoevsky, women are given a special clairvoyance. Pasternak's mysterious lady of salvation has been defiled, yet she offers a mixture of sensual and spiritual quality. Lara is many things: Russia, life, poetry, a tree, unaffected simplicity. The wandering Zhivago seeks her throughout the great events of the revolutionary period. He achieves physical union with her in the snow-covered countryside; and then, beyond death, there is a moving last vignette where she weeps over Zhivago and makes the sign of the cross over his dead body. What might seem trite in another context suddenly
becomes transformed into a powerful scene containing elements both of a Pieta, wherein the Mother of God weeps over the broken body of her son, and of a Liebestod, wherein swelling music finds harmonic release only as Isolde joins her lover in death.
Lara has the same combination of beauty, integrity, and ambiguous depth which lay behind the greatest achievements of Russian literary culture. In the brave new world of twentieth-century Russia, Lara must bear the fate of that culture: disappearance and anonymous death. For Pasternak as for the theologians of the Eastern Church, all of nature participates in the suffering and martyrdom of sacred history. Through one of his innumerable images Pasternak points out that this culture suffers martyrdom at the hands not of evil men but of pharisees with their 'retouching' and 'varnishing over' (lakirovka) of truth. Even the coming of spring is affected by the Civil War.
Here and there a birch stretched forth itself like a martyr pierced by the barbs and arrows of its opening shoots, and you knew its smell by just looking at it, the smell of its glistening resin, which is used for making varnish.
Yet suffering and deception do not have the last word; for the over-all frame of the book is religious. The work is saturated with images from Orthodox Christianity; and one senses that they will in some way be recovered like the old images on the icons whose purity was only rediscovered through layers of varnish during the years of Pasternak's youth. The name Zhivago is taken from the Easter Liturgy and the communion prayer of John Chrysostom; events are repeatedly related to the Orthodox calendar, and Zhivago's tour with the partisans and experience of atrocities occurs during Lent. The old sectarian idea that people actually re-experience the passion and suffering of Christ is often hinted at, and the idea suggested that the period of revolutionary torment in Russian history is related in some way to that terrifying interlude between Christ's crucifixion and His resurrection. As with Dostoevsky and so many others, the basic Christian message is placed on the lips of a seeming fool: 'God and work.' There is really nothing else that matters. Yet these are the very things that have been missing from the lives of the secular intelligentsia. 'It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical teaching and commandments,' Pasternak writes in criticism of the abstract ethical fanaticism of modern Russian thought. 'But for me the most important thing is the fact that Christ speaks in parables taken from daily life, that he explains the truth in terms of everyday reality.' The natural universality of the central New Testament miracle, the birth of a child, is contrasted with the
nationalistic melodrama of the central Old Testament miracle, the passage through the Red Sea. Throughout the work, Pasternak's religious feeling is portrayed in images rather than abstract ideas; and as such his work represents a return to the old Muscovite culture of sounds, sights, and smells rather than the St. Petersburg culture of words and ideas. Pasternak used the old word for 'icons' (obraza) to describe poetic images, which he denned as 'miracles in words'14 rather as one used to speak of the miraculous paintings 'not made by hands.' Moscow and the deep interior rather than St. Petersburg and the West provide the mis-en-scene for Zhivago. For Pasternak Moscow of the silver age 'far surpassed Petersburg,' and he spent almost all his life in its environs. 'Moscow of 1600 belfries' had become the Moscow of Scriabin, who was perhaps the greatest of all formative influences on Pasternak.15
Like Scriabin, Pasternak sought to affect a kind of fusion of the arts in which music played a special role. Pasternak's description of Scriabin's artistic quest applies to his own: an effort to find 'an inner correspondence in musical terms to the surrounding world to the way people thought, felt, lived, dressed and travelled in those days.'16 To Pasternak Scriabin's work was not just music, but 'a feast, a celebration in the history of Russian culture.'17 His own work is an attempt to carry on that interrupted feast. It is not accidental that Lara's faith is described as 'inner music,' that the prose part of Zhivago ends with 'the unheard music of happiness' swelling up out 'of this holy city and of the whole world.'. Thereafter, the novel turns to song, and ends with the posthumous poems of Yury Zhivago, some of Pasternak's most hauntingly musical verse. If his father was a painter and he a student of philosophy, it is the sound of music first heard, perhaps, from his pianist-mother that lends a special magic to both image and idea in Pasternak. It seems fitting that his death and burial should be accompanied, not by the prosaic speeches and editorials of the official Soviet press, but rather by the pure music of Russia's greatest pianist and interpreter of Scriabin, Sviatoslav Richter, playing until drenched with perspiration at a small upright piano in Pasternak's cottage, near the dead body of the poet. If Pasternak's novel does not reach as high as those of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it moves in the same direction. Like them, Pasternak was driven by religious concerns that he was unable to resolve in any conventional way. In his last years, he described himself as 'almost an atheist'18 and denied that he had any philosophy of life whatsoever, admitting only to 'certain experiences or tendencies.' He confessed a special tendency to see art as an act of 'consecrated abnegation in a far and humble likeness with the Lord's Supper,'19 and to believe that out of voluntary suffering in imitation of Christ would come the miracle of resurrection.
Resurrection is the real theme of the novel-a fact which links him once again with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the submerged culture of Orthodoxy. 'Why seek ye the living [zhivago] among the dead?'20 Christ's followers were asked when they came to His tomb on the first Easter. Henceforth, all who would 'rightly praise' his name should cry forth 'Christ is risen! … In troth risen.' Dostoevsky's last testament to new life out of death, The Brothers Karamazov, begins with the legend: 'Except a grain of wheat fall in the ground and die . . .' Tolstoy's last novel bore the title Resurrection; and the original illustrations of this work by his father were on the walls of Pasternak's dacha at Peredelkino when he was writing Zhivago.
Pasternak's novel begins with a funeral and ends with the resurrection on the third day of a man to whom the centuries are moving 'out of darkness to judgment.' Pasternak suggests, moreover, that God may be bringing a new kind of life out of death on Russian soil; that a cultural resurrection may lie at the end of the revolutionary Calvary even for those like himself and Zhivago: the confused observers and superfluous figures of Old Russia. Nothing which they did earned salvation. But, for all their faults, they had been touched in some mysterious way by the warm forgiving natural world, and by the image of Christ Himself. These two supernatural forces converge on the lonely, dead body of Zhivago. There was to be no formal church funeral; and Lara had already bid him farewell.
Only the flowers compensated for the absence of the ritual and chant. They did more than blossom and smell sweet. Perhaps hastening the return to dust, they poured forth their scent as in a choir, and steeping everything in their exhalation seemed to take over the function of the Office of the Dead.
The vegetable kingdom can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbour of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees and flowers of graveyards. Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus risen from the grave, 'supposing him to be the gardener.'
Russia's resurrection is hinted at in a no less powerful manner. Indeed, for the historian of culture, Pasternak's view of the Russian Revolution and of the Russian future is perhaps even more important than his views on personal fulfillment and salvation. It is significant that, despite Zhivago's intimate relationship with Lara, she chose to marry his spiritual opposite, Strelnikov, the 'shooter,' the revolutionary activist. For the spiritual culture of Old Russia did, to a considerable extent, wed itself to the Revolution in the initial period of purity and new vision.
