The story of Strelnikov offers a marvelously distilled account of the
drift into revolution. It all began, in Pasternak's view, when the young man named Antipov ceased responding as an individual to the real world and began repeating the abstract slogans dinned about him: in this case the war cries of 1914. He goes off to war under the new name of Pasha, disappears from view under a cloud of shell smoke, and is next seen under the name of Strelnikov in a new capacity as revolutionary leader. Thus, with economy and graphic power Pasternak relates revolution to war, and war to man's flight from the individual and the concrete. Strelnikov becomes the epitome of revolution: intensely devoted to abstract ideas and completely pure personally. He marries Lara, and Pasternak assures us in the last dialogue between Strelnikov and Zhivago that her choice-and thus Russia's attachment to revolution-was not a mistake. The revolution which Strelnikov personified offered men the purity of self-denial in the name of a fresh start in human affairs. This impulse was destroyed in Russia not by counterrevolution but by the destructive logic of revolution itself. Thus Strelnikov dies a suicide even before the Civil War has ended; and the last image of him is that of his sacrificial blood, which Pasternak links with that of Christ by way of the naturalistic images of Russian folklore. Pasternak depicts the dead Strelnikov through the blood from his wound congealed on the snow 'like the frozen berries of the rowan tree'-thus calling to mind the popular folk song recited earlier, in which the rowan tree voluntarily threw its red berries to the wind rather than give them over to the ravens. If the ravens took over in the wake of the Revolution and feasted on the remains of the spiritual culture of Old Russia, Pasternak insists that their day is passing. In the first epilogue one learns that Zhivago and Lara have been survived by a daughter living somewhere in the interior of Russia 'where the language is still pure' and that 'portents of freedom filled the air throughout the post-war period and they alone defined its historical significance.' Pasternak sounded the same theme in characteristic natural imagery during an interview with a Western journalist as Zhivago was being readied for publication:
The proclamations, the tumult, the excitement, are over. Now something else is growing, something new. It is growing imperceptibly and quietly, as the grass grows. It is growing as fruit does, and it is growing in the young. The essential thing in this epoch is that a new freedom is being born.21
But Pasternak's 'message' is ultimately found in his poetry rather than his prose; and it is appropriate that the final epilogue of his novel takes the form of verse. Whereas Tolstoy's second epilogue had been a statement of his philosophy of history, a retreat from magnificent fiction into
polemic prose, Pasternak's second epilogue marks an advance from fine fiction into magnificent poetry. The two epilogues are as different as was Tolstoy's 'Kreutzer Sonata' from Beethoven's; and Pasternak, as always, is on the side of music.
There are twenty-five poems in all-the number of songs frequently used in Akathistoi, the hymn cycles popularly used in the Eastern Church to honor the Virgin. Pasternak's poems can be looked on as the Akathistoi of an intelligent feeling his way back to God.
At the beginning of the cycle stands Hamlet, the symbol of indecision about life itself that had so long fascinated the Russian imagination. Pasternak does not resolve the 'Hamlet question,' but rather changes the Hamlet image. As a translator of Shakespeare he had lived closely with this play, and had suggested years before Zhivago that Hamlet was a figure not of weakness but of nobility:
Hamlet is not the drama of a weak-willed character, but of duty and self-abnegation. . . . Hamlet is chosen as the judge of his own time and the servant of a more distant time.22
In the opening poem of the second epilogue, Pasternak identifies himself not with Hamlet himself but with an actor who is forced to play the role before an unfeeling new audience. Then, suddenly, the actor acquires a new dimension as he acknowledges his despair and suddenly repeats the words of Christ: 'Father, if it be Thy will, take this cup from me.'23 The agony of Gethsemane, the subject of the last poem, is thus introduced in the very first:
I am alone, all are drowned in Phariseeism. To live out life is not to cross a field.
The cycle continues through a world of progressing seasons and natural images into which are woven poeticized passages from scripture and other religious allusions. At the end, there are several poems on the birth and early days of Christ, two on Mary Magdalen, who mistook Christ for a gardener, and a final poem, 'The Garden of Gethsemane.' His final affirmation of faith comes only after the Christ of his poem has bid Peter put up the sword and has reconciled Himself to drinking His cup to the full. Thus, Pasternak, in his last three stanzas, writes of coming suffering with the prayerful resignation of a monastic chronicler:
The book of life has come unto a page That is more precious than all holy things. Now that which has been written must take place. So be it then. Amen.
There is meaning in all of this. Man's only mistake has been that of all the heretics from the early Judaizers to the Bolsheviks: presuming to unravel the secrets and determine the path of history. The ancient flame symbol is summoned up to suggest the impulsive and unpredictable quality of providential history: and the Christian message of voluntarily taking up the cross is suggested:
Thou see'st the passing of the years is like a parable
And could burst into flame along the way.
In the name of its awful majesty
I go in voluntary suffering to the grave.
In the final verse men move from the world in which they see through a glass darkly toward their final destination and place of judgment. He reverts to the classical image of a ship at sea. It had served him as a symbol of sensual deliverance in his poem of 1917, 'Oars at Rest,' where a boat lies motionless and the poet and his lover within it are blended into a kind of liquid union with one another and with their natural surroundings.24 In the last lines of Zhivago, however, Pasternak returns the image to its older religious framework. He seems to be saying that beyond the private fate of the poet united briefly with Lara at Varykino, there is another destination; that all the barges so long hauled up the Volga by the sweating multitudes are in truth storied vessels which will yet lead Russia out of its landlocked insularity to worlds beyond.
I descend into the grave, and on the third day
rise again And, like barks weaving down a river The centuries shall come like a caravan of barges Out of the darkness, unto me.
They are the last lines in an extended chronicle, the last image in a long series of icons. The message which Pasternak left to a Russia in turmoil and conflict in the twentieth century is very much like that which a revered metropolitan of Siberia left to his flock amidst the troubles and schism of the seventeenth century-and which the official journal of the Moscow patriarch quietly reprinted in mid-1965:
Christians! even in darkest days a sunflower completes its circular course, following the sun by unchangeable
