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PARTISAN REVIEW
of a Uruguayan magazine who expressed admiration for his poetry,
he
recently replied in these words:
They are only trifles. I have the feeling that an epoch with absolutely
new tasks, both of the heart and human dignity-a silent epoch which
will never be proclaimed or promulgated in a loud voice-has come to
birth and grows day by day without our being aware of it. Fragmentary,
personal poems are hardly suited to meditating on such obscure, new
and solemn events. Only prose and philosophy can attempt to deal with
them. For this reason, the most important thing which I have until now
succeeded in doing in my life is the novel
Dr. Zivagho .
...
I am
dis–
turbed by the very sad circumstance which gives me an exaggerated
fame on the basis of my first writings, whereas nobody knows my recent
work (above all, my novel), work which has an entirely different
significance.
To move out of the "fragmentary" and the "personal," to dominate
his lyrical impulse in order to render the sense of human experience,
this is evidently what Pasternak has tried to do in his novel. It is,
in
substance, a meditation on history, that is, on the infinite distance
which separates the human conscience from the violence of history
and permits a man to remain a man, to rediscover the track of truth
that the whirlwind of events continually cancels and confuses. One
might say that all of
Dr. Zivagho
is dedicated to a description of
this
distance, and to the insistent representation of the truth manifested in it
The novel tells the story and meditates on the odyssey of one man
(a doctor who is also a poet, but, above all, a man irremovably thought–
ful and sensitive) through forty years of Russian history, from 1903,
when the protagonist is barely a boy in Czarist Russia, to 1929, when,
having lost his family, the woman he loves and his friends, he is killed
by a heart attack on the street in the midst of a crowd in Stalin's
Moscow. But in the Epilogue and the Conclusion, the novel arrives at
the last war and 1945, when the memory of Zivagho, handed down to
them in a small notebook of his prose and poetry, is revived in the minds
of his two old friends and his experience flows into theirs, illuminated
by the light of hope.
Anyone looking for adventures, the interweaving of plots, the
im–
print of historical events will find all these in this novel. There are the
peaceful years before 1905, the Socialist and libertarian fervor, the
revolution of 1905, the war of 1914, the February days of 1917, the
October
coup d'etat,
the civil war from the Ukraine to Siberia, famine,
plague, massacres, the terroristic fury of the Cheka, the consolidation
of Bolshevik power, the spreading of silence and fear; there are the
in–
tellectuals, the peasants, the workers, soldiers, Red and White Com-
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