After the poet fell silent
Andrei Navrozov
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO by Boris Pasternak
translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari
Collins Harvill, £10.95, £5.95 Thirty years ago next autumn, Boris Pasternak's novel was published in English translation by Collins and the Harvill Press, just months after Giangiacomo Fel- trinelli had published the Russian original in Italy. Weeks later, in his own country, the award of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature to Pasternak signalled the start of a 'hate campaign' which, in the estima- tion of one Western biographer, conferred on Doctor Zhivago, 'in one hectic fort- night, a volume of publicity unprecedented in the history of the novel.'
Although in the text of its official cita- tion the Swedish academy thoughtfully mentioned Boris Pastemak's 'significant contribution to modern lyric poetry', after 23 October 1958 he would be known as the author of Doctor Zhivago. With the Pas- ternak centennial in 1990 just around the bend and the novel's scheduled publication in Moscow recently announced, at last it may be time to recall why, in biographical terms, the persistent identification with the succes de scandale of Doctor Zhivago is contrary to the nature of the Pasternak phenomenon. In literary terms, it is even more misleading.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born into an idyll: his parents' love, their intel- lectual environment, and the time and place in which they found themselves at the dawn of the 'Silver Age' of Russian culture were all vital to what he was to become. No Pasternak has ever pursued success for its own sake. The mother, a protegee of Anton Rubinstein and one of the most promising pianists of her generation, sacri- ficed her career to family life. The father, Leonid Pasternak, was amongst the most gifted and original painters Russia has produced, a kind of Impressionist sui generis, yet one who lacked the promotion- al instincts of Diaghilev's 'World of Art' luminaries to win for himself some kind of international reputation. The children were brought up to uphold that tradition: Zhozefina Leonidovna Pasternak, a resi- dent of Oxford, is a supremely gifted poet in her own right, yet to this day her work is largely unpublished and unknown.
The genius of young Pasternak burst into Russian culture in 1912, the annus mirabi- lis of Alexander Blok's Collected Poems. The events of 1917 put an unambiguous end to the idyll of the poet's childhood and youth: 'Our land is all smudged by the lightning', he wrote in a poem of that year. Shortly thereafter, the family was scat- tered; the last time Boris saw his parents was during a visit abroad in 1923. He remained in Moscow and continued to write and publish poems so catastrophical- ly fresh, so obviously immutable, that by the early 1930s his verse occupied a place in Russian literature which invites com- parison with Shakespeare's in English; if the place of the 'Russian Shakespeare' is permanently reserved for Pushkin, it can only be said that the English equivalent of Pasternak is yet to appear. Like Shakespeare, Pasternak transformed the existing poetic vocabulary.
The words he 'freed' between 1912 and 1932 in his collections Over the Barriers, My Sister — Life, Themes and Variations, and Second Birth comprise an autonomous lyrical universe, a unique 'blossoming world' closed to academic pedants and cultural paraphrasts who revel in interpret- ing spiritual realities they are powerless to create. Significantly, by 1923, Osip Man- delstam saw Pasternak as the initiator of a `new mode of prosody commensurate with the maturity and virility of the Russian language', whilst Marina Tsvetayeva de- scribed him as the 'poet more important than any, for most present poets have been, some are, and he alone will be.'
With a postanovleniye o perestroike (`Decree on restructuring') issued in April 1932, the new totalitarian state, which had inherited Pasternak along with other ves- tiges of the 'Silver Age', damned the myriad literary 'currents' it had allowed to flow unhindered in the early 1920s into a single stream of 'Socialist Realism'. By then, Pasternak's reputation had been established, and the regime chose to accept it for what it was, especially because this unworldly child of an idyll saw ecstasy and not merely happiness, as expected of a `Soviet writer' — in a world that was plunged into terror and misery.
Despite the regime's benevolence, in 1932 Pasternak stopped writing. The spir- itual paralysis of the man who described himself in his odd new position as 'thrice- decorated wizard-consultant for poetry' displeased the rulers, as it would a boastful host who produced a prize songbird sud- denly obstinate in its silence. Although punctuated by the unnatural deaths of fellow poets (Mayakovsky's in 1930, Man- delstam's in 1938, Tsvetayeva's in 1941), Pasternak's silence during the long night of Stalin's terror had less to do with his own fear than with the loss of a sympathetic milieu.
When the songster tried his voice again, it became clear that the supreme genius of Russian prosody had been smothered. The poems of On Early Trains (1943) read as if translated from Pastemak's language into a plodding, versified prose. And, in fact, prose was now increasingly on his mind.
In her journal entry for 4 December 1957, Anna Akhmatova's amanuensis, L. K. Chukovskaya, recorded the poet's reac- tion to Doctor Zhivago (which she had just finished reading in typescript):'
There are some absolutely unprofessional pages . . . You know, I've never had editorial inclinations, but here I wanted to grab a pencil and cross out page after page. And yet there are landscapes . . . I would say unequalled in Russian literature.
This mixed verdict may or may not be taken as a comprehensive critical assess- ment of the novel. But the fact remains that, by 1957, Akhmatova was one of the few surviving remnants of the cultural milieu which had nurtured Pasternak and others who in some sense could be consi- dered his peers. Pasternak's own judgment — he told Chukovskaya that the novel was `the only worthwhile thing I have achieved' — corresponded with his savage, fitful, tone-deaf revisions of his early verse, which appalled Akhmatova, and with his new 'simple' verse, much of which she abhorred.
As a poet, the Pasternak of Doctor Zhivago is as far from his poetic universe of 1912-1932 as Wellington's Victory is from the Beethoven we know. Thankfully, the contrast is less pronounced in prose; despite the essential weakness at once glimpsed by Akhmatova, the novel en- dures, condensing all that had remained of Pasternak in his later years into a pure and vivid style. By the standards of its author's time, if not those of his life, this was a remarkable achievement.
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