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PARTISAN REVIEW
the past by rejecting some of its elements and developing others. How–
ever, Zhivago's reflections have some relevance to Pasternak's literary
conservatism.
This is Pasternak's first novel, written at the age of about 65, after
he had been a poet all his life. His main formative influences had been
the Russian Symbolist school, which flourished early in the century, then
for a short time the pre-revolutionary Futurism, and finally, the "Formal–
ism" of the early 1920's. These schools enriched the idiom and refined
the techniques of Russian poetry, but often they also weakened its elan
and narrowed its imaginative range. Within the Symbolist and the For–
malist traditions Pasternak has achieved almost perfection. His virtuosity
of form has made of him Russia's most eminent translator of Shake–
speare and Goethe. As far as I can judge from his poems, of which some
are not easily accessible and others have remained unpublished, virtuosity
rather than vigorous, inventive, and creative mastery distinguishes Pas–
ternak. Yet as a poet too he is curiously antiquated compared with
Mayakovsky and Yessenin, his contemporaries.
What prompted him to write his first novel at so advanced an age
was the feeling that his poetry, or poetry at large, could not express
adequately the experience of his generation. There is a touch of greatness
in this admission and in the poet's effort to transcend his limitations.
However, for any writer whose gifts had, for nearly half a century, been
attuned exclusively to lyrical poetry, it would, in any case, have been
risky to try his hand at a realistic and political novel. Pasternak's poetic
tradition has proved an insuperable obstacle to his literary metamorpho–
sis. He has not been able to jump the gulf between lyrical symbolism and
prose narrative.
This accounts for the incongruity between the various elements that
make up
Doctor Zhivago:
on the one side lyrical passages, noble, richly
imaginative, refined, and fastidiously polished; and on the other the core
of the novel itself, flat, clumsy, labored, and embarrassingly crude.
It
is as
if
the book had been written by two hands: the virtuoso-poet of 65 and
a beginning novelist of 16.
Scattered like jewels over the pages of
Doctor Zhivago
are Paster–
nak's exquisite descriptions of nature or rather of mood in nature which
serve him as keys to the moods and destinies of his hero. The method,
with a long tradition behind it, is familiar; but Pasternak excels at it.
There is richness and delicacy in his images of forest, field, river, country
road, sunrise and sunset, and of the season of the year. The realistically
painted landscape is shot through with a mystical symbolism, which se-
