Doctor Zhivago and Modern Sensibility
Chiaromonte, Nicola
I think that Doctor Zhivago is one of the most beautiful novels written since Proust, if not the most beautiful. I don't see, in fact, what other contemporary novelist, with the possible...
...Is Kafka's "K" a character in the same sense as Raskolnikov...
...It is the awareness of it that makes of their story a love poem...
...These are some of the reasons, dear Lionel, for which I admire Doctor Zhivago...
...In the meantime he has not behaved like a hero or a saint, nor have his thoughts been those of a genius...
...The external world is ruled by chance, but the relation between man and events is governed by a necessity whose source is man himself...
...And there is in fact no contradiction between young Pasha, the son of a rebel...
...We know both what the revolution means and what kind of people they are when Pasternak shows them gathered around the table to feast on the duck Yuri had received as a present from the strange deaf-mute on the train (a scene which, by the way, is another striking image of the revolution, although an indirect one), and then all of a sudden the attention is turned to the world around: And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka...
...it also communicates the essential greatness of the event...
...By this I am not referring only to war, revolution, the uprooting of individuals from their attachments, their expectations and their very lives—all of the stupendous wildness of the events which is the subject of the book...
...Their identity, in other words, is not of a psychological order, but of a moral and intellectual one...
...What matters is the line of their des tiny, their appearances and disappearances in the course of the story, and finally, their significance in the framework of Zhivago's own odys sey...
...The question of whether he is simply the last tenant of a doomed world or the bearer of a new and deeper truth seems to me unimportant...
...of the October coup d'etat that "It has something of Pushkin's uncompromising clarity and of Tolstoy's unwavering faithfulness to the facts...
...Pas ternak does give us a picture of those great events, as suffered, observed, and judged by human beings, which is by no means inferior to the magnitude of the events themselves...
...To make the transition acceptable, all that is required is that it not be inconsistent...
...So much the more so since Zhivago's grief has been forcefully expressed in the preceding pages...
...We know him, and we are called to judge him, not approve of him...
...This, after all, is something we do quite often in real life...
...As for Doctor Zhivago's accomplishment, I measure it from the fact that, uneven as the novel is, and stumbling as it does against the many difficulties of the task, it does not fall short of the mark...
...It is seriously motivated, and the motive is perfectly in keeping with the character: But to look on inactively while the mortal struggle raged all around was impossible, it was beyond human strength...
...the fate of human values...
...These questions are all present in a concrete as well as in an intellectual form in Pasternak's novel...
...whereas Flaubert's mot juste is not a novelist's preoccupation...
...it meant that as an individual the artist was bound by no rule at all, except his own sense of quality, while at the same time a well-nigh monastic rule of art existed which was self-evident as well as rigorous...
...In this new world all that is left of an individual is his "odyssey," the sequence of his ventures and transformations...
...Whether they remain hidden or leave their refuge, they know that in the common doom, their happiness is doomed...
...and psychological motivation is almost absent...
...The refusal of "artistic purism," so strong in Tolstoy, is, I think, a trait common to the great Russian novelists and poets...
...This implied a peculiarly narrow conception of art which can well be called "artistic puritanism," insofar as it is fundamentally moralistic rather than aesthetic...
...He does manage, and death as an outcast on a Moscow thoroughfare is his retribution...
...You had to do what everyone else was doing...
...Only some kind of artistic purism, it seems to me, could have led you to make the remark about Zhivago's being an artist but not a man...
...IN TRYING TO PROVE MY POINT, I shall begin with a quotation from Isaiah Berlin's essay on Tolstoy and History: "What, then, is the historian's task—to describe the ultimate data of subjective experience—the personal lives lived by men—the 'thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions' of which, for Tolstoy, 'real' life is compounded, and only that...
...But, then again, is not this the fundamental struggle of modern art...
...the individual's helplessness in the face of it...
...He is not a conscientious objector...
...In my opinion she is one of the most affecting images of womanhood in modern literature...
...175) These are not just passing thoughts or moralistic comments...
