Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Thoughts on the Pasternak Case The persecution of Boris Pasternak for the crime of having deservedly won the Nobel Prize is perhaps the most...
...This recalls an attempt at Stalinist censorship in the United States during the war...
...Doctor Zhivago is not a political tract...
...But he does not cease to think...
...The hero, Zhivago, is not a man whose instinct is to get a gun and join the nearest White Army...
...He was compared unfavorably with a snake and a pig-in the last case in the approving presence of Nikita Khrushchev...
...Tsarist Russia was never regarded as an asylum of free thought and expression, but everything is relative...
...A practical joker who believed in freedom of expression sent a telegram to one of the loudest howlers: "Presume you object to scene where renegade commissar Goulash ridicules Stalin...
...So, when one reads in a Tass bulletin that the Union of Azerbaidjan Writers condemned Doctor Zhivago, it is obvious that most of them have never read it...
...Had the Soviet Government, after insulting the Nobel Prize Committee by characterizing the award in its controlled press as "a hostile political act directed against the Soviet state," forbidden Soviet citizens to receive such awards there would at least have been such consistency...
...The ordeal of Boris Pasternak shows what a price is demanded of a Soviet writer if he dares to maintain his moral integrity and assert his right to creative expression...
...If one could pick out a key sentence which made the book impossible, from the standpoint of the Soviet censorship, it is this: "What has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel, but the irresistible power of unarmed truth...
...He was obviously put under terrific pressure to write pleading letters to Khrushchev and to Pravda asking for permission to remain in Russia...
...There is no record of Tolstoy or Turgenev being called pigs or snakes or being expelled from literary organizations because their works did not sing the praises of the Tsarist system...
...Not a hair of a Jew's head has been touched...
...The Soviet Writers Union expelled him from membership, and some of its members declared they could not breathe the same air with him...
...and that, to the Soviet regime and its contemptible pack of kept writers, is the unforgivable sin...
...Certain phrases in the letter to Pravda ("I have not been persecuted . . . My life has not been endangered, nor has my freedom been imperiled I am making this statement of my own free will") recall a grim joke of the early period of Nazi rule in Germany...
...But the award to three Soviet scientists for physics was effusively welcomed...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Thoughts on the Pasternak Case The persecution of Boris Pasternak for the crime of having deservedly won the Nobel Prize is perhaps the most revealing action of the Soviet regime since the Hungarian Revolution...
...For instance, Doctor Zhivago, the novel which aroused the storm, has not been allowed to appear in the Soviet Union...
...In the whole book he commits no hostile act against the Soviet regime...
...Some day, we may hope, the citizens of a free Russia will inscribe that sentence, in admiration and repentance, on the statue of Pasternak that will rise along with those of Pushkin and Gogol...
...It was obviously being condemned blindly, just like Doctor Zhivago at the present time...
...There was a clamor, carefully masterminded from above, to deprive him of citizenship and make him a man without a country...
...The crushing of Hungary showed that a Soviet satellite cannot hope to achieve the right to direct its own internal affairs and foreign policy- a lesson that has certainly not been lost on the Gomulka regime in Poland...
...If the organized gang-up on Pasternak were not so disgusting, it would be calculated to arose hearty laughter, because of the comical inconsistencies involved...
...but it is not likely that many Soviet writers have ventured to acquire the book by contraband methods...
...Uncle Moritz, who expressed a contrary opinion, was buried yesterday...
...Back came the reply: "Other things in novel just as objectionable as scene you mention...
...A Jewish family in America supposedly received the following message from a relative in Germany...
...Pasternak was called "a traitor, a Judas...
...The irresistible power of unarmed truth...
...He does what most of the Russian intelligentsia did, carrying on his work as best he can, trying to keep his family from starving and freezing...
...Whatever pressure may be exerted on Pasternak now or in the future, his fame in literature and humanism will endure and far outlive the contemptible memory of his persecutors...
...A few copies have probably been made available to the more trusted Party hacks...
...If it were it would not be the genuine literary masterpiece, rich in human values, that it is...
...We are all perfectly safe...
...Various Communist-infiltrated groups raised a piercing protest because Harcourt, Brace published a novel by a Russian writer in exile, Mark Aldanov...
...A great principle was at stake in each case...
...But there was no such character in the book as "renegade commissar Goulash...
...The organized lynching of Pasternak was both obscene and absurd...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 63
