260
PARTISAN REVIEW
The other characters are altogether puppet-like or
papier macke,
much though the author exerts himself to make them move of their own
accord, or to make them look "unusual," enigmatic, or romantic. Even
more than in the case of Zhivago, lyrical patches, naive and stilted dia–
logues, and affected superlatives have to stand for the portrayal of char–
acter and of actual relationships. This, for instance, is how the intimate
concord between Lara and Zhivago is described:
Their low-voiced talk, however unimportant, was as full of mean–
ings as the Dialogue of Plato.
Even more than by what they had in common, they were united by
what separated them from the rest of the world....
They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, with–
out noticing that there is anything remarkable about it. To them-and
this made them unusual-the moments when passion visited their doomed
human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation,
or of ever greater understanding of life and of themselves.
In
this
histoire politique
of the epoch the author makes no attempt
to draw a single Bolshevik figure-the makers of the revolution are an
alien and inaccessible world to him. He underlines that his revolutionaries
are not party men. They are primitively picaresque types or wholly in–
credible eccentrics, like Klintsov-Pogorevshikh, the deaf-mute instigator
of rebellions in the Czarist army, Liberius, the chieftain of the Forest
Brotherhood, and the most important of them Strelnikov, Lara's husband.
Of Strelnikov we learn that he "had an unusual power [how Pasternak
loves this adjective!] of clear and logical reasoning, and he was endowed
with great moral purity and sense of justice; he was ardent and honor–
able." From disappointment in family life-apparently his only motive–
he plunges into revolution, becomes a legendary Red commander, the
scourge of the Whites and of the people at large ; but eventually falls
foul of the Bolsheviks--we do not know why and how but presumably
because of his "moral purity and sense of justice"; and he commits sui–
cide. A few workers appear fleetingly in pale episodes, and are either
half-wits or servile post-seekers. We do not see the Whites at all, apart
from one remote and evanescent apparition. One could not even guess
from this grand cross-section of the epoch who were the men who made
the revolution, who were those who fought the civil war on either side,
and why and how they lost or won. Artistically as well as politically the
epoch-making upheaval remains a vacuum.
V
Yet despite this void, and the unctuous moralizing and all the
falsettos, there is
in
Doctor Zhivago
a note of genuine conviction. The
