Pasternak's Epic

...The approval of this huge novel by Soviet critics is a tribute to the popularity both of the novel and its author, which gives Sholokhov such a powerful position that instead of being forced to revise his work in order to conform to the limits of socialistic realism, the bounds of the prescription were broadened to make room for the novel...

...He provides biographical sketches and valuable, generous summaries of the three authors' chief works, many of which have not been translated into English...

...Until 1928, controls over Soviet culture were relatively light...

...It contains passages which express a wise, exultant appreciation of love, and others which are full of heart-felt compassion for the myriad sufferings which have been the lot of the peoples of Russia...

...An insistent symbolism is basic to the book which has a staccato, elliptical construction...

...Yet the fact remains that what would be blemishes in a smaller work are in this colossus evidence of the triviality of our conventional criteria...

...M. Forster-Percy Lubbock tradition...

...During the relaxation of cultural controls after the death of Stalin, some works were produced which are exciting because of their social and political content (Ehrenburg's The Thaw, Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone, the anthology, Literary Moscow), but disappointing artistically...

...To the rulers of Russia, this book will be a more dangerous (because a more fundamental) opponent, in the long run harder to shake oft than the more topical, practical gadflies—the Dudintsevs and Ehrenburgs—and one which will not grow out of date...

...Pasternak has poured into this novel all his mature thoughts about the meaning of the experiences of his generation...

...Pasternak has written a poetical, philosophical, perhaps even a religious, anti-political epic...

...Its dominant mood combines sad resignation with wonder at life's mysteries...

...Zhivago opposes the Soviet system but does not struggle against it...

...Hitherto famous primarily for his marvelous, difficult poetry (which is frowned upon by Soviet officials), his translations of Shakespeare's plays, and a few short prose works, he is tolerated by the authorities only as something of a freak, a half-mad relic of a past generation...

...There are passages in Doctor Zhivago which will horrify the purists of fictional technique...

...In the early 1800's one prominent Westerner remarked that Russia had not yet found its voice in literature...

...Pasternak cannot be bothered about the niceties of the Henry James-E...

...His story is the tragedy of a passive victim, of the destruction of the Russian intellectuals...

...In Russian Fiction and Soviet Ideology, Ernest J. Simmons analyzes three of the most prominent Soviet writers, Sholokhov, Fedin, and Leo-nov...

...There can be no doubt about the talent of these three novelists, but it is revealing that the greatest works of Fedin and Leonov are the early ones (Fedin's Cities and Years, 1924, Leo-nov's The End of a Petty Man, 1924, and The Thief, 1927), which in content and in form run counter to the demands made by those Party spokesmen who take a narrowly utilitarian view of the function of literature, and that Sholokhov's great work The Quiet Don (1928-1940), although acclaimed in Russia as a masterpiece of socialistic realism, also is actually at odds with the official doctrine...

...When he wants to get to an important dialogue or scene, he moves into it with a few bold, brief sentences, ignoring continuity, point of view, probability—and dives into what really interests him...

...Born in 1890, Pasternak as a writer was formed largely in a pre-Revolution-ary, intellectual, symbolist environment...

...One is aware throughout that this is also a painter's, a poet's, and a philosopher's novel...

...Some have been told precisely what to do and nevertheless produced masterpieces...

...far from being a mere background, it is a rich, poetically rendered presence ever before us...

...He has been scolded for an "individualism deeply alien to the spirit of our society...

...Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago is the first Russian novel in two decades which is remarkable not only for its outspoken anti-Soviet content but because it is a great work of art...

...He sympathizes with the noble original motives behind the revolutionary movement in Russia, but considers it to be misguided, tragically distorted, and harmful...

...Some transitions are clumsy, the handling of the dialogue slovenly...

...The French and English novel suddenly found a worthy and, in the opinion of some critics, even a superior rival...

...History shows that artists have been able to work successfully without enjoying what we consider artistic freedom...

...We skip from one brief scene to another, from one indelibly sketched image to another...