...he has created a character, Zhivago, by doing something no novelist had done before, namely, making of consciousness—not the psychological consciousness of the traditional nov el, but the very dimension of consciousness—the hero of the book...
...Something that in some way goes beyond humanity, putting it in abeyance...
...To remain an outsider was against the rules...
...The contradiction, one might grant, was a fruitful one...
...One of its most revealing and touching traits is, in fact, the struggle of the poet to express himself in the language of everyday experience—the struggle to use "interchangeable words" and yet say that which he wants to "preserve intact in memory...
...Am I wrong...
...But the one thing the novelist cannot do is to be a pure artist, that is, in his case, a pure poet...
...And this was most vexing of all...
...He does not so much aim at "preserving facts intact in memory" as at sharing their meaning and changing the image of the everyday world as it is given and accepted in ordinary human intercourse...
...It was this that won them their glory...
...The most obvious reason is that, in the face of surging philistinism the artist found himself indeed in the position of the stoic hero, alone with his inner conviction against the whole of society...
...All I can say is that from that point on I felt involved in Zhiva go's character, and eager to know what would happen to him, how he would manage to remain faithful to the noble pride expressed in those thoughts...
...In a battle there are always soldiers who realize the absurdity of war, and they don't have to be intellectuals in order to decide to shoot at random...
...And before that we certainly have been made to feel, together with the unique quality of their bond, the doom impending on it, in the extraordinary image of their retreat in the woods, besieged by wolves...
...It is unjust to say that Pasternak does not give us a strong and even epic image of the Russian Revolution, or that he belittles Lenin's role...
...This freedom came from the feeling that all human lives were interrelated, a certainty that they flowed into each other—a happy feeling that all events took place not only on the earth, in which the dead are buried, but also in some other region which some called the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others by some other name...
...When his shots strike a man dead, Zhivago feels pity, not guilt...
...What they experience instead is the shattering of this continuity in themselves as well as in the outer world...
...As for him, his only privilege is being endowed with an articulate consciousness...
...What Pas• ternak obviously set out to do was something quite different...
...Yet the acceptance of Russian literature by European writers and critics always tended to be kept within the limits of artistic (or technical) purism...
...That they appear to us as the authentic sources of their acts and thoughts...
...To sum up, the assumption implicit in Pasternak's creation of characters is that what an individual thinks of the world, not his "nature," is the cause of his acts, and shapes his fate...
...In receiving Tonia's farewell letter, for example, he is stricken with sorrow to the point of fainting (a detail which you failed to notice), but he does not feel guilty about his love for Lara...
...Should a certain straightforwardness and magnanimity be suspect to a modern intellectual...
...People worked and struggled, each set in motion by the mechanism of his own cares...
...That it is a perfect novel, I would not care to say...
...Even though all we know of her external appearance is that she has blue eyes and beautiful arms, we finally come to know the kind of woman she is—her frailty, her earnestness, her mortified nobility...
...It is not merely a privilege, however, insofar as Zhivago abides by its commands, following them as the very form of his destiny...
...This is what any reader of War and Peace or The Possessed does implicitly or explicitly, and this is what a reader of Doctor Zhivago cannot help doing...
...In recounting his ordeal to us, the author has wanted to show us not only his acts and his feelings, but also his reasons, his ideas, the quality of his relation to life as such, and finally, even his poetry...
...You say that she is purely a literary character, a mixture of Nastasia Filippovna and Natasha Rostov...
...He and his comrades were being shot at...
...Which story, in which way and, by which means is for the novelist to decide...
...Moreover, in a novel such cliches as "la baronne fit appeler sa voiture" which provoked Valery's sarcasm, may recur as often as is expedient without bothering us in the least...
...The question as to why the artist as a human type was saddled in the 1850s (most clearly by Flaubert) with an extreme kind of stoic morality which obliged him to be an artist and nothing else, is a complex one...
...The truth that he has found, however, he communicates most scrupulously...
