BORIS PASTERNAK
551
peaces of being, which reduce all diplomacy and strategy to senseless
games, vainly attempting to shape the destiny of the human race.
In Tolstoy's view mankind survives the ordeal of history not in the
chaos of individual life but in the wholeness and singleness of the
species. The immortal cell of human life is the family, which triumphs,
always and everywhere, over the destructive force of that monster
which men call "reason of state." In Tolstoy's novel the issue is sim–
plified, as the reason of state is symbolized by the aggressive imperial–
ism of a foreign power: hence patriotism coincides with the moral
and practical interest of that patriarchal household which for Tolstoy
represents an ideal way of life.
In Pasternak's novel, however, history manifests itself as civil
war and domestic strife, in a "permanent revolution" which is at
once material and spiritual warfare, a total struggle without quarter
or truce. Through technology, ideology, and social planning, history
is now able to submit to its will the nation, the class, and the family
-perhaps the world itself. But its weakest victim may be also its
most elusive enemy: and that victim and enemy is the single person,
the individual soul. Hence the voice protesting here is the one that
says not "we" but "I." Here it is not Mother Russia, but one of
her orphan children, who, like a fairytale Kutuzov, defends his little
yet precious treasure, which is personal dignity and private life, by
withdrawing into other dimensions than those of space and time.
Such a stubborn retreat of the spirit is
Doctor <.hivago's
main mo–
tive, perhaps its only one: and it is the exceptional nobility of this
theme that turns Pasternak's novel, if not into a masterpiece, at least
into a spiritual document of great significance, which brings to us a
very different message than that of
War and Peaoe,
and the tidings
of a new time. Nothing conveys better the sense of
this
difference than
the plants symbolizing the "tree of life" in each novel. In one we
have the old oak which Prince Andrey suddenly sees rejuvenated by
the sap of spring;
in
the other we have that evergreen thicket, almost
buried by ice and snow, holding high a branch full of berries in the
heart of the Siberian winter. Pasternak's "golden bough," unlike Tol–
stoy's, is thus a burning bramble that shines and consumes itself
mystically and ecstatically in the desert of the Self, in the cold land
of the spirit.
