The Passion of Yurii Zhivago

Under a white birch tree near a brook sat a young man writing poetry. Occasionally, when the words on paper somehow refused to echo the music in his mind, he wept. The place was Molodi, a village 38 miles from Moscow, and the time was the year of peace 1913. The quiet gardens surrounding his parents' summer house, legend had it, had once served as a battlefield for the Czar's Cossacks and Napoleon's retreating French. Near by, graves dotted the ground.

For nearly 50 years, during which most of his country and the world became a graveyard, the poet continued to write--and one of the things that shaped his vision was the contrast between the graves and his youth's calm summer landscape, the eternal tension between life and death. In Doctor Zhivago, one of this century's remarkable novels, Boris Pasternak carried that theme to its climax. With this embattled book he restored to the world the image of what Russia has long been, despite violence, madness and corruption --a preacher to the nations on the text of death and resurrection.

In Stockholm this week Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was to have received one of the world's great literary honors--the Nobel Prize. The elaborate ceremonies, honoring, among others, three Soviet scientists, were bound to be dominated by the man who was not there. According to a terse speech, prepared weeks ago, by Anders Osterling, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Boris Pasternak was chosen because of his "important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition. Mr. Pasternak informed us that he does not wish to accept the prize. In view of these circumstances the Academy can only express its regrets."

The Territory of Conscience. In far-off Peredelkino, in his fir-and birch-engirdled, two-story dacha 15 miles southwest of Moscow, Boris Pasternak was mute but not inglorious. Against the sky he could see silhouetted the blue, oniontop cupolas of the village Orthodox Church, symbol of the Christian faith that enables his hero, Dr. Yurii Zhivago, to endure the torment, humiliations, sins and tragedy of war and revolution. On the walls of his study glow the illustrations that his artist-father drew for Resurrection by the great Tolstoy, whom Boris Pasternak has called "the territory of conscience." On that territory he consecrated Doctor Zhivago.

"I had to write this book," he said weeks ago, before the Kremlin clamped down. "These 40 years of storm were calling for an incarnation." In his token submission to Nikita Khrushchev and Pravda (TIME, Nov. 10-17), Pasternak recanted not a line of his book, expressed not a moment's regret that it has been published outside Russia. To a German reporter who saw him for a few moments after the Nobel announcement and the resulting political storm, Pasternak said: "I am sorry, I didn't want this to happen, all this noise . . . But I am glad I wrote this book." Months ago Pasternak had told friends: "Stockholm will never happen, since my government will never permit such an award to be given to me. This and much else is hard and sad. But it is these fatalities that give life weight and depth and gravity, and make it extraordinary--rapturous, magical, and real."

Pasternak has called his book's tremendous success the "Zhivago miracle," but the paradox of the Pasternak miracle is equally compelling. He is a stubborn man who is not really a martyr. He is an aggrieved man and yet not an avenger. He is a man without weapons, wielding "the irresistible power of unarmed truth." Most paradoxically of all, out of Communist Russia, a society that officially denies the existence of God, Pasternak has sent a deeply Christian statement of the condition of man, such as most writers of the professedly Christian West are too embarrassed or too unbelieving to make.

Beyond Politics. Around the world the name of Boris Pasternak, until recently familiar to few except fellow poets and literary specialists, has assumed a kind of magic. In U.S. book stores, Zhivago, the No. 1 bestseller, is periodically out of stock; U.S. sales to this week: 344,000 copies. The publisher (Pantheon) has a new printing of 430,000 copies scheduled, and the Book-of-the-Month Club is rushing Zhivago to its subscribers as an alternate choice. It has been translated into 17 languages: the book without a country will shortly span the globe. At least some clandestine copies of the book are being read in Russia, too.

