270
PARTISAN REVIEW
accomplice of History, all this seems "naive," a residual sentiment of
"a survivor of a lost tribe." Yes, the human tribe.
Chiaromonte's point-central for an understanding of the novel–
also helps explain why Mr. Deutscher's comparison between
War and
Peace
and
Doctor Zhivago
betrays both literary and political insensitivity.
I happen to think, unlike other critics, that Pasternak did begin his
novel with an intention of composing a story of Tolstoyan breadth:
hence, its least successful section, the opening series of dry vignettes.
But it must have become clear to him that, if he were to write hon–
estly, he could not compose this kind of novel about the Russia of the
last decades. Pasternak began, perhaps, by desiring to capture something
of the Tolstoyan freedom and spontaneity, its joy as a token of man's
gratitude for existence; his characters reach for it eagerly, pathetically;
but the Russia he comes to describe, whether of the War Communism
years or the Stalin and post-Stalin periods, is too grey, too grim in its
inhumane monolithism to permit a prolonged release of the Tolstoyan
ethos. To have pretended otherwise would have been to acquiesce in a
characteristic falsification of Soviet fiction.
Yet after about the first 100 pages-far from repeating, as Mr.
Deutscher supposes, the usual business of the old-fashioned social novel
-Pasternak radically shifts his focus and begins to compose a quite
different kind of novel. The very "substance" of his imagined world,
in respect to which all the other characters are observed and validated,
becomes Zhivago's sense of consciousness: his sense of consciousness as
it is the last refuge of freedom. Through his doomed yet exemplary
struggle to maintain the life of contemplation, through his proud in–
sistence upon the autonomy of his inner "organic" being, Zhivago comes
to represent-and even in those moments of lassitude and demoraliza–
tion that so offend Mr. Deutscher's spartan sensibilities-all that which
in human life must remain impervious to the manipulation of the party–
state and its ideology.
It is for this reason that
Doctor Zhiv'ago
is not merely a remark–
able novel in its own right but a testament for the silent and suppressed:
all those who, no matter how they might reject Zhivago's ideas, share
with him the yearning for the right to free reflection. It is for this
reason that Zhivago, feeble broken creature that
he
finally becomes,
still represents the "permanent revolution" of man against the total
state.
Whether Pasternak confuses "the calendar of the Russian revolu–
tion" would therefore seem a secondary matter. (Other great Russian
novels, Dostoevsky's
The Possessed
and Turgenev's
Virgin Soil,
have
