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PARTISAN REVIEW
from the beginning outsiders to the revolution, lacking all point of con–
tact with it, and psychologically static. The author evidently feels this and
seeks to animate them, to take them "inside" the revolution, and invest
them with something like dilemmas. He presents Doctor Zhivago as al–
most a revolutionary at first, or, at any rate, a man sympathetic to the
revolution, who suffers disillusionment and disintegrates in despair. In
the same way he tries to complicate other characters like Strelnikov, the
Red commander, and Lara, Strelnikov's wife and Zhivago's mistress. In
every case, however, he fails. He tried to square a circle. From Christian
rejection of the October revolution it might be possible for a Russian
writer to produce perhaps a new version of Chateaubriand's
Genie du
Christianisme,
but not a true, coherent, and convincing image of the
revolution and of the human beings who have made it or experienced it.
How does Pasternak arrive at the rejection? Is his (and Zhivago's)
profession of sympathy with the origins of the revolution mere pretense?
Certainly not. He is the victim of a genuine and in a sense tragic con–
fusidn. He himself reveals this when he describes Zhivago's, that is his
own, state of mind shortly before October, 1917: "Here too were
his
loyalty to the revolution and his admiration for it, the revolution in the
sense in which it was accepted by the middle classes and in which it had
been understood by the students, followers of Blok, in 1905." The revo–
lution accepted by the middle classes in 1905, it should be recalled, had
as its ideals either a Czardom reformed into a constitutional monarchy
or, as an extreme, a Liberal-Radical bourgeois republic. That abortive
bourgeois revolution was implicitly opposed to the proletarian revolution
of 1917. Pasternak-Zhivago is unaware that
his
"admiration and loyalty"
to the former must necessarily bring him in conflict with the latter.
The confusion goes even deeper: the Zhivago of 1917 is as if un–
aware that even this his "loyalty to the ideas of 1905" is by now only a
fading memory. "This familiar circle," Pasternak goes on, "also contained
the foretaste of new things. In it were those omens and promises which
before the war, between 1912 and 1914, had appeared in Russian
thought, art, and life, in the destiny of Russia as a whole and in
his
own, Zhivago's." The allusive reminiscence would convey to a Russian,
if he could read it, far more than it can possibly convey to a Western
reader. "Between 1912 and 1914" Russia's middle classes, the bour–
geoisie, had definitely turned their backs on their own radicalism of 1905,
had taken their distance from the revolutionary underground movement,
and were seeking salvation exclusively in a liberalized Czardom. The
mildly socialistic and radical intelligentsia, encouraged by a slight soft-
