In 2007, a Moscow researcher wondrously named Ivan Tolstoy published a book in Russia suggesting that the cia, in concert with British intelligence, was responsible for the novel’s Nobel win and thus its certified use as a cannonade in the Cold War. Tolstoy told the London Times that he’d uncovered a letter from a former cia agent explaining how the manuscript, fresh from Peredelkino, was intercepted when the plane carrying this precious cargo was diverted to Malta instead of Italy. As reported by the Times: “While passengers waited for two hours, agents took the manuscript from the suitcase, photographed it and returned it. The cia then published the Russian edition in Europe and America simultaneously.”
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Pantheon, 544 pages.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/He--the-living-6982
He, the living, by Michael Weiss
On the vision of Boris Pasternak.
Martin Amis once described Finnegans Wake as a “700-page crossword clue, and the answer is ‘the.’” Where does that leave Doctor Zhivago with its recurring symbols and allusions that compete with Joyce for spawning an exegetical industrial complex? As Boris Pasternak told Olga Carlisle in an interview for The Paris Review in 1960: “Now some critics have gotten so wrapped up in those symbols—which are put in the book the way stoves go into a house, to warm it up—they would like me to commit myself and climb into the stove.” What a tease coming from an author whose symbolism gorgeously encoded his entire philosophy of life and art and whose fiction so closely mirrored his own fate.
Born in 1890 to a painter father and pianist mother, Pasternak set out at first to become a composer. He studied under the great Alexander Scriabin who later encouraged his protégé, now under the influence of Rilke, to give up music for the full-time pursuit of poetry. By 1913, when Pasternak came out with his first collection of verse, A Twin in the Clouds, Russian poetry was in a state of sectarian upheaval, in some ways more contentiously disputed than the legitimacy of the czar. Were you a Futurist, an Acmeist, or a Symbolist following the footsteps of Blok? Pasternak was the latter, later explaining, in People and Situations, one of a series of early autobiographical sketches, his belief that reality was subjective but in a universal way and that an artist became immortal when the “happiness of existence he experienced” and his innermost sensations were felt centuries on by other people. This belief apparently stuck with him well past the point of his poetic apprenticeship and into the new sectarian upheavals of the day, this time over the legitimacy of Soviet Communism.
Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago in 1946; he didn’t complete it until 1955, by which time he’d already published ten of the poems contained in the novel’s final chapter. Hoping to see the book appear in the Soviet Union under the terms of the Khrushchevite cultural “thaw,” he submitted the manuscript to the liberal journal Novy Mir in 1956 and asked the state publishing firm Gosizdat to consider bringing it out. He was rebuffed by both because of the subjective nature of the novel and its rebellion against Marxist orthodoxy. Instead, Pasternak agreed to hand it off to an Italian Communist journalist who had visited him that same year at the poet’s home in the Moscow suburb of Peredelkino, announcing grandly but not entirely without reason, “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad,” which in its stoicism echoes what Yuri Zhivago says upon returning to Moscow from the Ukrainian front: “a grown-up man must grit his teeth and share the fate of his native land.”
Pasternak, with his fame as a poet, was unlikely to be shot, but he still risked arrest or exile. That these outcomes never came to pass is especially impressive in light of the global publicity furor that attended Doctor Zhivago’s Italian and Russian publications under the auspices of the Communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. A workmanlike and much derided English translation of the novel was produced in 1958 by Manya Harari and Max Hayward, a former British Foreign Office official who, in the company of Stalin at the Kremlin, was once rendered too dumbstruck to translate for the British ambassador.
This first and hitherto only English edition, which Edmund Wilson likened to something that Reader’s Digest might have manufactured, was full of clunky transliterations and unaccountable elisions. The music of the original prose was gone, although, as Wilson conceded, the majesty of the novel somehow remained intact, surely a testament to Pasternak’s indomitable gifts as a storyteller. Wilson’s friend, Vladimir Nabokov—who had once praised Pasternak’s early poems only to condemn his later output as that of an “Emily Dickinson in trousers”—thought Doctor Zhivago “clumsy, trite, and melodramatic.” It perhaps bears recounting that Nabokov’s own masterpiece, Lolita, was also published under scandalous circumstances in 1958 and also featured the seduction of a young girl by an older man already romantically entangled with the girl’s mother. Like Humbert Humbert, Komarovsky’s great tragedy is that, despite being an opportunist and a sexual tyrant, he is ruinously in love with his adolescent prey.
When Doctor Zhivago won the Nobel Prize in 1958—an honor never, shamefully, bestowed on the emigré Nabokov—Pasternak declared himself to the Swedish Academy “immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” But then the ideological catcalls and denunciations began in earnest, culminating in his expulsion from the Soviet Writers Union (which entailed his forfeiture of his right to housing and revenue from his sold works). Four days later, Pasternak issued this coerced but telling repudiation of the prize: “Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must refuse it. Please do not take offense at my voluntary rejection.”
