CALENDAR OF THE REVOLUTION
263
now feels that he has morally recovered; and he flaunts his self-righteous–
ness. This is a' spurious recovery, however; and it is helped along by a
suggestio falsi.
Pasternak traces back Zhivago's ideas and his Christianity to Alex–
ander Blok. In Blok's
Twelve,
Christ walked at the head of armed work–
men, tramps, and prostitutes, leading them, in the blood. red dawn of
October, towards a greater future. There was a certain artistic and even
historic authenticity in this daring symbol. In it were merged the primi–
tive Christianity and the elemental revolutionary elan of the Russia of
the muzhiks who, chanting Prayer Book psalms, burned the mansions of
the aristocracy. The Christ who blessed that Russia was also the Christ
of primitive Christianity, the hope of the enslaved and the oppressed,
St. Matthew's Son of Man, who would sooner let the camel go through
the eye of a needle than the rich man enter into the Kingdom of God.
Pasternak's Christ turns his back on the rough mob he had led in Octo–
ber and parts company with them. He is the pre-revolutionary self-suf–
ficient Russian intellectual, "refined," futile, and full of grudge and re–
sentment at the abomination of a proletarian revolution.
VI
Pasternak has been hailed in the West for his moral courage; and
much is written about his poetry as a "challenge to tyranny" and his
stubbornly non-conformist attitude throughout the Stalin era. Let us try
and disentangle facts from fiction.
It
is true that Pasternak has never
been among Stalin's versifying sycophants. He has never bowed to the
official cult and observance; and he has never surrendered his literary
integrity to powerful taskmasters. This alone would have been enough
to earn him respect and to make of his writing a startling phenomenon.
His poetry stands out sharply against the grey background of the official
literature of the last thirty years. Against that lifeless and unendurably
monotonous background even the old-fashioned quality of his lyricism
could appear and has appeared as a thrilling innovation. One may there–
fore speak of
him
as of a great and even heroic poet in that semi-ironical
sense in which the Bible speaks of Noah as a just man "in his generation,"
a generation of vice. Pasternak stands indeed head and shoulders above
the poetasters of the Stalin era.
However, his courage has been of a peculiar kind-the courage of
passive resistance. His poetry has been his flight from tyranny, not his
challenge to it. To this he has owed his survival, in a generation in which
the greatest poets, Mayakovsky and Yessenin, committed suicide, and
