Innocence in Russia

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (558 pp.)--Boris Pasternak--Pantheon ($5).

Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane:

I shall descend into my grave. And on the third day rise again.

And, even as rafts float down a river,

So shall the centuries drift, trailing like a caravan,

Coming for judgment, out of the dark, to me.

Thus the U.S.S.R.'s Boris Pasternak, who once described himself as "almost an atheist," seems to summon his readers to stand--not before the official Communist deity, which is a thing called history--but before the divinity of Jesus. This helps to explain why Doctor Zhivago, the greatest Russian novel since the Revolution, will not be read in Russia. The poem is attributed to the novel's hero, who supposedly leaves it with a sheaf of other verse as his legacy, but it plainly speaks for Pasternak and his gentle genius.

Poet Pasternak, 68, distinguished Russian translator of Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, finished the novel in 1955, after almost a decade's work, and during a period of "thaw"' and official absentmindedness sent it to an Italian Communist publisher (TIME, Dec. 9). Before long the Reds did an ideological double take and demanded the manuscript's return, but the publisher refused. This English translation reveals the novel (which begins in 1903 and ends in 1929, with an epilogue carrying the action beyond World War II) as a biography of Pasternak's own generation, described by Poet Alexander Blok as "the children of Russia's terrible years.''

The Failure. Zhivago's tortuous path takes him from boyhood at his mother's grave through the lurid landscape of war and revolution. An utterly credible and pitiable man. he is seen first as a student whose gift for happiness makes him feel lost among the fanatical miseries of Russian revolutionary youth. All are anarchists, nihilists. pro-Bolsheviks: young Zhivago is merely human, and he remains stubbornly human as he moves through marriage, friendships, his career as a physician, front-line service in World War I. In the vast plains of Russia, he seeks to shelter his family from the horrors of civil war--but he seems disastrously unable to help those who love him.

In a sense he is inept, but he survives, perhaps because of that very ineptness. He is the opposite of that foremost hero of 20th century fiction. l'homme engage --the ideologically committed man. He is unlike Antipov. the revolutionary idealist who thinks he can remake the world and shoots himself when he finds his dream betrayed; and he is unlike his own father, the dead libertine, symbol of a dead Russia. Zhivago worships neither the past nor the forces that act in the name of the future. His philosophy is: "People must be drawn to good by goodness."

By Soviet standards--and perhaps by Western standards too--he is a failure. He is an innocent, and Author Pasternak asserts that such a spirit will outlast all regimes. At the end of the book, one of the three women who loved Zhivago bids him farewell: "The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of unadorned beauty--yes, yes. these things were ours. [But] things like the reshaping of the planet--these things, no thank you, they are not for us."

The Talkers. In the past, Author Pasternak has been denounced by his comrade writers as "an internal emigre of the ivory tower." Yet, perhaps because of his international reputation, the Reds have left him more or less in peace in his ivory tower (a rambling wooden dacha near Moscow, surrounded by wild currant bushes and apple trees). His alter ego, Dr. Zhivago, sneers at "claptrap in praise of the revolution . . . It's not the kind of thing I'm good at.'' Neither is Pasternak. Recently, when it was suggested to him that he go to Baku, where he lived as a young man, to write a novel about the workers' improved lot in the oilfields, Pasternak refused--and got away with it.

Doctor Zhivago is far too good a novel to be read primarily as an anti-Marxist polemic, although it does contain some breathtaking anti-Marxist passages. Nor, despite the mystical intensity of Dr. Zhi-vago's poetry, does the book resemble a Tolstoyan Christian tract. It is a story in praise of life surrounded by death, of innocence surrounded by corruption. The language, even in translation, is that of a poet. There is a marvelously real sense of Russian life--which means, above all, Rus sian talk. In boxcars, beds, before firing squads and committees, Pasternak's Russians talk, and total strangers explain themselves to each other at the top of their voices. As Zhivago says on the eve of the revolution: "Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and she can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop. And it isn't as if only people were talking. Stars and trees meet and converse, flowers talk philosophy at night, stone houses hold meetings. It makes you think of the Gospel, doesn't it?"

The talk may be mostly silenced today, but there is in Doctor Zhivago an unyielding suggestion that the silence will one day be broken, that the Communist regime is an interim affair, an affliction to be endured in hope, until the caravan of time evoked in Zhivago's poem comes out of the dark for judgment.

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