It took Gorbachev’s glasnost for Doctor Zhivago to see daylight in its native land, although the historical and political complications of this masterpiece remain undiminished today. In 2007, a Moscow researcher wondrously named Ivan Tolstoy published a book in Russia suggesting that the cia, in concert with British intelligence, was responsible for the novel’s Nobel win and thus its certified use as a cannonade in the Cold War. Tolstoy told the London Times that he’d uncovered a letter from a former cia agent explaining how the manuscript, fresh from Peredelkino, was intercepted when the plane carrying this precious cargo was diverted to Malta instead of Italy. As reported by the Times: “While passengers waited for two hours, agents took the manuscript from the suitcase, photographed it and returned it. The cia then published the Russian edition in Europe and America simultaneously.”
If we credit this story as true, then from a purely literary standpoint, it recalls nothing so much as Roy Jenkins’s comment when it was discovered that Encounter magazine’s funding had a similarly controversial provenance: “Good for the cia.” The repercussions, however, were dire for Pasternak’s kin. After his death in 1960, his mistress Olga Ivinskaya—the woman upon whom part of the novel’s heroine Larissa Fyodorovna, or Lara, is based—was arrested along with her daughter, Lyudmila. Their crime was the “illegal” receipt of foreign royalties for Doctor Zhivago. Ivinskaya was sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia, more or less following the fate of her fictional counterpart, while her daughter was sentenced to three. Ivinskaya had also been arrested a decade before as a way of trying to silence Pasternak’s criticisms of the Soviet Union. While in prison and faced with round-the-clock interrogations, she miscarried the child she was carrying by him. The child that Yuri has with Lara narrowly escapes murder, travels around the world as an orphan, then winds up a laundress in the Second World War.
Critics have charged that Doctor Zhivago is too reliant upon forced coincidences and scant characterization. Fleetingly introduced figures in early chapters reappear later on as revved-up plot engines. Galiullin, the son of an abused yard porter in Moscow, turns up as a senior officer in the First World War and the witness to the supposed death of Strelnikov, by then known more conventionally as Pasha Antipov. Vasya, the adolescent work conscript, first appears during the chapter-long train journey to Varykino only to disappear until the very end of the book when he returns as Zhivago’s Bolshevized ward in Moscow. Responding to these criticisms, which were couched in the expectation that Doctor Zhivago had been intended as a realist nineteenth-century epic along the lines of Tolstoy (with whom, incidentally, his father had been friendly), Pasternak gave his entire theory of art:
There is an effort in the novel to represent the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a developing, passing by, rolling, and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless variants and versions.
Nothing is superfluous and everything comes alive, acting rather than being acted upon, as if beholden to some metaphysical force. It is for this reason that Doctor Zhivago has been compared to the Russian folk tale, a rare work of “mysticism” in an age of dialectical materialism. Isaiah Berlin once observed of his fellow Russian, “Stones, trees, earth, water are endowed with a life of their own in an almost mystical vision which fills his poetry from its earliest beginnings.”
In Doctor Zhivago, which borrows from the Russian folk tale, or skazka, this tendency goes beyond pathetic fallacy and borders on a kind of literary animism. Yet it would be wrong to misread in this assessment a faddishness or obscurantism in Pasternak’s writing in general, which displayed a high regard for what used to be called natural philosophy. (It’s no accident that Yuri’s heresies as a doctor in post-revolutionary Russia involve his lectures on biological adaptation and Goethe and Schelling.) As a poet, particularly one who matured in the post-symbolist period of the 1920s, Pasternak was always a stickler for conventional form, seldom making use of enjambment—a favorite device of the Futurists such as his friend Mayakovsky. Pasternak once called rhyme the “entrance ticket” to poetry, which put him at odds with modernism. And, as Robert Conquest has noted, even the most complex and allusive of Pasternak’s poems resist multiple interpretations or ambiguity.
As for Pasternak’s politics, Nabokov was supremely unfair to describe him as a “weeping Bolshevik.” Although his poetry engaged with Russia’s three revolutions, he was detached from—if not quite hostile to—the ideology behind the October Revolution, coming to believe simply that its liberating potential had been squandered. A character at the end of Doctor Zhivago says it well: “What was conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned into Rome, so the Russian enlightenment turn into the Russian revolution.” The reforming zeal inspired by Pushkin, Gorky, and Blok had given way to the professionalized militancy of Chernychevsky, Nechayev, and Lenin, a degeneration best embodied in the novel by Strelnikov, of whom it is splendidly said, “Disappointment embittered him. The revolution armed him.”