Much of the West's interest in Zhivago is political. Inevitably, the book has been used as a weapon in the cold war. Inevitably, Moscow's refusal to let Pasternak accept the Nobel Prize and his denunciation by the hired hacks of the Animal Farm ("A black sheep in a good flock," "a pig," "a snake") have alienated intellectuals outside Russia--even India's Nehru protested directly to Khrushchev. But to assess the book primarily in political terms would be making a major error about Doctor Zhivago and about Boris Pasternak. The bitter criticism of Marxism cannot be missed, and Pasternak obviously wrote exactly what he wanted to write. But he also says: "My novel was not intended to be a political pamphlet. I wanted to show life as it is, in all its wealth and intensity. In the West they always quote the same two or three pages of my work. Have they read the rest? I am not a propagandist. This is not the meaning of my novel."

That meaning is manifold. Zhivago is a historical novel of "Russia's terrible years," bearing witness to the sufferings of the Russian people. It is also a novel of Christian humanism that opposes the materialism of both East and West, affirms the sanctity of every man's soul under God. It is a novel in praise of the continuity of life, which for Pasternak means resurrection. It is, finally, a novel dedicated to the primacy of the individual and his private life in defiance of superstates, of groupthink, of social and ideological regimentation. If this is a devastating indictment of the essence of Communism, it is by implication equally critical of much that is currently lodged in Western habits of thought; for the book flatly pits the individual against "adjustment to the group," the soul's need against economic need, the organic against the mechanical.

Bury the Living. In strictly literary terms. Doctor Zhivago is an extraordinary novel, but it is not a great one. It is riddled by implausible coincidences, cluttered with distracting minor characters, shamelessly melodramatic. With the exception of Dr. Zhivago, none of the major characters are developed much beyond the point of abstraction. Even the doctor exists more as a luminous conscience than a physical presence; all the reader is ever told of his appearance is that he is tall and has "a snub nose and an unremarkable face." As for the novel's structure, it is like an endless railway journey in which the reader sometimes waits yawningly for the next station of the plot. Yet these defects mask virtues. Coincidence is the logic of destiny, and Dr. Zhivago has a strong sense of his destiny. The massed characters and episodes help to give the book panoramic scope. And the torrents of talk on art, religion, and life usually flow with incisive force, in what one critic calls Western Europe's "great tradition of full statement"--a tradition that has nearly disappeared in the West's contemporary fragmented, endlessly detailed and programed writing.

What raises Zhivago above technically better-made novels is that it is charged with moral passion. On the very first page, Pasternak evokes an old Russian ballad that sets the tone of the novel and suggests the elaborate symbolic substructure he has given his book. The ballad, dating from the period when being buried alive was a commonly felt terror, contains the line "Who are they burying? The living! Not him, but her." Thus in the second paragraph of Doctor Zhivago, a funeral procession is described: "Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried?'--'Zhivago,' they were told.--'Oh, I see. That's what it is.'--'It isn't him. It's his wife.'--'Well, it comes to the same thing.' " Zhivago is a name Pasternak has used to evoke the Russian words for life and vitality. His meaning may well be that, for too long, it has been Russia's fate to bury the living.

In this scene it is actually the boy Yurii Andreievich Zhivago's mother who is being buried. His millionaire father has committed suicide, and Yurii is being brought up as a ward of the well-to-do Gromeko family in a gracious world of chamber-music concerts, fancy-dress balls and lofty ideals. His teen-age partner, prim and proper Antonina (Tonia) Gromeko, is destined to be his bride.

In the meantime, the girl who is to become the great love of Yurii Zhivago's life, Larisa (Lara) Feodorovna Guishar, is being schooled in a very different way. In her mid-teens, she is seduced by a middle-aged lawyer lecher named Komarovsky. The characters are easily seen as symbols. Komarovsky plainly stands for the corruption of the old Czarist regime, while Lara may be Mary Magdalene or Russia herself. And what of Yurii Zhivago? He too stands for Russia. He also stands for martyrdom (Critic Edmund Wilson notes that Yurii means George and perhaps suggests St. George, martyred under Diocletian). Above all, Zhivago is Christlike in his suffering and in his promise of life; his story is a modern passion.

Life as Sacrifice. Zhivago's Uncle Kolia, a kind of fellow traveler of Christianity, enunciates one of the book's major themes: "What you don't understand is that . . . history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ's Gospel is its foundation. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies . . . The two basic ideals of modern man --without them he is unthinkable--[are] the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice."