...And I find particularly satisfying Pasternak's attempt to express this with candor and directness in a novel which preserves the traditional form, instead of searching for new techniques...
...He had to shoot back...
...It was not a question of loyalty to the side that held him captive or of defending his own life, but of submitting to the order of events, to the laws governing what went on around him...
...Finally, Zhivago's experience of poetry as a transcendental realm of meaning to whose laws he finds himself subjected in writing a poem is a development of the same theme...
...There was no religiosity in his reverence for the supreme powers of heaven and earth, which he worshipped as his progenitors...
...In this sense the novel is obviously a hybrid art form...
...Zhivago wants to act like one of them...
...Writing a poem for Lara is the last thing Zhivago can do for her, and why it should be regarded as a substitute for sorrow I am unable to understand...
...If Zhivago and Lara's love cannot last it is because they are overcome by a sense of isolation from the sea of troubles that is sweeping Russia...
...He wanted to tell the story of what happened during those years to a definite group of people more or less connected with his hero...
...Then he had prayed in confusion, fear, and pain...
...In the first part of the book, Pasternak gives us the very essence of such a moment, surprisingly enough, in his description of passengers getting out of a train during a stop to get drinks and food at the station: Every motion in the world [he writes] taken separately was calculated and purposeful, but, taken together, they were spontaneously intoxicated with the general stream of life which united them all...
...A battle was going on...
...And this is, ultimately, no more than the story of a man's fidelity to himself, from manly pride and self-assertion to pure awareness and acceptance of fate through endurance...
...There is a moment in Doctor Zhivago when individuals exist peacefully and can hence develop into what we are accustomed to considering "round" characters...
...By doing this he has run into difficulties, of course...
...This is an original and profound view that could easily be connected with certain tendencies in modern thought and art...
...and he tells a love story which is one of the most beautiful creations in modern literature...
...I don't see, in fact, what other contemporary novelist, with the possible exception of Faulkner, can be compared to Pasternak in both the scope and accomplishment of his narration...
...It not only describes the violence, hunger, cold, dread and chaos...
...Now I must defend Lara as a character...
...They are the very themes of the book, composing a strong counterpoint throughout the narration...
...Fate is between them in a much more real sense than King Mark's sword is between Tristan and Isolde, since it penetrates their souls...
...If one compares this with the description of another railroad trip, the one that takes Zhivago and his family from Moscow to Varykino through the great expanses of the Russian plain at the beginning of the revolution, with the disorder, the tumult, the unleashed vitality and violence that accompanies it, one grasps very clearly, I think, the transition from a world of three-dimensional characters to one in which individuals are made into translucid entities, so to speak, since psychological continuity is no longer possible...
...When an extreme situation appears, "time's charms are all o'erthrown...
...I find such moments of pure awareness as poetic as the passages about nature, so rightly admired by every reader of Doctor Zhivago I know, including you, I am sure...
...334) What is here involved is simply the realization of the law to which soldiers in battle are subjected...
...And, in the disruption of their private lives, the shattering of time itself...
...He has carried it out in his poems, in his novel, and in his personal conduct with a thoughtfulness that is not inferior to his great artistic gift—on the grounds of love rather than of reason, as becomes a poet...
...Among modern poets and writers Pasternak seems to me the one who has most deeply and earnestly realized both the difficulty and the necessity of such an enterprise...
...But it remained a contradiction, and it is particularly apparent in the case of the novel...
...The position was nevertheless ambiguous...
...And may I point out that Russian history of the last forty years is also, in more than one sense, our history...
...As a matter of fact, I imagine that Pasternak, himself, if the thought had occurred to him, would not have hesitated to say that she has something of Nastasia as well as of Natasha...
...But his action is neither idle nor directionless, and it is not a game...
...Sould a poet who happens to be in love make a point of keeping his poetic feelings separate from his love...
...To celebrate an irretrievable loss by song is one of the oldest human instincts...
...what happens, that is, to that pure possibility of human nature which the author has established as his...
