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, 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.
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.
The Icon and the Axe Page 83