BORIS PASTERNAK
553
to pay the revolution the tribute which all pay, and which may be
justly due it.
Pasternak continued to grapple with these questions during the
long years of a silence which was at least in part self-imposed; and
at the end of that period he reached the conclusion that lyrical poetry
had become too limited and subjective a vehicle to allow him to
express what was no longer a purely private attitude toward revolu–
tion and the dialectic of history. After presenting his poet's case in
verse, he felt that now he should present the case of man in prose.
The writer was still in an apologetic mood, but the apology he now
wanted to make was a far more universal one; and he wished to
address it, beyond official Russia, to the Russian people, and even
to his Western brethren. He felt that the proper vehicle for such an
apology, which was to be also a protest, could be only narrative prose,
the traditional tool of the Russian literary genius, which expressed its
ethos and art in that "classical" and "critical" realism of which "so–
cialist realism" was but a monstrous caricature.
If
Pushkin's "poetry"
had never denied "truth," so the "truth" of the "classical" and "cri–
tical" realists had never denied "poetry"; and this may help us to
understand why, the first time Pasternak spoke in public of the novel
he was then writing, he called
Doctor Zhivago
a "novel in prose."
The poet himself recently explained this new aesthetic and moral
view in a reply to a series of questions by a South American literary
journal: "Fragmentary, personal poems are hardly suited to medita–
tions on such obscure, new, and solemn events. Only prose and
philosophy can attempt to deal with them...." Here Pasternak seems
to echo, unknowingly, Sartre's statement that prose, unlike poetry,
should always be
engagee;
nor does it matter that
engage'ment
for
Pasternak involves different, even opposing values: not social obli–
gations but moral ones. Pasternak seems to feel that such an
engage–
ment
was impossible while he was only a lyrical poet; and this is
why the author of
Doctor Zhivago
spoke disdainfully of his poetic
work in his reply to the questionnaire. By doing so he merely under–
scored something which he had hinted at in the novel itself. Nothing
in
Doctor Zhivago
has a more autobiographical ring than the com–
ment on the literary career of the protagonist. Zhivago "had dreamed
about writing a book on life, in which to express the most wonderful
things he had seen and understood in the world. Yet for such a book