...The book is the story of the experiences—the adventures as well as many long reflective conversations —of Yury Zhivago, of the three women in his life, as well as a crowd of other characters, which include a partisan leader, a lawyer, a group of railway workers, seen in flashes from 1903 until 1929, with particular emphasis on the years of the Revolution and Civil War and with an epilogue set during and after World War II...

...It is another matter, however, for artists to work under orders in the Twentieth Century, when they know that such a thing as artistic freedom can exist and feel deprived without it...

...It is a complex, densely constructed book which is likely to go down in history alongside the masterpieces of Nineteenth Century Russian literature...

...Pasternak etches strong, pictorial scenes...

...Throughout his useful study, he pays particular attention to the question of whether there is a relationship between the artistic achievement of the novels and the degree to which they follow or diverge from the official Soviet ideology...

...The effects of years of strict dictatorship and isolation from foreign countries cannot be shaken off at once...

...Reviewed by George Gibian The emergence of the Russian novel in the Nineteenth Century is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of world literature...

...The novel shows signs of being written by an author who has moved beyond careful technical conventions, who is contemptuous of what lesser men would consider correctness, who is so impatient to speak about important things that he jumps over all trivial matters...

...Pasternak, like Balzac, Dostoevsky, and others, creates a world of his own...

...Painter's, because it leaps from one visually conceived image to another...

...Pasternak weaves a net of coincidences which would make one's hair stand on end in a melodramatic, sensational novel, but which in Doctor Zhivago acquire a meaningful existence of their own...

...We meet the characters in a variety of settings, in riches and in poverty, whirling with the winds of the Revolution...

...Poet's, because its logic and system of relationships rely on symbolic rather than narrative continuities...

...One occasionally loses track of who is talking to whom...

...It proves that the genius of at least one member of the older generation in Russia did not wither or evaporate, but ripened through the tribulations of the Soviet era...

...He is a profound individualist who holds direct human contacts, the concrete experiences of one's inner and outer life, freedom, personal independence, and art to be more important than any social movement...

...The same characters keep crossing one another's path, influencing one another's lives in an almost occult manner...

...But they have been for the most part men who accepted their fate as normal and never knew the possibilities of freedom...

...Primarily through the mind of Zhivago, an intellectual, poetic physician, but also through several other characters, Pasternak broods about the meaning of the Russian Revolution, about what is important in life, about the place of art and history...

...Philosopher's, because throughout we feel the presence of the brooding mind of a man with tremendous historical consciousness, striving to understand the meaning of life, history, destiny, love, and art: "The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of unadorned beauty—yes, yes, these things were ours...

...Nature is the all-important setting...

...He despises empty words and believes Marxist theories to be gross oversimplifications of the realities of life...

...Since then, with the exception of the "interval of freedom" from 1954-57, the heavy hand of "social command" has descended upon writers, and they have been expected to follow the canons of "socialistic realism," to strive towards an optimistic, easily understood, simple, group-conscious, Party-line literature concerning contemporary subjects, eschewing the sins of "formalism"—subjectivism, individualism, modernism, symbol and myth, and representations of the negative side of Soviet life...

...His attack is all the more powerful because he holds no brief for the ancien regime, for private property, or "the acquisitive passions...

...Particular cases" and "little actions," not generalities, not efforts to "reshape life" and to sacrifice the present for the future (the Utopian Communist doctrine which he calls "this childish harlequinade of immature fantasies, these school-boy escapades") matter to him...

...Zhivago (whose name is cognate with the word "to live") challenges the central dogmas of the Soviet state...

...He also frequently discusses beauty, form, line, particularly line in nature and in woman...

...But what happened to the Russian novel after 1917...

...In the liberal days of 1954, it seemed that the government was going to permit the novel to be published in Russia, but it understandably changed its mind, and the book would not even now be published abroad if a copy of the manuscript had not by good fortune found its way to Italy before the authorities clamped down...

...After the works of Gogol, Tur-genev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were translated, the West realized that where it had believed only a blank existed, there was now a flourishing, first-rate literature...