PASTERNAK'S MESSAGE
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missars; there are the steppes, the forests, the rivers of Russia; family
life, friendship, adolescence, youth, maturity; and there is a love story,
told with a truly Russian purity and seriousness. Since
War and Peace,
there has not been a novel which has embraced so vast and dense a
period of history. Indeed, though described in a much different manner,
the characters and events in Pasternak are even more numerous than
in
Tolstoy.
But the tumult, the wealth and grandiosity of events are certainly
not the essential matter in
Dr. Zivagho.
And even less the depiction of
solid, well-rounded characters, the joy of describing life and making it
palpitate which fills Tolstoy with such exuberance. In Pasternak, there
are on one side the events and the vicissitudes of the individual char–
acters, on the other-as a constant counterpoint-a certain ecstasy of
the spirit outside of the immediate reality, an ecstasy found in the vi–
sion of universal life and in the effort to understand in human terms
that which is happening. There is, more than a religious, a mystical
feeling for nature, a powerful and proud "yes" said to life, despite
everything. But there is not a single smile, nor a single moment of
joy, save for the joy of freedom during the first days of the revolution,
and this is an impersonal rapture more than a true joy. The events
are narrated in every detail, with bare simplicity; but they seem far–
off and muffled, plunged in a kind of twilight ; terrible as they are, they
occur and pass away in a sort of strange silence and tranquillity, almost
as though even their terror cannot disturb that which exists at the bot–
tom of things and of the human spirit. As a result, they give us the
feeling of memories which rise to the surface of consciousness, sharp
yet insubstantial: shadows which ask to be placated by understanding.
And they are shadows which also are characters: almost pure names,
with nothing physical about them. What one is told about them is solely
the part they play in each other's lives, the way in which they are
twisted and beaten by the storm, a few of the essential expressions of
their spirit, a few of their thoughts and judgments. Their existences
are so disordered and torn to pieces that nothing is left to them (and,
in
particular, to the protagonist) but the pure distance of the spirit
from circumstances, the meditative solitude in which they endure the
raging of destiny. At the end, we know that all that has been told was
told so as to describe this distance and this solitude: Doctor Zivagho's
conscience and how it managed, by resisting death, to remain human.
From another viewpoint, however, Pasternak's book is an historical
novel in the full, even Tolstoyan sense of the word: a re-evocation of
the tragedy of Russia which has been written not only to rescue it