Sacrifice begins for Zhivago when World War I wrenches him from his wife Tonia and his infant son. He is wounded, and cared for by Lara, who has become a nurse, while her husband has seemingly perished at the front. Their grand love affair begins, but Pasternak treats it with a circumspection that Russians have dubbed "the Turgenev approach" after the Russian Victorian novelist. Though they spend years intermittently living together in adultery, Yurii and Lara never even kiss in the pages of Doctor Zhivago.

Russia in Flames. When the Revolution breaks out, almost everyone Dr. Zhivago knows is enraptured by the profoundly Russian messianic dream: "There arose before the eyes of the world the vast figure of Russia bursting into flames like a light of redemption for all the sorrows and misfortunes of mankind." But Zhivago soon sickens of "the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter." Moscow is like a looted city, its empty windowpanes stare blindly at Zhivago; it is another one of the living whom the Revolution has buried. Typhus and near-starvation force the doctor to pack himself and family off to the Urals--but the old life is still so near that they go into exile with a nursemaid for the children. This train journey is one of the book's great set pieces, with matchless descriptions of sky, snow and forest, and a haunting image of all Russia, restless, uprooted and on the move.

During the journey, Zhivago meets Lara's husband Antipov, now called Strelnikov, "The Shooter." His task is to destroy recalcitrant peasant villages for the Bolsheviks in the civil war that has broken out between the Whites and Reds. Emphasizing yet again Zhivago's inner quest for the truth of his own being, Pasternak settles the doctor in a town that is his symbolic namesake, Yuriatin. Inevitably, Lara is there; and despite his remorse, Yurii is once more unfaithful to his wife. On a horseback ride back from Lara's. Physician Zhivago is kidnaped by a band of Red partisans, and for the next couple of years he is their captive medic in the White-Red struggle in Siberia.

Few, other than Pasternak's Communist critics, have noted his unfeigned and unwavering sympathies for the educated middle class in which he was reared. In this section, Pasternak takes pains to make his protagonist's loyalties unmistakable. The partisan commander is a cocaine-sniffing hophead whom Dr. Zhivago loathes, as much for his boring platitudes as for his cruelty. By contrast, when a band of teen-age White soldiers storms the Red positions, the doctor admires their gallantry. He feels that he must shoot in self-defense, but he cannot bring himself to aim at the boys who "were probably akin to him in spirit, in education, in moral values." And so, in a perfect illustration of Zhivago's essential refusal to do harm, he aims his fire at a dead tree.

While his family is forced to escape to western Europe, Zhivago escapes from the partisans for one last reunion with Lara. It is a weird, snowbound, dreamlike idyl on the edge of disaster, rapturous with love but also with an almost Chekhovian paralysis of the will. Eventually Lara is swept away to temporary safety by her old traducer, Komarovsky.

During the brief remainder of his life, Zhivago goes to seed.

As an ironic token of the complete reversal of the social hourglass, he lives with the daughter of his former porter. He is mocked and ridiculed. A kind of Suffering Servant, he does odd chores for his neighbors. One morning, in a Moscow trolley, he feels suffocated, tugs vainly at the window for a breath of air and dies short minutes later of a heart attack--buried alive, as the first-page parable foretold, for lack of the vital air of freedom.

Weather of the Heart. An oldtime literary colleague of Pasternak's and a party-liner, who has managed to survive Moscow's murderous political traffic by carefully watching the Kremlin lights, ventured (before the Nobel Prize fracas) to praise Doctor Zhivago. Said Ilya (The Thaw) Ehrenburg: "The description of those days is excellent. Pasternak and I belong to the same generation, so I can pass judgment on this." But the editors of the Moscow magazine Novy Mir, to whom Pasternak submitted the manuscript in 1956, stated the Communist case against the novel. Apart from Pasternak's sympathy for bourgeois characters, they cited 1) his failure to distinguish between the several wings of the revolutionary movement and even between the February (Democratic) and the October (Bolshevik) revolutions; 2) the unheroic desire of his characters to stay alive. From the editors' point of view, both criticisms were just.

