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PARTISAN REVIEW
and Dostoevskian motifs, and also not a little of Chestov and Berdaeyev,
come together in Pasternak's Christianity. Yet, in the over-all equilibrium
of the work, it is certainly the Tolstoyan inspiration that predominates,
particularly in the expression of the religious emotion of the individual's
dependence on the life of the cosmos and the noble pride that comes
from this dependence.
In any case, what matters are not the "solutions" proposed by Pas–
ternak. What matters and what moves us most deeply are the questions.
It is to see arise today, out of the thick of history, when it seemed that
history itself had suppressed them forever, the great Russian questions
expounded by a living Russian writer, the questions about man, about
life, about good and evil. The "accursed questions," as the Russians of
the last century called them, and he who speaks for the others-the
writer-must know how to confront them, must run the risk of "dam–
nation."
In Boris Pasternak's poetry one can read this quatrain:
Related to all that which exists, deciding
To meet the future in the life of
eueryd~
At the end one cannot help but incur, as in a heresy,
An incredible simplicity.
The son, like Alexander Blok, of "Russia's terrible years," Paster–
nak has wholeheartedly incurred this heresy. Confronted by the great
event which his book represents, one is inclined to repeat what he him–
self has said about the October revolution: "Something ancestral
and
familiar. Something of Pushkin's absolute light, of Tolstoy's direct faith–
fulness to the concrete." It is a book born out of the depths of
pain
and love, nourished at the very roots of human liberty. And the presage
of freedom on which it majestically ends is only its final harmony.
