CALENDAR OF THE REVOLUTION
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a brief and rather lifeless dialogue with a deported anti-Bolshevik poli–
tician. He is finally overcome by disgust with the new regime, and with
his time at large, in the Urals, when his expectation of satiety and quie–
tude on the old family estate is disappointed, when he is torn between
loyalty to his wife and love for Lara; and when eventually the Red
partisans trap him on a highway, abduct him to their forest camp, and
force him to serve them as doctor.
The picture of the Forest Brotherhood is forcefully drawn. There
is in it a sense of space, Siberian space, of the cruelty and mercy of nature
and man, and of the primordial savagery of the fight. Still, we touch
here only a remote periphery of the civil war, a forlorn and icy corner
of Mother Russia. (Pasternak himself spent those years in the Urals,
though not in any Forest Brotherhood.) The types or rather situations
he depicts here are convincing, and at times (for instance the doings of
the witch in the Forest Brotherhood) even fascinating; but they are only
marginal. They represent the anarchic fringe of the Red Army which
by now fights its battles against Ko1chak, Denikin, Yudenich, and Wran–
gel-elsewhere, mostly far to the West, in European Russia. There the
human element, the problems, and the situations were different from
those encountered in this Forest Brotherhood, although the civil war
was savage and cruel everywhere. The Forest Brotherhood, at any rate,
forms, even in fiction, too slender a basis for any
histoire politique
of
this
period.
It is there, in the partisans' camp, that Zhivago's final "break" with
the revolution occurs. Abducted from the highway, he explodes in anger
over the violation of his rights as an individual, the insult to his human
dignity, and the breakdown of all moral standards. After eighteen months
in captivity, during which at moments he feels almost closer to the Whites
than to the Reds, he manages to escape.
If
this were all, one could say
that the story has its psychological and artistic logic and that the author
has "taken it from life." But Pasternak does not content himself with
this. Not relying on objective narrative and portrayal, he incessantly
idealizes his hero, his own projection, and leaves us in no doubt that
he shares Zhivago's thoughts and emotions and all his indignation. (Near–
ly all his characters do the same, because the author does not manage
to set up any real contrast or counter-balance to Zhivago!) Politically
and artistically Pasternak thus involves himself in a self-revealing incon–
sistency. Zhivago, we know, had, as doctor, spent several years in the
Czarist army; and all those years he behaved extremely meekly, never
making any fuss over his sacred rights as individual and his offended