All factions, friend and foe, are suffused by Pasternak with a profound pity, and their death is mourned. In one of the more fascinating passages, he introduces a village witch in Siberia who, even in the dawn of scientific socialism, clings to her visions. She prophesies: "Take your red banner. You think it's a flag, isn't that what you think? Well, it isn't a flag. It's the purple kerchief of the death woman."

Aside from its moral fervor and the grand themes of life and death, Doctor Zhivago is not intimately linked to any of the Russian masterpieces of the past. Pasternak's Yurii and Lara, Antipov and Tonia are simply not the solid and memorable characters that Tolstoy's Pierre and Natasha are, or Dostoevsky's Karamazovs. But Pasternak is not interested in character dissection. After the manner of Pushkin and Turgenev, he prefers to use the imagery of nature and inanimate objects to create a kind of poetic accompaniment to his characters' states of feeling. In Pasternak, at the heart of the weather, one always finds the weather of the heart.

As a result, the reader knows all about the moods of his characters but little about their motivations. This compounds the sense of will-lessness that pervades the book and gives Dr. Zhivago the air of a hapless victim. But there is something about Zhivago's very weakness that gives him strength. Perhaps, suggests an expert on Russian literature, Harvard Professor Renato Poggioli, this is Pasternak's way of saying that in a totalitarian society the "weakest victim may be also its most elusive enemy: and that victim and enemy is the single person, the individual soul."

Dr. Zhivago is a Hamlet and a passive Hamlet at that. What then, of Zhivago's destiny? Pasternak, himself a renowned translator of Hamlet, gives the clue in an answer that reveals more about Pasternak than it does about Hamlet: "Chance has allotted Hamlet the role of judge of his own time and servant of the future. Hamlet is the drama of a high destiny, of a life devoted and preordained to a heroic task." This is the key to Doctor Zhivago. As the judge of his own time, Pasternak declares the Revolution and its aftermath of suffering a tyrannous failure. As the servant of the future, he demands nothing less than freedom.

Sweet & Dreadful. Like Yurii Zhivago, Boris Pasternak was raised in a gracious, leisurely, art-saturated world. Of Jewish descent, he was born in 1890 in a red brick house on Moscow's fashionable Arsenal Street. "Borya" Pasternak was the eldest of four children (one brother, Alexander, now a Moscow architect, and two sisters, Lydia and Josephine, emigres in England since the mid-thirties). Papa Leonid Pasternak was a celebrated, goateed painter, who did portraits of the great and gifted, among them, Chaliapin, Rilke, Rachmaninoff, Lenin. Though she later renounced her career, Mamma Roza Kaufmann Pasternak was a concert pianist--"Mozart in skirts"--who had toured the Russian concert halls from the age of eight. Sensitive, high-strung (Pasternak claims to have contemplated suicide in his sixth, seventh, and eighth years), little Boris woke up crying one night, with "a sweet and dreadful pain" to the echoes of music. Blotting his tears, Mamma Pasternak trotted the blinky-eyed youngster out to meet the guests, among them an old man who has since "accompanied me throughout my whole life." It was Tolstoy.

In 1903 Papa Pasternak rented a dacha outside Moscow, next to the home of the composer Scriabin. The day the Pasternaks moved, the future poet fled the bustle and ran into the surrounding woods. He recalls in an autobiographical sketch: "Oh Lord! That forest was full of everything that morning! The sun was piercing it in all directions . . . And like the light and shadows shimmering in the forest, like the singing birds flitting from branch to branch, sections of Scriabin's Third Symphony or Divine Poem, which was being composed at the piano in the neighboring house, spread and echoed under the foliage." The adolescent Pasternak decided that he was "destined for music." But crestfallen that he lacked absolute pitch and that he could not even properly play what he had composed. Pasternak abandoned music after six years of study. He retains one of Scriabin's mystic ideas: that art, religion and life are one, an eternal and infrangible entity.

