268
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mr. Deutscher's critical strategy lends itself to unexpected uses:
he could, for example, dismiss
The Charterhouse of Parma,
since its
hero Fabrice merely glances at the central event of his time, the battle
of Waterloo, and then lives a dream-like and non-political existence,
even though the political events of the Napoleonic era, as Stendhal
makes clear, decisively shape his life. (For that matter, Mr. Deutscher's
complaints about the "coincidences" in
Zhivago
would also permit him,
like recent generations of students, to dismiss Thomas Hardy's great
novels in which the sense of a fate beyond human control is similarly
projected through the use of "coincidence.")
The novel Pasternak happens to have written is quite different from
the one Mr. Deutscher thinks he has or should have written. Pasternak
largely takes for granted the sweep of historical events and the likelihood
that his Russian readers will be familiar with them. (Given their "edu–
cation," it is perhaps the one thing he can take for granted.) What he
wishes to impress upon his readers is the value of an independent con–
sciousness, sometimes heroic, more often passive and helpless, yet cling–
ing to its own terms of existence. But this, judging from his article, does
not seem to interest Mr. Deutscher very much.
A good many of the terrible events, however, are touched upon in
the novel, either by implication or through brief presentiments-and to
my mind, touched upon with great force and objectivity. One thinks
of the moments when Zhivago is at the front, a witness to the disin–
tegration of the Czarist army; or later in Moscow, discovering that in
times of stress the snatched pleasure of duck and vodka, because it is
not shared with other men, is no pleasure at all (is that perhaps an in–
cident justifying the resort to Trotsky's vulgar passage about aesthetes?) ;
or still later during the marvelously-portrayed journey to the Urals,
when Zhivago argues in behalf of the revolution against one of its "pre–
mature" critics, shares with ease and affection the trials of the ordinary
people who are his companions on the train, and experiences, in his
inner self, the meaning of a vast historical uprooting.
Here is Zhivago as a witness to the revolution-and one wonders
whether it is this passage that prompted Mr. Deutscher to his delicate
comparison with the "Constitutional Democrat aesthete":
He realized he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future;
he was anxious about this future, and loved it and was secretly proud
of it, and as though for the last time, as if in farewell, he avidly looked
at the streets and the clouds and the people walking in the streets, the
great Russian city struggling through misfortune-and was ready to
sacrifice himself for the general good, and could do nothing.
