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PARTISAN REVIEW
from the "non-truth" of the official truth ("the diabolical power of
the dead letter," says Pasternak) , but also from the dull opacity of
re–
sentment and hate. At every point the novel draws its life from the
will to oppose the true story of individuals to History as it is made, by
force and chance, on the world's stage. In fact the great Russian novel·
ists have never separated the story of the individual from that of
his
society, from that immense
persona
which Russia is for them. And it
is
in this way that Pasternak has certainly wished to "continue" Tolstoy–
the Tolstoy whom he venerates-by telling the truth about Russian
history and proclaiming that, no matter who is entrusted with the
mao
terial power, the power over consciences belongs to him who knows how
to make himself its instrument and voice.
"I am here so as to try to understand the terrible beauty of the
world and to know the names of things, and if my forces do not suffice,
to generate children who will do it in my place." Thus thinks the young
woman Lara at the beginning of the novel, when she feels she
has
finally freed herself from the weakness which has made her the slave of
a seducer. And her resoluteness has its correspondence in Juri Zivagho's
virile pride:
Now he feared nothing, neither life nor death; instead everything,
all
the things of the world, were part of his vocabulary. He felt himself on
a footing of equality with the universe and he listened to the funeral
ceremony for Anna Ivanova in a completely different way from that
which, when she had died, he had listened to his mother's. At that
time he had felt that he was dying of the pain, he had been afraid and
had prayed. Now he listened to the ceremony as to a communication
which addressed him directly and intimately concerned him. He listened
to the words and demanded a clear meaning from them, such as one
demands from anything, and there was nothing in common with de–
voutness in the emotion he felt of dependence on the supreme forces
of earth and heaven, to which he bowed as to his true progenitors.
Armed with such inner certainties-with such "revelations," one
might say-these individuals go to meet their fates; in fact the novel
amounts to nothing else but the story of how pride of this sort resists
disorder and violence, of how man cannot be humiliated by anybody
but himself.
The revolution, justice on earth, man liberated from the super–
fluous which "besmears" him and thus rendered equal to man-all
this
is what people such as Lara and Zivagho look forward to. When
it
arrives, this is how they welcome it: "There is truly something morbid
in the life of the rich. An infinity of useless things. Useless furniture
and rooms in their houses, useless delicacies of feeling, useless expreto
