252
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mauriac naturally finds himself in the warmest sympathy with
Pasternak's Christianity. But has he also based his opinion on a consid–
eration of
Doctor Zhivago's
merits as a novel? Even though Pasternak
himself, through various imitative details of composition and style, evokes
War and Peace,
it is difficult to see how any novelist can make the com–
parison seriously. Tolstoy's huge canvas is alive and crowded with a mag–
nificently full blooded, richly individualized yet organically integrated,
social milieu. In
Doctor Zhivago
a mere fragment of a milieu comes only
partly alive, and this only in the opening chapters-the milieu of the
pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, Platonically "faithful to the ideas of
1905" but well adjusted in fact to the
ancien regime
and leading a smug
existence on the fringes of the upper and middle bourgeoisie and of the
Czarist bureaucracy. After 1917 this milieu disintegrates and disperses,
as it was bound to do; and-as nothing takes its place--its
membra
disjecta,
as individuals, are whirled furiously into a social vacuum, from
which they hark back to their lost felicity. No
histoire politique
emerges
therefore from their private destinies, certainly not any
histoire politique
of the Bolshevik epoch.
Tolstoy takes the characters of
War and Peace
straight into the
center of the great events of their time. He throws them right onto the
stream of history, which carries them until they are overwhelmed or come
on top. Pasternak places his characters in the backwoods and backwaters.
They do not participate in any single important event; nor do they even
witness any such event. Yet, what would
War and Peace
have been with–
out Austerlitz and Borodino, without the fire of Moscow, without the
Czar's Court and Kutuzov's headquarters, and without the retreat of
the Grande Armee, all reproduced by Tolstoy's epic genius? What sig–
nificance would have had the
destinees particulieres
of Pierre Bezukhov
and Andre Bolkonsky without their deep and active involvement
in
these
events? The drama of 1917-1921 was at least as great as that of 1812;
and it is far more momentous in its consequences. Yet Pasternak never
manages to give us a single glimpse of its main theme, of its central oc–
currences, and of its significant actors. It is not only that he lacks the
gift of epic narration and has no eye for the historic scene. He runs away
from history, just as all the time his chief characters flee from the scourge
of revolution.
We barely hear in
Doctor Zhivago
a grotesquesly remote echo of the
stormy prelude of 1905. Then, during the World War until September
1917, Zhivago serves as an army doctor in a God-forsaken Carpathian
village and a Galician townlet on the Hungarian frontier, hundreds and
