552
PARTISAN REVIEW
In his article on
Doctor Zhivago
in
Partisan Review,
Nicola
Chiaromonte aptly described the novel as "a meditation on
his–
tory, that is, on the infinite distance which separates the human
conscience from the violence of history, and permits a man to re–
main a man ..." But it is important to note that the depth of the
meditation represents something new in Pasternak's work. There
is
no doubt that in such narrative poems as
1905
and
Lieutenant
Schmidt
the poet had tried to come to terms with historical reality
rather than to face it as a critic and judge. Only once did he
express his sense of alienation from Soviet society: in that page of
his long autobiographical essay
The Safe-Conduct
where he de–
scribed Mayakovsky's funeral, haunted by the state power which the
dead poet had served only to be crushed by it.
As
for Pasternak's
lyrical poems, they had often expressed in passing (and not without
a sense of guilt) the poet's attempt to shun or to transcend the
his–
torical experience of his nation and his time. Nothing exemplifies
better such an attempt than an early piece dealing with the secluded
workings of the poetic imagination, where the poet's voice suddenly
bursts out with the question: ''Children, what century is it, outside
in our courtyard?" That question, both sophisticated and naive, hints
that the poet was then convinced that the artistic mind
is
innately
indifferent to the dimension of time, to the category of history. Later,
however, Pasternak seemed to realize that such indifference is impos–
sible, and that the self was bound to merge, whether willingly or un–
willingly, with the historical process. But it
is
true that Pasternak
claimed in another poem that the poet could at least evade contem–
porary history by projecting himself into the future, or, as he said,
by escaping like steam, through the chinks of fate, from the burning
peat of dead time.
Many similar statements could be quoted from Pasternak's
earlier and later verse; yet, taken together, all of them sound like
apologies which the poet addressed not so much to the regime as to
public opinion, or rather, to an elite able to understand equally the
reason of poetry and the reason of state. Yet the poet seemed to know,
at least in the depth of his art, that any reconciliation between
art
and politics was fundamentally impossible. Hence that sense of both
pride and shame in all of Pasternak's statement on the subject: the
pride of his unconquerable loneliness, and the shame of being unable
