FREEDOM AND HISTORY
273
ment?
If
Zhivago stands for nostalgia for the
ancien regzme,
and if in
eastern Europe he is a threat to "the revolution," does it not follow that
there may be some ground for suppressing the book, not in Russia,
but in Poland and Hungary? Mr. Deutscher will of course protest; but
let him look to his own words before protesting too quickly.
IV
The heart of the matter is Zhivago's "archaism"-a charge that
reminds one, unhappily, of Trotsky's arrogant habit of dismissing poli–
tical opponents to the "ashcan of history."
If
one believes that in their
essence the Communist states embody the necessary and/or desirable
future, then perhaps Zhivago is "archaic." But if one believes that the
central issue of our time is freedom and that all the "old" nineteenth–
century problems have acquired a new value since the rise of the total
state, then Zhivago speaks for the best of the past as it relates to the
future. That Pasternak is a kind of "old-fashioned" and even conserva–
tive nineteenth-century liberal I do not doubt; but if socialism is to
prove something better than a cruel caricature of its own pretensions,
the task of modern politics becomes that of finding a new and more
humane mode of realization for the values of nineteenth-century liberal–
ism. It becomes necessary, that is, to find a link between the values
of an older generation that is represented by men like Pasternak and a
younger generation that is represented by men like the Polish writer
Marek Hlasko, who remains a rebel but has broken from Communism
because, as he writes, life under Communism is "a moral atrophy."
If
you have read only Mr. Deutscher and not the novel itself, you
might suppose Pasternak has nothing to say about such matters. Quite
the contrary! It is a main concern of his book. Does, for example, the
following passage betray an aesthete's "archaism" or a profound in–
sight into characteristic vices of totalitarianism?
Microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages have become very frequent
in recent years.... It's a typical modern disease. I think its causes are
of a moral order. The great majority of us are required to live a life
of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected
if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel. . . . I found
it painful to listen to you, Innokentii, when you told us how
yoU!
were
reeducated and became mature in jail. It was like listening to' a horse
describing how it broke itself in.
Or the following passage: is this a "voice from the dead" or a hu–
mane intelligence portraying the disease of party fanaticism?
Dudorov's pious platitudes were in the spirit of the times. But it was
