On "Doctor Zhivago" - an Open Letter to Nicola, Chiaro-monte
Abel, Lionel
Dear Nick: When I read your piece in Partisan Review [Winter 1958] on Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago* I was struck by your enthusiasm for the novel (I had not yet read it), and puzzled by the fact...
...But Pasternak, who knows Chekhov and Dostoevsky, is not up to such knowledge, for he wants to present Dr...
...We have come a long way down from Myshkin and Pierre Bezhukov and this fall from consciousness is surely not something Pasternak can lay to the account of the October Revolution and its leadership...
...So let me describe my enthusiasm for the book which is probably somewhat different from yours...
...But the man would have to be very strange indeed, and I feel nothing of such strangeness when I read the episodes in which Strelnikov appears...
...In fact, this whole novel with all its other faults could stand or fall as a book on one's judgment of its hero...
...Whatever its faults as a novel, Dr...
...nor great compassion...
...It achieves purity and that is all...
...His words were breathed almost soundlessly into the cold afternoon air...
...The 53-year-old Stalin Prize winner is believed to be scrubbing floors as penance...
...Now there is nothing universal in such preference...
...The moment we realize that this is his attitude to the revolution we see the tragic theme has evaporated...
...I like the fact that his book is disliked by the Soviet Authorities...
...Zhivago himself, the hero, Lara, with whom he is in love, and whose love affair with him occupies the entire second part of the novel, and Strelnikov, Lara's husband, the guerrilla leader who turns himself into the very personification of the kind of efficient, ruthless chieftain the Bolsheviks conceived of as ideal for their purposes...
...I'll put my grief for you in a work that will endure and be worthy of you...
...Farewell, my only love, my love forever lost...
...I see neither manly courage...
...We get such directness in the novels of Tolstoy, in which the style is, as he wanted it to be, "transparent...
...I like the book because it is in exile and has to sustain itself on the praise of people who do not know the language it was written in, and make its way among those it was not primarily intended for, which is certainly to "eat bitter bread and climb the stranger's stairs" if I may quote the great poet you admire just as much as I do, but for whom you have never shown the slightest enthusiasm...
...Leaving out of account altogether any political motive for preferring to dwell on such facts, rather than treat of countless others, is it not the case that the purified, innocent, and simple style which renders these specially chosen facts has the effect of making them seem not subjectively sought for, but objectively imposed on the author...
...Zhivago, we never understand her feelings for her husband, Strelnikov, or even her feelings for the man who originally seduced her and who in the end destroys her, causing her to make an orphan of Zhivago's child by her...
...But spoken of or speaking, she is simply unconvincing...
...I do not find it great either as a work of art or as a document...
...When the whites are attacking the reds who have taken him prisoner because they lack a trained physician, he finds he is sympathetic to the whites who are firing at him...
...And it occurred to me then that your enthusiasm for the book must be in excess of your admiration for it...
...On the other hand, I cannot admire this style as I admire not only Tolstoy's, which is equally pure or purer, and as I admire the style of Gide, also pure, but so much more subtle, persuasive and more finely conceived as a tool for narration...
...There are no real antagonists, there is no history with its own elemental justification, there are only the two intelligent, sensitive lovers pressed upon and finally destroyed by processes whose meanings do not even interest them...
...There is a rifle handy, not being used, and he feels called upon to fire it...
...Actually, a highly subjective style would have been more appropriate considering the content...
...A mixture of Nastasya and Natasha, Sara is a purely literary and unbelievable person...
...How can Dr...
...I love the part which has the daring to represent the whole...
...Pasternak is, of course, clever enough to keep her off the stage most of the time...
...Is this a convincing expression of grief for lost love...
...And the events of the two Russian revolutions, as well as of the Civil War which followed the second, were certainly as full of meaning as Napoleon's Russian campaign...
...Neither more nor less...
...You may say that it is not right to express such views, that Boris Pasternak is to be heralded just for having written this book with the implied criticism of the Soviet state it contains, and that at this juncture of events, with the author under ban and, for all I know, under attack in Moscow, we who are abroad ought to sing his praises and recommend the novel so highly that the Soviet authorities will finally be forced by world opinion to enable all Russians to read Dr...
...But of the two revolutions and of the Civil War, Pasternak has singled out only a few fragments on the periphery of the central action, tiny episodes of brutality and pain endured by certain individuals in personal contact with Dr...
...I am sure that you think too highly of Boris Pasternak, as do I myself...
...With Lara gone, he drinks vodka and writes about her...
...Touching and beautiful, the letter at last makes one feel that Tonia exists...
...Enthusiasm for a work means a warm feeling for it—as one might have for a woman, without expecting anyone else to like her...
...But maybe I am wrong on this point...
...First of all then, I like the man who wrote the book...
...I like it, I was touched by it, I would like others to read it...
