Poet, in Action
As readers of Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago will remember, the novel ends with twenty-five short poems which are put forward as the work of the central character, Dr. Zhivago him- self. Most of the *poems contain obvious echoes of details or atmosphere from the prose text, yet the link remains an elusive one. Are the poems just an appendix to the novel, or is the connection between the verse and prose a more intimate one? The latter, thinks Dr. Davie, who now seeks to pin it down in this valuable new translation and commentary.
He thinks it wrong to treat these poems too directly as the work of Pasternak —an error made (according to Dr. Davie) by an earlier com- mentator, Dr. George Katkov. Rather should the poems be treated as if written by Zhivago him- self. They constitute a 'working model' of a fictionalised poet in action put forward by Pasternak. There is a whiff of special pleading in the development of Dr. Davie's thesis that the twenty-five poems are 'Zhivago's' rather than 'Pasternak's.' It seems to me that, given this ingenuity and determination to prove a point, quite extraneous material (certainly many of Pasternak's own poems outside the Zhivago cycle) could be demonstrated to be 'by' Zhivago, with equal success. So, perhaps. could The Hunting of the Smirk.
However, this is not the first time in literary criticism that a non-proven thesis has formed a peg on which to hang stimulating comment. To read ,Dr. Davie's work is indeed to have one's understanding of Pasternak's art deep- ened and extended. The translation is one of, great sensitivity, in which the lilt and reson- ance of the original are often caught with un- canny skill., Dr. Davie deals fairly and court- eously with earlier interpreters of the same text, and his commentary is lucid and painstaking. This volume is also free from those excruciating amateur touches which so disgrace many works in English on Russian topics. And in Part III (The Poems in the Original Russian) a minor miracle has been performed: the extraction from a firm of British printers of an accurate Cyrillic text.
RONALD II1NGLEY
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