...As a consequence of it and of the moral strictness it implies, your judgment reveals a strong aversion not for Pasternak, of course, and not even for the book itself, but for the meaning it wants to convey, the kind of question it raises, and even its style...
...A love that succeeds in asserting itself over horror and pity (and which, in its intrepid pride, recalls what is most noble in Nietzsche's thought), is the dominant feeling in Doctor Zhivago...
...One might say that this amounts to the disappearance of character in fiction...
...As for the characters themselves, I must say that Zhivago's personality is clearly established for me when the author shows him at the funeral of Anna Ivanovna: He felt he was on an equal footing with the universe...
...Tolstoy, the moralist and the questioner, in particular, was considered a somewhat different person from Tolstoy the artist, and somewhat inferior to him...
...87) To me there is a wonderful directness here in rendering the way an ardent young man can face life...
...The rest was nothing but interchangeable words...
...I think that Doctor Zhivago is one of the most beautiful novels written since Proust, if not the most beautiful...
...This kind of artistic purism—preached in his day by Flaubert—this kind of preoccupation with the analysis and description of the experience and relationships and problems and inner lives of individuals (later advocated and practiced by Gide and the writers he influenced, both in France and England) struck him as both trivial and false...
...Because the novel, from the point of view of pure art, is a literary form that exists only insofar as it violates the rules...
...the resurgence of naked force in a world that is supposedly committed to progress...
...Now he listened to the services as if they were a message addressed to him and concerning him directly...
...In this sense, I feel, Yuri Zhivago, Lara Fedorovna, and (to a lesser degree) Pasha Antipov are indeed characters and they exist...
...Do you really think that being an artist is "something added" to being a man...
...You yourself should not distinguish/Between your victory and defeat," says Pasternak in a poem recently translated into English...
...What I mean is, above all, the final impossibility for such characters (and for the author through them) to conceive of their own identity as a mere sequence of occasions in time—thinking of it in terms of the fundamentally continuous dura tion—the duree—that is the stuff out of which characters are made in the classical novel...
...WHAT DO WE ASK of characters in a novel...
...Hence, it may well be that in firing at a tree stump because he does not want to kill people Zhivago is behaving Iike a poet...
...The absence of a sense of guilt, in fact, is one of the most striking features of Zhivago's character...
...Hence, if they wish to maintain their identity, they must stake it on something more intimate than any occasion, and more impersonal than their natural selves—a pure quality of being, sustained by an intrinsic accord with universal life...
...But that they should constitute the very intention of the work, that the author himself should be involved in the questioning, and that he should mean to involve the reader in it, was considered to lay beyond the pale of art...
...All the questions that have been facing us in the West since 1914 are present on a truly tragic scale—the conflict between common ideals and collective necessity...
...Must I add that ideas in a novel should not be taken as philosophical theses, nor abstracted from the emotional situation out of which they are shown to arise...
...He has simply lived his life...
...Until these "freaks" influenced European literature so much that Dostoievsky, for example, became to all practical purposes the novelist par excellence, not so much on account of the great human problems he debated through his characters as because he was supposed to have freed psychological imagination from the strictures of naturalistic consistency...
...Strelnikov, the Bolshevik...
...Only a conventional writer would stress psychological connections here, al• though in some degree they continue to exist...
...Since it is a mixture of true history and fable it cannot do without the "interchangeable words" that make up the context of the everyday...
...Pasternak is quite unselfconscious about using literature as a source of metaphor...
...In Pasternak's attempt to lay bare, within the confines of the novel, an individual consciousness that submits to events and is yet detached from them, that is reduced to pure thoughtfulness and yet remains lifelike, the Russian poet shows, among other things, that he is a truly modern writer, well aware that in the novel pure representation no longer interests us...
...To carry out the effort of being faithful to oneself . . . to be able to remain identical with oneself as a reasonable being"—these words by Edmund Husserl seem to me to express with great simplicity the task that confronted modern man the moment he had to face the apparent collapse of all established truths, which was brought about by the realization of the fundamental relativity of factual knowledge...
