CALENDAR OF THE REVOLUTION
261
suggestive indictment of the revolution must make its impression on the
reader who is unfamiliar with the background of the years 1917-1922
but
is
vaguely aware of the horrors of the Stalin era. Confusing the calen–
dar of the revolution, Pasternak projects those horrors back into the early
and earliest phases of the Bolshevik rule. The anachronism runs through
the entire novel. In the years 1918-1921 Zhivago and Lara are already
revolted by the tyranny of the monolithic regime which in fact was not
formed until a decade later:
They were both equally repelled by what was tragically typical of
modern man, his shrill text-book admirations, his forced enthusiasms,
and the deadly dullness conscientiously preached and practised by count–
less workers in the fields of art and science in order that genius should
remain extremely rare.
lt was then that falsehood came into our Russian land [Zhivago
and Lara agree]. The great misfortune, the root of all the evil to come
was the loss of faith in the value of personal opinions. People imagined
that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must
sing the same tune in chorus, and live by other peoples' notions, the no–
tions which are being crammed down everybody's throat.
I do not know [says Zhivago] of any teaching more self-centred and
farther from the facts than Marxism. Ordinarily, people are anxious to
test their theories, to learn from experience, but those who wield power
are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they
turn their back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing
to me. I do not like people who are indifferent to the truth.
Zhivago-Pasternak goes on in this vein without any substantial con–
tradiction from any other character. Yet, the "forced enthusiasms," the
deadly uniformity in art and science, the "singing of the same tune in
chorus," and the degradation of Marxism to an infallible Church-all
this fits the fully-fledged Stalin era but not the years in which these
words are spoken. Those were years of
Sturm und Drang,
of bold in–
tellectual and artistic experimentation in Russia, and of almost perma–
nent public controversy within the Bolshevik camp. Does Pasternak–
Zhivago confuse the calendar of the revolution or is he confused by it?
Whatever the truth, only this confusion enables
him
to make his case. He
could not have actually argued in 1921 the way he does. Yet readers
familiar only with the atmosphere of the latter day Stalinism are all too
likely to believe that he could.
It
may be objected that the author need
not concern himself with historical chronology, and that he has the right
to compress or "telescope" various periods and so reveal the evil em–
bedded in the thing itself. Where then are the limits of the compression?
And does not historical and artistic truth come out mangled? Pasternak,
at any rate, establishes most carefully, almost pedantically, the chronol-
