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PARTISAN REVIEW
dignity. Implicitly, he thus acknowledges the right of the
ancien regime
to press him into service-he denies that right only to the Red partisans.
Yet they do exactly what the old army had done: they make the doctor
look after the wounded. Unlike the Czarist army, they had not sent
him call-up papers by mail but had kidnapped him-they had not yet
had the time to build up a military machine which would mobilize
doctors and others in a "civilized" manner. Surely from the angle of
Pasternak-Zhivago's morality this should have been an irrelevant detail:
at any rate, it should not have made so great a moral difference to the
idealistic and humanitarian doctor whose wounded soldiers he cure,
those of the Czar, of the Whites or the Reds. Why then does he only
now feel so deeply insulted in his human dignity?
The juxtaposition of these two situations in Zhivago's life is sig–
nificant in other respects as well. Near the Carpathian front, that
cemetery of the Czarist army, Zhivago had seen blood, suffering, death,
and countless atrocities. Pasternak sparingly describes a few of these
but he does not dwell on that side of Zhivago's early experience. He pre–
sents as an almost uninterrupted atrocity only that part of the story
which begins with the revolution. Nostalgia for the
ancien regime
here
too colors his entire vision, determines for him his horizon, and dictates
even the composition of the novel.
Unintentionally, Pasternak portrays his hero, the sensitive poet and
moralist, as the epitome of callousness and egotism-unintentionally, be–
cause otherwise he could hardly have so insistently identified himself
with Zhivago and lavished on him all the lachrymose love with which
the novel overflows. The egotism is physical as well as intellectual. Zhi–
vago is the descendant not of Pierre Bezukhov but of Oblomov, Gon–
charov's character who, though not worthless, had spent all his life in
bed, as symbol of the indolence and immobility of old Russia. Here is
Oblomov in revolt against the inhumanity of a revolution that has
dragged him out of bed. Goncharov, however, conceived Oblomov as a
grand satyrical figure; Pasternak makes of him a martyr and the object
of an apotheosis.
Willy-nilly one thinks of a fierce and ruthless, yet historically just
passage in Trotsky's
Literature and Revolution,
written in 1923, which
appears to anticipate Zhivago. In truth, however, Trotsky did not an–
ticipate him; he merely summed up a certain type that belonged to that
time:
When a certain Constitutional Democratic aesthete, having made a
long journey in a stove-heated goods wagon, tells you, muttering between
his teeth, how he, a most refined European, with a set of superb false
