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PARTISAN REVIEW
he was too young, and in the meanwhile he went on writing poems,
as a painter who all his life draws studies for a painting still in
his
mind."
It would be unfair to Pasternak both as man and writer to ac–
cept his retrospective claim that his poetic production was but a
gradual preparation for
Doctor Zhivago
J
which is a moral act and a
psychological document of great value, though not the culmination
of his work. His poems are more than simple preludes to the novel;
and though
Doctor Zhivago
towers over all Soviet fiction, this
is
due not only to Pasternak's stature as a novelist but also to the medi–
ocrity of his rivals. What we prefer to emphasize is that this "novel
in prose" proves more passionately and eloquently, yet in a less
spirited and witty way than his poems, the same truth: that even in
Communist Russia there are moral "pockets" permitting that most
bourgeois creation, the "sentimental education" of the self, the
Bil–
dungroman
of the soul.
In his poetry and his earlier prose, no less than in this novel,
Pasternak had asserted and defended the private rights of the spirit
in a forthright manner, without a false idealization or mystique. He
has never rejected history, society or revolution in the name of art,
nor has he ever longed for a purity which is not of this world. Paster–
nak believes we may "purge" the soul, rather than "cleanse" it; and
this is the catharsis that
Doctor Zhivago
in the end achieves. Perhaps
after such an act of purgation, the author might feel free to write
poetry again. I, for one, should like to see Pasternak do so, because
I find Pasternak's poems more vital and exciting than this novel,
which lacks the tension of his earlier works, so challenging in their
inborn avant-gardism.
If
Pasternak should receive the Nobel Prize–
and I here submit his name as that of the worthiest candidate-I
do hope he will be honored as poet as well as novelist.
