FREEDOM AND HISTORY
269
When Mr. Deutscher charges Zhivago, as a representative of his
class and/or generation, with yearning for a period (1912-1914) when
Russia's middle classes "had definitely turned their back on their own
radicalism of 1905," he neglects to add that those were also years
in
which, perhaps mistakenly, many Russian intellectuals felt some hopes
for a
liberal
development. And when he charges Pasternak with basing
his "recital of the broken pledges of October ... on a false premise,"
he is being less than just: for while it is true that the Bolshevik revolu–
tion did not promise to return to the climate of 1912-1914, it is also
true that in its first year or so it gave the intellectuars reason to hope
that it would honor at least some of the freedoms Pasternak clearly had
in mind when referring to the pre-revolutionary years. In any case, if
the point of
Doctor Zhivago
were really so preposterous as a piping
for the Czarist past, the dictatorship would surely not have reacted to it
with so sustained and intense a fury: for what damage could it then
have done, what impact could it have had? No, when the students of
Moscow hailed Pasternak a few years ago, chanting a request that he
read his translation of Shakespeare's 66th sonnet
(UAnd art made
tongue-tied by authority") ,
they saw him not as a relic of "the dead"
but as a spokesman and symbol of the freedom they desired.
It is true that Zhivago's political consciousness, never more than
a fragment of that complex human consciousness toward which he
strives, can at no point satisfy the strict requirements of a Leninist.
One of the main themes of the novel is that the Bolshevik regime, as
it rapidly became monolithic and bureaucratized, gave people like Zhi–
vago no margin for survival. As Nicola Chiaromonte has written in a
moving essay
(Dissent)
Winter 1959): "What Pasternak has done is to
show what is left of characters under conditions in which the very
identity of the individual is threatened, and tends to be reduced to an
inconsistent sequel of occasions and acts."
That is why the passage Mr. Deutscher singles out as "naive and
stilted"-the passage in which Pasternak compares the conversation of
Zhivago and Lara with the dialogues of Plato-acquires in context a
noble and tragic character. Loyalty to the text would require readers
to
be
told that this passage occurs in a quick transitional section which
summarizes what has been and will again be shown in dramatic full–
ness: that Zhivago has been
ill,
that he has now been reunited with
Lara, that they find it possible, while living on the edge of the precipice
they know awaits them, to rediscover something of the value of human
existence through sharing in the spirit of sacrifice and love. But to the
