Pasternak's Retreat

"I accepted the award of the Nobel Prize as a literary distinction. I rejoiced . . . But I was wrong." White-haired Russian Poet-Novelist Boris Pasternak wrote these abject words in Pravda last week, and the Soviet news agency Tass triumphantly fired them round the world as Pasternak's "confession" that the Swedish prize committee's award to him last month had been "political."

It was a mean little gain for Soviet propaganda, and a larger defeat for human dignity. Yet if Pasternak's letter was a retreat, it was not a complete capitulation. A Russian patriot, he had plainly not enjoyed being trapped in the no man's land of the East-West cold war. No political figure, asking only of politics that it not destroy all that he holds more dear, Boris Pasternak, during the blackest years of Stalin's tyranny, had aloofly "listened to the world through his soul":

With a muffler round my throat, shielding myself with the palm of my hand, I call out in the courtyard: "What millennium are we celebrating here?"

By the Rules. When Stalin died, Pasternak wrote his novel Doctor Zhivago out of a passionate Christian conviction that salvation is possible only through the individual human spirit. He had shown that spirit in conflict with Soviet society, against which he had sharp things to say --but he had not written merely a political tract. Yet his message undercut the whole dogma of the socialist panacea, as Pasternak's Moscow editors worriedly said in their surprisingly mild 1956 letter of rejection, which was made public in Russia last fortnight.

An old man who has lived through 40 years of Communist rule, Pasternak has had to learn to live by the rules in contemporary Russia. He turned down the Nobel Prize; he addressed an eloquent personal plea to Nikita Khrushchev ("To leave my country would be death") against the exile that the party literary hacks led by David Zaslavsky were insistently demanding. And when all this was not enough, he wrote to Pravda.

The Artist's Fable. Without ever repudiating Doctor Zhivago--which, he repeated, had been published abroad without his authority--Pasternak expressed only regrets at the way in which some had interpreted it. "After the end of the week, when I saw the scope of the political campaign around my novel, I realized myself that this award was a political measure." His Soviet editors, wrote Pasternak, "warned me that the novel might be understood as a work directed against the October Revolution and the founders of the Soviet system. I did not realize this, and I now regret it."

But after listing the main criticisms put forward by his Moscow editors in their letter of rejection, he added impenitently: "I cannot endorse such clumsy allegations," even though "I finally gave up the prize" because of them. He even managed, by pointing out that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize five years ago (long before Doctor Zhivago had been printed and read in the West), to signal to Pravda's readers his answer to the charge that the award was a purely political act.

Returning from Russia, British Laborite M.P. Richard Grossman reported last week: "This decision not to publish Pasternak has caused a first-class sensation in Moscow. Indeed, I found every Russian anxious to talk to me about it and discuss the pros and cons." The sensation would continue, and Pasternak's recantation in Pravda was bound to widen the Russians' curiosity about the great work they were not allowed to read. Years ago Poet Pasternak had warned:

In vain during the days of the Great Soviet, When seats are assigned to Supreme Authority, Is the poet's place reserved: It is dangerous if it is not vacant.

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