FREEDOM AND HISTORY
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also been accused, perhaps with greater justice, of violating the "calen–
dar" of their day: a fact that in no way diminishes their value as litera–
ture or "evidence.") In any case, is this confusion quite so shocking as
Mr. Deutscher claims? Outright terrorism Pasternak shows only at the
end of the novel, as in the chilling paragraph which records that Lara
"died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that after–
wards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's con–
centration camps in the north." (A passage reflecting, perhaps, Paster–
nak's "archaism?") What Pasternak portrays in the early 'twenties is
the cruelty of the Civil war ("White and Red atrocities rivalled each
other in savagery"), the gathering fanaticism of the triumphant Com–
munists, the agonies of personal survival. I submit that his novel shows
a greater faithfulness to the eSgential history of our time as it has be–
come the crucifixion of freedom and consciousness, than all of Mr.
Deutscher's dialectical turnings.
III
About the literary merits of
Doctor Zhivago
there can of course
be legitimate disagreement. But one would expect an intellectual to feel
only the deepest sense of comradeship with Pasternak as a man, to be
stirred to emotions of fraternity by the sight of this aging poet as he
suffered in loneliness the assaults of the party-state. (Or should we
congratulate Khrushchev for not having arranged his liquidation?) And
here, despite Mr. Deutscher's careful statement of opposition to the
witch-hunt and the banning, I find his article lamentable. No one, not
even the reader who disagrees with every word I have written, could
say that Mr. Deutscher's moral-political impulse is a warm solidarity
with the artist absorbing the blows of the state.
Mr. Deutscher chastizes "the censors" for their "obtuseness and
stupidity." But surely it is more than a matter of "censors," and some–
thing far more serious than "obtuseness." These "censors" did not act
on their own, apart from the cues of Khrushchev and Mikoyan; the
whole apparatus of the party-state--including that agent of Russia's "not
unhopeful drama," the Konsomol leader who called Pasternak a pig–
threw itself into the vendetta against the writer. Mr. Deutscher, faithful
to his theories, must however present the matter as if it were the result
of the "obtuseness" of officials out of step with History, bureaucrats
who, having perhaps mislaid the calendar of the revolution, don't un–
derstand their own true interests, which Mr. Deutscher tries so patiently
to explain. (One wonders, incidentally, whether the suppression of the