...We know next to nothing of their physical appearance...
...The funeral games for Patroclus in the Iliad spring from such an impulse...
...In fact, he drives home consistently only one point: we should not betray the question for the sake of the answer...
...12-13) This is a wonderful insight into the essence of peace with the inner order and the trust in the future that peace implies...
...The scope of Doctor Zhivago is measured by the story it tells, in terms of individual vicissitudes, of the last fifty years of Russian history...
...184) And I don't find any better adjective than "religious" to define the earnestness with which Zhivago, Tonia and their friends face what is happening...
...The theme of virile acceptance of events, for example (an acceptance which does not exclude stern judgment or moral revolt, and in fact implies them) recurs as constantly as that of the impossibility of solitary happiness, nay of living fully, without merging one's life in the lives of other people...
...Artistic purism (and puritanism) is not an adequate criterion, for the simple reason that moral choices and ideas in a work of art raise the question of a meaning that is not purely aesthetic, and commit the reader to a debate about their intrinsic validity on their own grounds...
...and so is his notion of personal immortality as the life we obtain in other people's consciousness: "Man's presence in other men, that is what man's soul is," says the young Zhivago to Anna Ivanovna...
...195...
...It was not Wilde's "awful business of imparting opinions" that motivated them, but a passionate concern with common history, and the contrast between the irreversible flow of time and the uniqueness of the individual—a concern which could not be satisfied by pure representation, as Proust and Joyce were to show...
...the meaning or lack of meaning of such a world...
...Finally, in my opinion, Pasternak deals adequately with the moral and intellectual questions raised by the events...
...I think that his picture of Moscow before and after October, 1917, is a marvelous image of a city shaken by a revolution...
...But is it not the marvel of this disappearance that Proust described in Marcel's progress from time lost to time found again...
...In judging Zhivago, however, we must take into account not just his "psychology" (which in a way is absent) but his ideas about the world and about poetry...
...It is the love which Pasternak has said "is not a spiritual state, but the foundation on which the world rests," and which to him is "equivalent to creative art...
...To me it is natural that a true poet should have such a thought in the very fullness of his grief...
...He listened intently to the words, expecting them, like any other words, to have a clear meaning...
...Passion for ideas and moral questioning was not condemned as such, of course...
...But it was also this trait that, when they first became known in Western Europe, made them look like freaks in the eyes of European (especially French) literary people—great, no doubt but still freaks...
...In order to grasp their function in the novel we don't need to know more about them than what the author tells us...
...May I add that Pasternak shows he is a truly modern artist precisely in his refusal to give us an overall picture of events and to formulate a global answer to them...
...In a short essay on the nature of poetry Roger Caillois has recently given a definition which I find suggestive: "Poetry was (at the origin)," writes Caillois, "everything that people wanted to preserve intact in memory...
...But I am convinced that it is a work of art of great power and significance today, that is, in terms of the present artistic, intellectual and moral situation...
...As for the intervention of ideas and moral questions in the novel, which the same Flaubert found so objectionable, they simply express the presence of the author in it, and his eagerness to communicate the full meaning of the story...
...This is what the great Russian novelists saw with clarity, and wanted to achieve in their stories...
...not in the same way, however, as Julien Sorel, Natasha Rostov, or, let us say, Svidrigailov, exist in their respective universes...
...She is characterized with classical simplicity by her demeanor, by the regal dignity with which she infuses her sordid, rat-infested room, and, most of all, by her love for Zhivago and his for her...
...And he was affected by the services for Anna Ivanovna differently than he had been by the services for his mother...
...This is what you seem to imply when you interpret Zhivago's impulse (after his separation from Lara) to write her memory "into an image of aching tenderness and sorrow," as meaning that he loves his poetry rather than her...
...he does not wish to be innocent...
...There is a serious reason for this...
...What Pasternak insists on doing (and, as far as "history" is concerned, it is what is most original in the book) is to describe and judge the revolution from afar and from below, while never attempting to survey it from above, so to speak, and to judge it wholesale...
