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PARTISAN REVIEW
most of the best writers and artists, Babel, Pilniak, Mandelstam, Kluyev,
Voronsky, Meyerhold, and Eisenstein, to mention only these, were de–
ported, imprisoned and driven to death. Stalin did not allow many of
Pasternak's poems
to
be published; but he spared their author and, by
the despot's benevolent whim, even surrounded him with care, protecting
his safety and well-being. The poet did nothing to gain these favors; but
Stalin knew that he had little to fear from his poetry. He sensed a threat
to himself not in the archaic message of the man who harked back to
pre-revolutionary times, but in the work of those writers and artists who,
each in his own way, expressed the ethos, the
Sturm und Drang,
and the
non-conformity of the early years of the revolution-there Stalin sensed
the genuine challenge to his infallibility. With those writers and their
message Pasternak has been in implicit conflict; and it would be unjust
to their memory to hail him as the most heroic and authentic spokesman
of his generation. Moreover, their message, even though it, too, belongs
to its time and can hardly meet the needs of our day, has certainly far
more relevance to the experience and the aspirations of the new Russia
than have the ideas of
Doctor Zhivago.
When all this has been said, one cannot react otherwise than with
indignation and disgust to the suppression of
Doctor Zhivago
in the
Soviet Union, and to the spectacle of Pasternak's condemnation. There
exists no justification and no excuse for the ban on his book and the
outcry against it, or for the pressure exercised on Pasternak, to make him
resign the Nobel award, the threat of his expulsion from the country,
and the continuing witch-hunt. The Writers' Union of Moscow and its
official instigators or accomplices have achieved nothing except that they
have given proof of their own obtuseness and stupidity.
What are Pasternak's censors afraid of? His Christianity? But the
Soviet State Publishers print in millions of copies the works of Tolstoy
and Dostoyevsky, every page of which breathes a Christianity far more
authentic than Pasternak's. His nostalgia for the
ancien regime?
But
who, apart from a few survivors of the old intelligentsia and bourgeoisie,
people of Pasternak's age, can share that nostalgia in the Soviet Union
today? And even if younger people were to experience it vicariously–
what possibly could the Soviet Union fear from that? It cannot and it
will not go back to the past, anyhow. The work of the revolution can no
longer be undone or reversed: the huge, formidable, and ever growing
structure of the new Soviet society will hardly stop growing. Can perhaps
a poet's eye, turned inwards and backwards, and wandering over the
wastes of his memory, cast an evil spell? Zhivago still represents a power-
