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PARTISAN REVIEW
ogy
of the events which form the background to Zhivago's fortunes; and
so he should be expected to demonstrate the "spirit of the time," on
which he dwells so much, in accordance with the time.
To be sure, the deadly uniformity in art and science, the disregard
and contempt of personal opinion, the infallibility of the ruler, and so
many other features of the Stalin era evolved from germs which had
been present in the early phase of the revolution; but they evolved in
continuous and inexorable conflict with that phase. No great artist could
possibly have missed, as Pasternak has, the colossal tragedy inherent in
this chain of cause and effect and in the tension between the early and
the late phases of the revolution and of Bolshevism. What Pasternak does
is not merely to blur the contours of the time--he pulverizes all the real
aspects of the revolution and dissolves them into a bloody and repulsive
fog. Art and history alike, however, will reestablish the contours and make
their distinction between the revolution's creative and its irrationally de–
structive acts, no matter how entangled these may have been, just as,
in the case of the French Revolution, posterity, with the exception of
extreme reactionaries, has drawn its distinction between the storming of
the Bastille, the proclamation of the Rights of Man, and the rise of the
new and modem, be it only bourgeois, France, on the one hand, and the
nightmares of revolution and the gods that were athirst, on the other.
Pasternak hardly ever alludes (even in his "Conclusion" and "Epi–
logue") to the great purges of the 1930's. Yet he constantly uses their
black hue for his picture of the earlier period-this indeed is the only
respect in which he draws for his writing on any significant social ex–
perience of the last three decades. His silence about the great holocaust
of the 1930's is not accidental. This was tragedy
within
the revolution;
and as such it does not concern the outsider, let alone the internal emigre.
What is striking here is the contrast between Pasternak and writers like
Kaverin, Galina Nikolaeva, Zorin and others, whose post-Stalinist novels
and plays (unknown in the West and some of them virtually suppressed
in the Soviet Union) have centered precisely on the tragedy within the
revolution, the tragedy which they also see from within. In Pasternak's
pages the transposed horrors of the Stalin era exist mainly as the source
of his own moral self-confidence, the self-confidence he needs for
his
critique of the revolution at large. We have said that he might have
written
Doctor Zhiuago
in the early 1920's; but he could not have written
it
then with his present self-confidence. At that time, with the "heroic"
phase of the revolution still fresh, the internal emigre labored under the
sense of his moral defeat. After all the experiences of the Stalin era, he
