Isaac Deutscher
PASTERNAK AND THE CALENDAR
OF THE REVOLUTION
I
The most striking characteristic of Boris Pasternak's
Doctor
Zhiuago
is its archaism, the archaism of the idea and of the artistic style
alike. The book has been received, in the West, as part of the recent
Russian revulsion against Stalinism and as its most consummate literary
expression. Yet,
Doctor Zhiuago
is nothing less than that-it is utterly
unrelated to the Russia of the 1950's and to the experiences, troubles, and
heart-searchings of the present Soviet generation.
It
is a parable about
a vanished generation. Pasternak, now approaching his seventieth year–
his formative period fell in the last decade before the October revolution
-might have written this book in 1921 or 1922.
It
is as
if
his mind had
stopped at that time, after the traumatic shock of the revolution; and
as if nearly all that his country has since gone through had remained a
blank. His sensitivity has remained unaffected, almost untouched, by the
great and grim, yet not unhopeful drama of Russia's last three decades.
The actual story of
Doctor Zhiuago
ends in 1922. Pasternak brings it
artificially "up to date" in two brief and hurried postscripts, "Con–
clusion" and "Epilogue," the first covering thinly the years from 1922
to 1929, till Zhivago's death, and the second jumping straight into the
1950's. The postscripts have almost none of the better qualities of the
work but show all its weaknesses and incongruities absurdly magnified.
Much of the climate and the local color of
Doctor Zhiuago
and
many of its ideas can indeed be found in the poems and prose of Andrey
Belyi, Zinaida Gippius, Evgenii Zamyatin, Marietta Shaginian, and other
writers of the 1920's, who were once polemically described as "internal
emigres." They were so called because they lived, worked (and pub–
lished their works) under the Soviet regime, but in some measure shared
the ideas and moods of the actual anti-Bolshevik emigres. Some, like
Gippius and Zamyatin, eventually went abroad and there voiced their
opposition to the revolution without inhibition. Others adjusted them-
