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PARTISAN REVIEW
narrative, speaking only through his characters. Yet we hear again
his unique voice in the descriptive passages, and especially in those
vivid images by which he constantly suggests to the reader that man,
as well as time, is out of joint.
Perhaps the only characters who speak solely for themselves are
those representing the younger generation in the novel's epilogue,
which jumps in time to Russian life today, twenty years after the
death of the protagonist. There we meet the sons of some of the
novel's main characters. The regime had recalled those young men
from deportation and exile, and they had rehabilitated themselves
politically by defending the fatherland against the German invaders.
It is difficult to say whether Pasternak considers these young men as
the children of the old bondage or the harbingers of a freer world.
In a sense they seem to tum more toward the past than toward the
future: perhaps they are also, as the author says of many others, naive
and innocent slaves who cannot help idealizing the slavery which
is
still their lot. Survivors of one upheaval, these young people may well
disappear in the next one.
Despite all appearances to the contrary,
it
is this perplexing epi–
logue, more than any other parallel, which reveals that Pasternak
wrote
Doctor Zhivago-as
other readers have already remarked–
on the pattern of
War and Peace.
It is well known that Tolstoy con–
ceived at first of his great novel as a long introduction to the home–
coming, after twenty years of Siberian exile, of a revolutionary of
the "Decembrist" generation. The conception was discarded, but its
residues are still visible in the epilogue of Tolstoy's masterpiece, which
projects the romantic liberalism and the naive poltical idealism of
Pierre and Nikolinka, the young son of Prince Andrey. In the light
of his historical knowledge, the Russian, if not the Western reader,
knows that both tutor and ward are marked for sacrifice by their
political dreams.
Doctor Zhivago
is not a historical novel in the
sense of
War and Peace,
since it deals with the contemporary age, an
epoch not yet closed. Hence its epilogue is problematic rather than
prophetic. Yet this difference is not important; for
Doctor Zhivago,
like
War and Peace,
is
written against history. What really matters
is that Pasternak's protest rests on other grounds, and may well con–
tain a message just the opposite of Tolstoy'S. In
War and Peace
all
the violence and cunning of history ultimately yield to the law of
nature, to the universal principles of life and death, to the wars and