...He would have had to show the revolution in its truth and its truth was not only in its atrocities...
...With this motive, mind you, totally without political content, Strelnikov we are told made himself over into a Bolshevik leader figure—though in the end he runs afoul of the Bolsheviks, is hounded by them and commits suicide...
...Dear Nick: When I read your piece in Partisan Review [Winter 1958] on Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago* I was struck by your enthusiasm for the novel (I had not yet read it), and puzzled by the fact that your very great fervor—I think you used the word "reverence"—did not communicate itself to me...
...I even prefer Hemingway's style, so mannered, but yet so quick and cat-like...
...Zhivago as a model, as an exemplar of the right attitude toward life...
...The simple recording of events without any central or massive significance bespeaks an effort to achieve universality in style without a corresponding universality of experience...
...Zhivago should be ideally to render events directly and not intrude the author's linguistic concerns upon them...
...BUT WHAT IS THE GENERAL meaning of this novel...
...But never mind that, what bothers me is that I cannot accept the reality of this character nor believe in his motivation...
...For to show history at odds with all that gives it value and all that gives value to history having to fight against it, surely that is a great and tragic theme, reminding one of the vision of the Greeks who kept seeing Gods at war in what to all appearances were the intrigues of men...
...Of these there are only three worth considering, Dr...
...Yet, really, what could be more comical...
...He is a flat, intellectually contrived figure, whom the author has simply not been able to infuse with life...
...it is an accident of my own intellectual history...
...To be concrete: what has the interruption of a modest sewing establishment in Moscow which is on strike to do with so vast an event as the 1905 revolution...
...The personal motive and the impersonal ideas and actions...
...So I believe from the incident that Zhivago is an artist, but I still cannot see him as a man...
...Certainly he deserves all our respect for this...
...And the book does communicate a rather definite image of him: I like his sweetness, his culture, his compassion, his desire to be interested in other people, I should say, rather than his interest in other people...
...in any case, you have to think of the good looks of all the other girls who are participating, and not merely of the specially intriguing looks of the one contestant you would like to vote for...
...My liking for this book is a personal fact without significance for literary judgment...
...Zhivago, is said to be an idealized figure of Boris Pasternak himself...
...THE CENTRAL FIGURE, Dr...
...And by meaning I do not have in mind ideas expressed in passing, of which there are a good many, some interesting, some apt, and others utterly uncalled for, irrelevant and highly objectionable, for instance, the attack on the Jews made by two different characters at different times and repeating the identical criticism—to wit—that the Jews are unjustified in clinging to any type of collective identity...
...Even so he manages to wound one of the enemy, whom he is unable to regard as his enemy at all...
...Whoknows...
...I do not greatly admire the novel...
...We never feel his ruthlessness...
...Now I AM SUPPOSED to judge Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago in this letter to you...
...He could not realize this theme by idealizing, as he does, Zhivago's love for Lara and her love for him on the one hand, and on the other devaluing the revolution, rendering it as a meaningless sequence of chance events, produced by incompetents, dreamers, theoreticians, people with not enough grasp of the meaning of life to behave like Lara and Zhivago...
...I am thinking of Pascal's distinction between purity and innocence...
...So I find myself in the same position that you must have been in when you wrote your article on Pasternak...
...We can understand that she loves Dr...
...So that so far as I am concerned the values implied by these activities can perfectly well be called transhistorical values, or even eternal values, if it is to one's taste to talk big, though it happens not to be mine...
...Why do they not all become individuals...
...Maybe for you they are the same...
...I'll write your memory into an image of aching tenderness and sorrow...
...But it is as certainly not a great book...
...I am assuming of course, that I agree with you—or you with me— about there being a distinct difference between enthusiasm and admiration...
...There is one other character about whom something should be said: Zhivago's wife, Tonia, if only because her letter to him when he is living with Lara is perhaps the most moving thing in the whole novel...
...What have the painful episodes of guerrilla struggle during the Civil War to do with the October revolution and Russia's defense against foreign intervention...
...I'll never see you again, I'll never, never see you again.'" After this outburst he says the following, talking to himself as if to her: "I'll stay with you a little, my unforgettable delight, for as long as my arms and my hands and my lips remember you...
...At its best, Hemingway's style has wonderful reflexes, like a good tennis-player's...
...Not to see a difference between Lenin and himself is not to see his own contradictions—but this man is presented as too intelligent a person to be that blind...
...Perhaps the world will come to an end, but until it does I am sure that people will talk to each other, that men and women will make love and that women will bear children...
...But was it realized...
...But in Dr...
...But on the other hand, since he is such a man, I am sure he wants us to say about his own book only what we think is true of it...
...But let me make explicit why I do not and cannot admire this novel, that is, beyond a certain point, for I am speaking here of a book which you described as a historical event, and which is, of course, a million times more interesting than James Agee's sentimental meditation of his boyhood which last year won the Pulitzer Prize in these Benighted States...