Once, during the abortive 1905 revolution, almost as a prank, young Boris rushed out to display "my tuppeny-ha'penny revolutionism which went no further than bravado in the face of a Cossack whip and its blow on the back of a padded coat." He studied law briefly at Moscow, then enrolled as a philosophy major in Germany's University of Marburg under a pudgy intellectual martinet, Professor Hermann Cohen, a disciple of Hegel and Kant. In the Gothic-fairy-tale mountain town of Marburg, with its steeply sloping streets and medieval gables, his first serious love came to 18-year-old Boris Pasternak. When the girl turned down his offer of marriage, "[I found] my face was twitching and my eyes constantly filled with tears."

After traveling in Italy, Pasternak returned to Moscow without his philosophy degree and began whooping it up as a bohemian versifier. Pasternak, with his liquid, steel-grey eyes, sensuous lips and proud and pensive look, became famed as a ladies' man. He looked, recalls one acquaintance, "like an Arabian stallion."

In poetry he vaulted over the neat, syntactical fences and conventional forms of the past. He, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin became Russia's three musketeers of modernity. Mayakovsky's poetry was like a shot in the streets. He became the Bolshevik poet laureate; but Big Brother's embrace was crushing, and in the end he killed himself. In his book Safe Conduct, Pasternak conjures up "our State" as the "stone guest" at the funeral. Esenin (who was married for a time to Dancer Isadora Duncan) was an untutored rustic songbird, who pined away in the Soviet cage and also died by his own hand.

Themes & Variations. In the four slim volumes that Boris Pasternak published between 1914 and 1923 (two chief ones: My Sister Life, Themes and Variations), he developed a telegraphic style, sound effects that are almost totally lost in translation and a unique imagery that made the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Pasternak's Definition of Poetry is actually easier to understand than most of his poems:

It is a steeply rising whistle.

It is the cracking of squeezed icicles.

It is frozen leaves through the night.

It is two nightingales singing a duel.

It is the stifled sweetpea plant.

It is the tears of the world on a shoulder.

Poet Pasternak stressed imagery because he believed that "only the image can keep pace with the successes of nature." A frosty night is "like a blind puppy lapping its milk." The Caucasus is like "crumpled bedding." The dark night of the soul is "blacker than monks, more stifling than clergy." The evening is empty "like an interrupted story." What Pasternak has tried to do in his poetry is not to recollect emotion in tranquillity, but to arrest emotion like a motion picture stopped with all the characters in mid-action.

Intriguingly enough, Pasternak had no trouble writing spirited revolutionary poetry when the period dealt with by the poem (1905, 1917) was one in which he could regard the Revolution as a kind of unspoiled force of nature. Sample stanza:

We're few, perhaps not more than three,

Flaming, infernal, from the Don,

Beneath a sky racing and gray

Of rain, clouds, soldiers bent upon

Soviets, verses and long talk

Of transport and the artist's work.

From the years before 1925 date four of Pasternak's five short stories. Another story, The Last Summer, written in 1934, is an autobiographical reverie evoking the summer of 1914, "that last summer when life still appeared to pay heed to individuals, and when it was easier and more natural to love than to hate." Of the earlier tales, only The Childhood of Luvers, a sensitively wrought, Proustian account of a girl at puberty accepting her womanhood, is memorable.

"Sixty-Six! Sixty-Six!" Pasternak escaped service in World War I because of an old leg injury, but worked in a chemical factory in the Urals. While the '20s brought him success, the late '30s imposed silence. During the Stalinist purges, Pasternak turned to translating Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley--the only work of his by which he is known to a wide Russian public. Save for two wartime books of poetry, no volume of Pasternak's has been published in Russia for a quarter-century, although handwritten copies are privately circulated.