When Yuri first encounters Strelnikov, after being waylaid by the Red Army on the way to Varykino, he at once sees what the generation of 1917 has wrought:
For some unknown reason it became clear at once that this man represented the consummate manifestation of will. He was to such a degree what he wanted to be that everything on him and in him inevitably seemed exemplary: his proportionately constructed and handsomely placed head, the impetuousness of his stride, and his long legs in high boots, which may have been dirty but seemed polished, and his gray flannel tunic, which may have been wrinkled but gave the impression of ironed linen.
Auden was quite right to say, in the context of another civil war, that thoughts became bodies and the “menacing shapes of our fever” were “precise and alive,” even if the nom de guerre Strelnikov (“shooter”) evokes the “necessary murder.”
It is true that, throughout his career, Pasternak betrayed a lukewarm nostalgia for the pre-Bolshevik intelligentsia. But even his poem The Year 1905, which was written the year of Trotsky’s removal from the Central Committee and the beginning of Stalin’s total consolidation of power, speaks of “Students pedantic in specs, nihilists smug in their smocks,” as if foreordaining future unpleasantness. Uncharacteristically for a poet of the twentieth century, Pasternak saw the depravity of Communism where it manifested itself earliest—in the Russian language. Yuri repeatedly registers his disillusionment with the epoch of “phrases and pathos,” the apparatchik’s cliché.
Upon hearing an arrogant young commissar explain how he’ll convert a band of deserting Cossacks to the people’s cause, Yuri pines “to go from such giftlessly high-flown, cheerless human wordiness into the seeming silence of nature, into the arduous soundlessness of long persistent labor, into the wordlessness of deep sleep, of true music, and of a quiet, heartfelt touch grown mute from the fulness of the soul.” Silence is preferable to politicized Babel, which is why the chief assistant to the founder of the ridiculous Zybushino Republic is rumored to be—and in fact is—a deaf-mute who only attains the gift of speech when ordered to prattle on about “revolutionary power.” Such figures, according to Zhivago and his creator, only “play” at being real people.
Indeed, Pasternak’s “subjective” speeches at various Soviet literary conferences in 1936 and 1937 may not have been transcribed for posterity, but the fulminating reactions to them were. A 1959 article by Mikhail Koryakov in Novy Zhurnal asked the question of why, exactly, this outré humanist poet had not been shot before the Khrushchevite cultural reforms. In Koryakov’s view, Pasternak was indebted both to chance and to the numinous serendipities he favored in Doctor Zhivago. When Stalin’s wife N. S. Alliluyeva committed suicide in 1932, an obsequious letter of condolence, signed by thirty-three prominent Soviet writers—all of them subsequently executed in the Great Terror—was sent to the Kremlin. Pasternak was offered an opportunity to add his signature but declined, instead choosing to append a postscript to the letter saying:
I had been thinking, the evening before, deeply and persistently of Stalin; for the first time from the point of view of the artist. In the morning I read the news. I was as shaken as if I had been present, as if I had lived it and seen it.
Koryakov posits that this cryptic postscript, as well as Pasternak’s courageous refusal to sign the more perfunctory and toadying letter, had a strange effect on Stalin. One needn’t take the point further, as Koryakov does, and claim that Stalin viewed Pasternak as some sort of mystic or “dervish,” to appreciate that Asiatic tyrants inspired fear not by being consistent in their choice of victims but by being capricious.
Pasternak again chanced fate when he lobbied to free the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested in 1934 for writing a satiric epigram about the “Kremlin mountaineer” with “cockroach whiskers.” Stalin rang Pasternak on the phone at 2 o’clock in the morning, asking why the Soviet writers’ organizations hadn’t appealed to him directly on Mandelstam’s behalf, clearly wanting to scandalize the poets who wouldn’t stick up for their friend. Pasternak explained that it was no longer the custom of these organizations to interfere in such matters. There followed this exchange:
STALIN: But is he [Mandelstam] or is he not a master?
PASTERNAK: That is not the issue!
STALIN: What is the issue then?
PASTERNAK: I would like to meet with you . . . and for us to talk.
STALIN: About what?
PASTERNAK: About life and death . . .
(Stalin then hung up.)
Koryakov is surely right to say that Yuri’s rescue of his half-brother Evgraf represents the guardian angel that Pasternak must have felt kept watch over his own fate.
