Pasternak's Hero: Man Against the Monoliths

The critical hobby-horses have been ridden to hell, and the trumpets are put away. Edmund Wilson and the Nobel Prize Committee and the Soviet Writers Union and the American newspaper editorial pages have had their say on Pasternak--and perhaps now a second reading and some thoughts are in order.

Doctor Zhivago has sold more hardcover editions in the United States than any other book since Peyton Place. It was the most popular literary Christmas present of the 1958 holiday season. The proportion of pages read to books bought must be more lopsided than that of the Gideon Bible. And one of the biggest reasons for the disparity is reader fatigue; the busy man must choose between the book itself and the welter of commentary on it.

Zhivago is a novel by a poet, and as such is at once too great and too restricted for its literary form. It is apolitical, and, ironically, a political shillelagh inveighed by both sides in the Cold War. It alternates between axes of profound beauty and profound confusion. It is not quite Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, but its intellectual vitality and respect for human dignity make it tower above anything else around these days.

The story of Yuri Zhivago is the story of the Russian intellectual--the disintegration of the man of ideas. Zhivago, as a student in the University, welcomes the Revolution; as a professional man displaced, repudiates it; as a degenerate in a one-room Moscow flat, is finally destroyed by it. In the process of that destruction, Pasternak tells the story of Russia in the 20th century--of the parasites who feed on emergent ideologies, of men serving and struggling against systems and faiths they cannot grasp, of the miasma of bureaucracy, land reform, nobility, and military that was Russia after October, 1917.

But the book is much more than an indictment of the Communist system. It is, just as much, an indictment of world-savers and social engineers, the true believer and the legislator of morality; an indictment as much of any political system which seeks to reform the world from the top or bottom, and ignores the basic ingredient and the basic problem, man.

In the process of disintegration, Zhivago devolves from a respected physician and devoted poet to a tired, beaten man who dies of a heart attack on a Moscow trolley-car. And that disintegration cannon be ascribed solely to the disruptive political system which surrounds him, to the "inscrutability of universal chaos."

Zhivago himself is a weak man, a Russian Hamlet to whom reality itself is the greatest antagonist. (The figure of Hamlet dominates Zhivago's conception of himself, culminating in the most notable of his poems collected at the end of the book.) The collection of pygmies in the Soviet Writers Union, besides their fatuous forays against Zhivago's politics complained that the character lacked a social conscience, that the book itself was devoid of a social meaning. And, in a way, it is legitimate criticism. When a protagonist of great stature fails to come to terms with reality, it is seldom a social novel; but it is often great tragedy, and such is Pasternak's book.

In a sense, Zhivago and the Russian intellectuals he symbolizes are Dostoyevsky's Ivan all over again. Just as the murder of the Father Karamazov was a consequence of Ivan's ideas, so was the Revolution a consequence of the (at once brilliant and naive) Russian intellectual ferment, a century in the coagulating. And just as Ivan was unable to face the practical implications of those ideas, to accept his own involvment in reality, and went insane; so Zhivago and his ilk came out of the October Revolution bewildered and shaken into silence.

Zhivago's tragedy is somewhat confused by Pasternak's limitations as a novelist. This is his first novel. He is a poet, and during the Stalin era of literary frigidity, he devoted himself to Russian translations of Shakespeare. As a poet, he has been schooled to write from a single point of view, a single consciousness ranging on a variety of subjects or focusing on one. Most poetry is characterized by this synthesis of artist and the created personality. For poetry, it is basic; for the novel, it can be disastrous. The fusion of Zhiva-go and Pasternak admits of no third party and no alternatives. Life is as Zhivago sees it, and the arguments of supplementary characters are given very little stature. Dostoyevsky argued eloquently for all three Karamazovs. Shakespeare's universal vision was splintered into a Lear, an Edmund, and a Fool in just one play. But Zhivago's antagonists are given a few pages of characterization, a few pages of soliloquy and a few pages of judgment--than back again into the moras of Zhivago's disaffection.

Evgraf, Zhivago's brother, appears once every 150 pages and plays his spasmodic role as a brother's keeper. Pasha, who left his family to become a military commander for the Communists, must explain his love, excuse his motivation, justify his life, and shoot himself in ten pages. These two men offered Zhivago a serious intellectual challenge--service out of love, and service out of duty. But Zhivago fails to come to terms with either concept, and Pasternak abets him.

And springing full-blown from this same faulty technique is the book's most serious fault-lack of character development. The reader must constantly depend upon random statements by one character judging another for either of them to be illuminated. We are told that Lara (for Zhivago, the life-force) symbolizes the oppression of the 19th century and the hope of the 20th; but someone has to say it, for in the characterization of her words and deeds there is no indication of such a symbolic meaning.

Evgraf, Pasha, Komarovsky (the old lecher), and Tonia (Zhivago's first wife) rush onto the stage, whisper or shout their say, commit their little deeds and consider their situations, and the clamber back into the wings. Some, like Zhivago, are tangled in the threads of introspection; others don't appear to think at all. Does Komarsky help Lara out of a sense of guilt for having violated her, out of a real love, or what: What sort of person is Tonia? Why did Pasha really leave home? Unfortunately, we can't tune in tomorrow.

The characters move along in a sweeping dream. They meet and react; they pass through each other's lives but for consistency of purpose and character, they might as well be unamed. The texture of the book itself is often dream-like. There are no expanations for remarkable conincidences. Useless characters and irrelevant scenes are introduced, languish, and are forgotten. Time sequence and geography and character all blur into a fantastic, exciting, but extremely confusing montage. The Soviet literary critics rightly complained that there was a failure to distinguish between the March and October revolutions. No matter what the1