...Pasternak's view of history is also connected with the theme of the impossibility for the individual to separate his own life from that of his fellow men...
...The scene of the lovers' separation is one of the most moving in the book...
...I don't know what people will think of it fifty or a hundred years from now...
...through them, however, she acquires a singularly objective reality...
...In a sense a novel is always a polemic against official history in the name of the true story of men...
...But that Lara resembles those literary characters does not mean that she can be reduced to them...
...he was anxious about this future, and loved it and was secretly proud of it, and as though for the last time, as if in farewell, he avidly looked at the trees and clouds and the people walking in the streets, the great Russian city struggling through misfortune—and was ready to sacrifice himself for the general good, and could do nothing...
...For example, he says of a girl that she is like a character in Griboiedov...
...There is a sense of truly religious awe in the thoughts of Zhivago before the revolution: He realized that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future...
...YOU WILL NOT MIND my saying, dear Lionel, that in your remarks about Doctor Zhivago the influence of "artistic purism" is clearly discernible...
...It is through the quality of their consciences that Zhivago and Lara are described by Pasternak, and it is through the pathos of their solitude that they are revealed to us as original characters...
...The transformation of Pasha Antipov, the young intellectual, into Strelnikov, the Bolshevik chieftain, does not have to be explained, and certainly not by his realization that Lara is not in love with him...
...And he can go as far as saying that a landscape is nature "as modern painting has painted it...
...Starting from the delicate and intense scene where Zhivago suddenly sees Lara again in the public library of Iuriatin she becomes Pasternak's own creation...
...Something that should be suspended if one wishes to be fully human...
...He has not asserted himself against events or over them...
...The existence of a character imposes itself on us when we become interested in his ventures and are eager to know what happens to him...
...The aversion manifests itself, as is natural, in a certain injustice...
...In the end nothing remains of Zhivago but his memory in the hearts of those who loved him, and a few written pages...
...Zhivago does this at the cost of appearing inept or inhuman or both, to men who think that poetry or thought do not belong in real life, as well as to artists who have little use for humanity except as the subject matter of their art...
...He has simply remained the man he was, under circumstances that put his personal morality, his soul, and his mind, as well, on trial...
...Lara is always seen through Zhivago's eyes...
...This is what we mean when we say that they "exist...
...They are defined by an attitude to life, instead of by a sequence of revealing insights into their "nature," as Stendhal's or Tolstoy's characters are...
...But the mechanisms would not have worked properly had they not been regulated and governed by a higher sense of an ultimate freedom from care...
...Well, Pasternak does not believe that, and neither does Zhivago...
...I don't deny that there is something of both these women in Lara...
...In a sense, however, the attempt to prove that Pasternak created "real" characters is contradictory, since, as I have already said, what he has done is rather to show what is left of characters under conditions in which the very identity of the individual is threatened, and tends to be reduced to an inconsistent sequel of occasions and acts...
...In him Pasternak wants to show the artist as a man subjected to a collective ordeal and reacting as the kind of man that poetic perception and thoughtfulness have made him...
...and the defeated man who commits suicide at Zhivago's door...
...the existence or nonexistence of a simple truth by which the individual can abide and preserve his identity while remaining in accord with his fellow men and with the rhythm of universal life...
...It is given as a fact, a sudden transition from the personal to the public role...
...This he does, not so much by his answers as by pointing out over and over again where the questions lie...
...But I cannot find fault with what you call the "innocence" of his style, since it is made to convey a meaning that is far from innocent...
...Its one rule is that it tell a story about the common world, and I would even say the present world, although the present world in the novel wears many disguises...
...It is not fair to assume that Pasternak set out to write the history of the Russian Revolution from 1905 to 1926 and then reduced it to a strike in a sewing establishment and to a description of guerrilla warfare...
...And is it really necessary to point out that as far as the approach to history is concerned, Pasternak's method is the same as Stendhal's in describing Waterloo...
...The time in which these char acters live is out of joint...
Vol. 6 • January 1959 • No. 1