As to the themes and symbols in Doctor Zhivago, none is so predominant as the Christian concept of death and resurrection, which begins with the very name of the protagonist. “Zhivago” is a play on the Russian root for “life” (zhivoy means “alive,” zhit’, “to live”). The opening scene of the book shows Yuri’s mother being buried, redolent of the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke in the text of the Russian Bible where the angels inquire of the women who have come to Jesus’s tomb only to find the stone rolled away from it, “Chto vy ishchete zhivago mezhdu mertvymi?” (“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”). “Yuri,” meanwhile, is Russian for “George,” whose saintly namesake is alluded to several times and even heard “gallop[ing] on horseback across the boundless expanse of the steppe.” Saint George is said to have died and been resurrected three times, just as Yuri is “resurrected” from physical or conditional extremity three times by Evgraf.
Elsewhere the act of being extinguished and reborn—Pasternak cleverly turns the “creative destruction” of Marxism on its head—is cited as the wellspring of artistic inspiration. Riding the train back to Moscow after the February Revolution, Yuri pines for the quotidian comforts of his family:
Three years of changes, uncertainty, marches, war, revolution, shocks, shootings, scenes of destruction, scenes of death, blown-up bridges, ruins, fires—all that suddenly turned into a vast empty place, devoid of content. The first true event after the long interruption was this giddy train ride towards his home, which was intact and still existed in the world, and where every little stone was dear to him. This was what life was, this was what experience was, this was what the seekers of adventure were after, this was what art had in view—coming to your dear ones, returning to yourself, the renewing of existence.
Is it one of those meddlesome coincidences, I now wonder, that Yuri’s wife’s name is Tonya and her German mother’s maiden name Krueger? Pasternak, whose parents and sister emigrated to Berlin in 1921, surely must have read Tonio Kröger, another meditation on the role of the artist in society. “To be an artist,” Mann’s protagonist declares, “one has to die everyday.”
Lara is the starkest symbol for rejuvenating life in Doctor Zhivago. The roadside advertisement in Varykino, noticed or recollected by Yuri whenever Lara is near, reads “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders and Threshers,” which also calls to mind what Komarovsky says of his teenaged mistress: “How she thrashes about, how she rises up and rebels all the time, striving to renew her fate in her own way and begin to exist all over again!” Lara’s metaphorical association with water, particularly waves of the ocean and rainfall, is not accidental. She is, at one point, envisioned as a watery wraith, and her departure from Meliuzeevo is marked with a torrential downpour, which leaves a puddle, “a sea, a veritable sea,” in her former quarters.
“Larissa,” according to the Russian Orthodox calendar, means “sea gull” or “sea bird”; according to Greek mythology, she’s the nymph who marries Poseidon. Pasternak also deliberately hints at Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree by Apollo when he describes the scene in which Yuri, now held captive by the “Forest Brotherhood” of Red partisans during the Civil War, sees a rowan tree and likens its snowy branches to Lara’s “big white arms, rounded, generous.” Rowan berries are later more literally suggested to be this Lara-identified vital essence; when Strelnikov commits suicide in the Varykino snow, his blood is described as resembling “frozen rowan berries.”
Pevear and Volokhonsky have done a masterly job translating what ought to be considered the definitive English edition of Doctor Zhivago.[1] They have not only rendered the prosody and imagery of Pasternak’s language more exquisitely than their predecessors (“the sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners”), but they have done so by keeping more faithfully to his original meanings. For instance, where Harari and Hayward write, “The grassy smell of earth and young leaves made one drowsy as on the morning after a Shrovetide feast,” Pevear and Volokhonsky have better translated, “The grassy smell of earth and young greenery made your head ache, like the smell of vodka and pancakes in the week before Lent.” Clearly drowsiness and a headache are two separate feelings, and the smell of vodka and pancakes is more evocative of Lent.
There are just two discordancies in the present volume. I doubt even an educated bourgeois Muscovite such as Yuri would reprimand a dope-fiend so archly as this: “I draw your attention to the cocaine that you have again been sniffing without restraint.” The second lapse is slightly graver because political. Harari and Hayward, in the Epilogue to their Doctor Zhivago, struck a more plangent note when Yuri’s boyhood friend Misha explains why even world war is preferential to labor camps and the “inhuman reign of the lie.” This translation renders it the “inhuman reign of fiction,” which sacrifices the point about the falsifications of Stalinism. The character who says this sees even the horrors and dangers of the Second World War as a “cleansing storm, a gust of fresh air, a breath of deliverance” from the stupefaction and meaningless terror of the 1930s.
No other Soviet writer had the same breadth of vision, the same hopefulness, in the midst of so many human catastrophes. If Pasternak endures beyond the century that didn’t deserve him then it is because, as Robert Conquest noted in 1961, he “saw the human experience more sub specie aeternitatis than is possible to most of us.”
[1]Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Pantheon, 544 pages, $30.
Michael Weiss is the executive director of Just Journalism, a London-based think tank that monitors the British media's coverage of Israel and the Middle East.
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