As late as the winter of '41-'42, Pasternak slept on a shakedown bed under the stairway of an unheated Moscow tenement house. There he received anonymous gifts of food, rather like a Hindu holy man before whose hovel little dishes are placed by unseen hands. During the Terror of '36-'37, he lost his "living space" and food-ration privileges. When Red Army Marshal Tukhachevsky et al. were executed, Pasternak was asked to sign a resolution of approval, and refused: "My wife was pregnant. She cried and begged me to sign, but I couldn't ... I abhorred all this blood ... It was, I was told later, my colleagues who saved me indirectly. No one dared to report to the hierarchy that I hadn't signed."

"Spasibo Dorogiye." The tactic of passivity and silence gradually made him a hero with Russian intellectuals and made his rare public appearances S.R.O. affairs. At one such reading, in 1947, a sheet of his manuscript slipped to the floor, and before he could stoop to retrieve it the audience chanted the next stanza of his poem by heart. Eyes brimming with tears, Pasternak choked out "Spasibo Dorogiye" (Thank you. dear ones). At another reading, his listeners yelled "Sixty-six! Sixty-six!", meaning the sixty-sixth sonnet of Shakespeare. The telltale line: "Art made tongue-tied by authority."

Over the years, Pasternak has written countless poems "for the drawer" in hope of future publication, though he periodically weeds and destroys some of his backlog. Occasionally absent-minded in conversation (he sometimes lapses into a preoccupied refrain of "da, da, da, da, da"), Pasternak is methodical in his writing habits. He first puts a watch on his desk, draws a pencil from the box he keeps there, and writes in longhand, reusing every sheet of paper (once on each side for separate works): "It's not only economical, but it's more cozy. The paper is not so fresh. It belongs to me, you might say."

Pasternak, the father of three grown sons, is married to Zinaida Nikolaevna Neuhaus, a plump, inconspicuous half-Italian woman (she is his second wife; little is known of his first, Eugenia, whom he divoiced in 1931). At Peredelkino, Boris Pasternak guards one of the few outposts of the "Other Russia" that exist in the U.S.S.R. On Sunday, over groaning helpings of zakuski (Russian hors d'oeuvres) and repeated toasts, Pasternak holds open house for bright young artists and intellectuals--or did until the Nobel Prize fracas. French, German or English may be spoken (Pasternak is fluent in all three). Pasternak asserts his aloofness from the Marxist world around him with quiet and kindly dignity. Once, in a conversation with a Swedish professor, he started to make some critical comment about Communism, then suddenly interrupted himself. "Possibly you are a Communist," he solicitously asked his caller. "Am I hurting your feelings?"

In no sense is Boris Pasternak a popular hero in Russia, or a practical rallying point of resistance. The West certainly has no grounds for claiming him as a political ally, and at best will have to live up to him as a moral one. Yet Zhivago has become one of those portents of freedom whose ends are incalculable. Among Moscow students a couplet goes:

The signs may change in the Zodiac,

But Pasternak remains Pasternak.

Disengagement, the EIan to Good. For literature, Pasternak's appearance on the world scene may mark the end of an era. For three decades far too many writers have tilted at every political windmill and ambulance-chased every passing cause. This was what Sartre called "engagement." Pasternak calls for disengagement. By that he does not mean detachment from the world, but attachment to human values. It is not the function of the writer, says Pasternak, to serve principalities and powers. Communism or capitalism. The task of men of letters, as he sees it, is to heed "the living voice of life," to bear witness to the good, the true and the beautiful. By example, Pasternak calls on writers to return to the universal themes of life and death, man and God, good and evil, and the joys, sorrows and splendors of love.

For mankind, Pasternak is a symbol of the "elan to good" which he believes is the spirit of the coming age, even in Soviet Russia. As Dr. Zhivago puts it, "I believe that man is only drawn to goodness through good." In Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak has fulfilled his personal definition of the highest purpose of art: to create "an image of man [that] is greater than man," thus leading him to nobler realms of being. He also reminds men that Christ and the Christ-in-everyman is the last best hope of earth. In a perplexed, ravaged and despairing age, Pasternak's undiminished confidence in the future of humanity is perhaps his greatest gift of all:

O do not trouble then, and do not grieve!

Despite my helpless state, I swear, I'll stay

With you that day. The strong in hope endure,

Through all the plagues that bring them low in life.

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