...Indeed, at this point I am inclined to think that Pasternak's style is not even innocent, that its seeming objectivity and purity simply mask a very personal and subjective approach to historical events which at times the author admits to frankly...
...This last character is hardly rendered real in any way...
...Rather I wondered, after reading your article, "But why is Nick so enthusiastic...
...So far, though, we have nothing more than a type of artist with humane inclinations...
...Zhivago and Strelnikov, a living person to me...
...The function of such a simplified and unostentatious style as Pasternak has employed in Dr...
...I shall not argue with the position that no values are transhistorical...
...Certainly it is one of the most interesting novels that has appeared in many years...
...Compared to Pasternak's novel, most of the books people are enthusiastic about, and even admire, are, of course, just plain rubbish...
...Now, of course, I do not say it is impossible for a person to have become a Bolshevik leader, without believing in Bolshevik ideas, just in order to revenge a woman...
...Very carefully, he avoids firing at the attacking soldiers and singles out the stump of a tree as his target...
...There is nothing new in this doomed woman, no touch of nature or spirit, that reveals her as distinctly different from her predecessors in the Russian novel...
...Lenin," he says, "fell upon the world as the personified retribution for its misdeeds...
...there is no reason why it should influence any body else...
...In such representation there is always an element of misrepresentation, but this is always poetical, always pardoned...
...We are told that he is ruthless...
...Moreover, I have far more admiration for styles which are not pure at all, like Faulkner's, for example, which always irritates with its crudities, but yet always conveys an intense flavor or atmosphere...
...We meet him twice, I believe, and never learn anything more about him except that loving Lara and feeling that she did not love him, or loved him, rather, in too motherly a way, he was determined to transform himself into an efficient, masterful person and help bring about the destruction of the world which had ruined her...
...But when you praised the novel in your P. R. article you did not mean it was merely a better work than a best seller...
...He knows this is the end and that he will never see her again...
...Maybe purity is even the wrong word for this style...
...Zhivago was written by a man who values freedom, and values it in a society where it is under constant attack...
...We are indeed made to feel Zhivago's love for living creatures, his warm interest in his fellows and a personal feeling of superiority connected with his capacity to see Iife artistically...
...But let us see the man in action...
...But Strelnikov does not convince me in the slightest...
...We never feel his love for her...
...But literary judgment requires not only warmth but coldness: a certain detachment...
...And Tonia did not will that they should love, nor did their love delight her...
...No, that could be...
...So I shall skip both what I like and dislike...
...I can believe that a good hearted, good natured and even gentle person in the period of chivalry, in order to win his lady's love or to kill one of her enemies, would become a resourceful and perhaps even cruel knight in the tournaments of those days...
...I like it because in Russian political circles the author is blamed for having written it...
...Such a character would be a living contradiction, immensely interesting I grant, if even barely convincing...
...He is humane, he is meditative, he has a feeling of wonder and even of what Alfred Schweitzer has called "reverence for life...
...Since then I have read Doctor Zhivago and, as it happens, I, too, am enthusiastic about it...
...He would even like them to win...
...And if they could all be shown simultaneously in his actions and utterances, then certainly Pasternak would have to be granted a very great achievement, that of having created an exemplary human figure...
...But this could only happen if he believed in the principles of chivalry, without which even his desire to excel as a knight, would he incomprehensible...
...Let me put it * Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak...
...Farewell, Lara, until we meet in the next world, Farewell, my love, my inexhaustible, everlasting joy...
...One cannot help thinking at the risk of being considered prosaic that Tonia had just a bit more interest in Zhivago and Lara than did the clouds, the trees, the earth, the sky, wide expanses, strangers met in the street, or the rooms Zhivago and Lara lived in...
...Pasternak's style is pure, then, but it is also pure of accomplishment...
...THESE ARE THE REASONS, Nick, I find it impossible to admire a work which did touch me at times and for which I still retain a fair amount of enthusiasm...
...Now in what does Zhivago talent for life consist...
...It is neither part nor whole...
...On the level of ideas there is good and bad in about equal measure in Dr...
...Pantheon Press, New York, $5.00...
...Nor is Lara, the unfortunate fallen woman, loved by both Dr...
...To realize it of course, Pasternak would have had to present not only people more real than Zhivago and Lara but a revolution more real than the October revolution is in this book...
...And how could a Russian writer who must know Dostoevsky and Chekhov by heart not have seen this...
...We are told that Strelnikov loves Lara...
...I COME NOW to the characters in Dr...
...I am speaking of the meaning of the story...
...Perhaps the surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw in their walks, the rooms in which they lived and met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did...
...He would have had to show the two lovers Lara and Zhivago in their falseness to each other, and to themselves, for transhistorical values are not sturdier than historical forces and real events...
