FREEDOM AND HISTORY
267
dialectic of irritation, it has provoked Mr. Deutscher into an unusual
bluntness of statement. His major charge against
Doctor Zhivago--that
its devotion to individual and liberal values is "archaic," that it "speaks
the language of the dead" (though, considering their tragic history, might
it not be appropriate that Russia's greatest living poet speak their
language?}-this can be understood only if one realizes that Mr.
Deutscher writes as a theorist who believes that the irrevocable progress
of History is floating the Communist state. His assault upon Pasternak
derives from a fundamental identification with the "essence," though
not necessarily with each manifestation, of that progress.
At the end of his essay, in a burst of rapture--it depends, rather
amusingly, upon his simplification of a phrase from Pasternak-Mr.
Deutscher speaks of the "music of the future," the music of socialism
no less, of which he hears the anticipatory chords in Khrushchev's
Russia. I write from another standpoint. The "music" I hear from
Russia is that of a party-state still in basic opposition to the values of
democracy and socialism: a party-state that systematically silences those
who would speak for freedom. The people of Russia remains a prisoner:
the leash has been lengthened, the rations are improved, but the prisoner
is not free. And I do not believe that the growing wealth and strength
of this jail-society assures a gradual slide into freedom, though it
may
offer new opportunities for those who want freedom to struggle against
the party monopoly of power.
This much understood, we may look at one or two of Mr.
Deutscher's ventures into criticism, not because they are significant in
themselves but because they lead back to the area in which his views are
significant: politics.
II
Mr. Deutscher describes
Doctor Zhiva,go
as a "political novel
par
execellence"
and then, quite as if he were reviewing a full-scale poli–
tical-social history of Communist Russia, bemoans its failure to present
directly the tumultuous events of the revolutionary and post-revolu–
tionary years. The novel does not even show us, he complains, a single
bona fide
Bolshevik. But if by a "political novel" (especially
(t
par ex–
cellence!")
we mean one that focusses primarily upon a course of
political happenings or upon a clash of political ideologies, then
Doctor
Zhivago,
despite its occasional passages about Marxism, might better
be described as an "anti-political" novel, one that deals with the effort
of a man to survive in his own being at a time when the imperious de–
mand of politics is total.