...this is because of their fine young faces...
...On Creating a "Higher Version of Man" In "People's China" PEIPING, April 17 (Reuters) —Communist China's leading woman author, Ting Ling, who was denounced as a Rightist last year, has been dismissed from the vice chairmanship of the China Authors Association, Jenmin Jihpao reported today...
...Can this be completely sincere...
...And here I am ready to grant your enthusiasm for Pasternak's novel, and mine, too, this much: a great theme was implied in this book...
...He is a physician and an artist, a poet...
...But let me make this quite clear...
...For in the event, were it truly understood and rendered with dramatic force, we would have the whole pathos of the man of letters, who can salvage masterpieces from catastrophes, and hence lacks the vulnerability to experience which is the basis of any real moral attitude...
...And this is the heroine of a writer who continually asserts his belief in the essential significance of individuality...
...But I return to the question: why is this book not admired by me, and not to be admired— that is beyond a certain point, of course, for the book does have quality...
...He does not seem to realize there is something monstrous in his behavior...
...For the burning of Moscow, the battle of Borodino, the intrigues among the Tsar's top generals, the analysis of Napoleon's whole campaign, the evocation of vast forces pushing thousands of men eastward and westward, the elemental Russian winter—what do we have to correspond to all this in Dr...
...And Zhivago sets out to do just that...
...Surely these events were selected by the author because he preferred to concentrate on them...
...Doctor Zhivago may sell well, as a matter of fact, for reasons having nothing to do with its quality as a work of art...
...FIRST, I WOULD CONSIDER the style, about which I really am enthusiastic, for even in translation it seems pure, very pure, free from any calculated effects and addressed to a simple, straightforward description of whatever the author wants to set before us...
...His one political comment is a reduction of Lenin to his own level...
...In that case I must presume to disagree with you...
...It has had a tremendous advance build up in the press already...
...But the thought never crosses Dr...
...Now surely, all these are positive qualities...
...It is nothing...
...He is presented as an artist, even a genius, and to have what the author considers the highest talent of all, namely a talent for life...
...So far, so good...
...They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet...
...When you are judging a work of art you often have to curb your inclination to praise it...
...Had Pasternak at least made Zhivago face up to some suspicion of this kind about himself, the man would be more real and likable, even if he kept on writing poems...
...Now, in this incident, I cannot find a trace of the qualities the hero is supposed to have...
...He accepts his impulse to write at that moment, naively, without questioning it...
...Yes, that can all be granted...
...I have accounted for my enthusiasm...
...Zhivago who is supposed to be supremely conscious, with a consciousness far more acute than the politically oriented people of his time, how can he not have understood that in yielding in the impulse to write about his beloved immediately after his loss of her, he was taking a practical attitude toward his own grief, trying to get something out of it, literature, maybe even glory...
...Zhivago, which almost deliberately suggests comparison with War and Peace, there are no events of the kind described in Tolstoy's novel...
...But the part which does not aspire to overcome, even partly, its a-part-ness, that part, if without guilt, is without interest...
...I say a great theme was implied by Pasternak's novel...
...We know her mainly from what is said of her, rather than by her...
...more strongly: a man in love with one of the entries in a beauty contest is the last person one could expect to judge fairly...
...So much so, even, that one cannot but object to the following passage on the love of Zhivago and Lara for each other: "They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the 'blaze of passion' often falsely ascribed to love...
...I do not think, though, that you would say this...
...Zhivago's mind...
...Certainly I like his feeling for art and his desire to show that art is consistent with a true feeling for humanity...
...In a way, you are like a judge at a beauty contest: you can't go overboard for one girl because you personally find her more likable than the other contestants, you have to have some objective norms in mind...
...What Pasternak is showing us in this book is the effort of two people, Lara and Zhivago, to defend against history certain transhistorical values, the values of sympathy, gentleness, authentic love and a feeling for truth in language and in action...
...Perhaps the best thing to call the style would be "innocent": for it is innocent of harm to language, innocent of harm to thought, innocent of falsification, innocent of contrivance— innocent of whatever literary crimes against feeling or language one can think of, but innocent also of the one crime for which the stylist is garlanded—the crime of making us see things as he sees them and replacing our own feelings by his...
...But perhaps I should take the big dramatic moment in the book when Zhivago sends Lara away with the man who had originally seduced her, being unwilling to accept this man's protection for himself...
...She is right out of the pages of Dostoevsky, with Nastasya Filipovna for a model—but somehow softened with Tolstoyan sweetness...
...And the firing of a gun at a tree stump which yet results in wounding one of the whites, to whom Zhivago is actually more sympathetic, strikes me as very analagous to that idle, directionless playing with words by a poet which might, and often does lead, to some real consequence in literature...
...You will notice that among my reasons for being enthusiastic about Pasternak's novel, there is not a single reason for admiring it particularly...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
