CALENDAR OF THE REVOLUTION
257
teeth, the best in the world, and with a minute knowledge of Egyptian
ballet techniques, was reduced by this boorish revolution to travelling
with despicable lice-ridden bagmen,
l
then you feel rising up in your
throat a physical nausea with his dentures, ballet techniques, and gen–
erally with all his "culture" pilfered from Europe's market stalls; and
the conviction grows upon you that the very last louse of the most un–
couth of our bagmen is more important in the mechanics of history and
more, so to speak, necessary than this thoroughly "cultured" and in every
respect sterile egotist."
We recognize at once the "Constitutional Democratic
aesthete"~
it was to him that the "omens and promises of 1912-1914" had been the
most congenial-and we have some idea even of his long journey in a
goods wagon, with despicable lice-ridden bagmen. True, his specialty
now is not Egyptian ballet techniques but the old Slavonic Prayer Book;
and his culture comes from native stores as well as from Europe's market
stalls. Perhaps so many years after the revolution our throats at his sight
are less susceptible than Trotsky'S was to violent physical nausea. All the
same we cannot help identifying the same sterile egotist in Zhivago the
moralist and humanitarian.
IV
With the archaism of the idea goes the archaism of the artistic style.
Doctor Zhivago
is extremely old-fashioned by any standards of the con–
temporary novel; and the standards by which, being what it is, it has to
be judged are those of the old-fashioned realistic novel. The texture of
its prose is pre-Proust, nay, pre-Maupassant.
It
has nothing in it of the
experimental modernity of Pilniak, Babel and other Russian writers of
the 1920's. Obsolescence of style is not a fault in itself. The point is that
Pasternak chooses deliberately his mode of expression which is the mode
proper to the
laudator temporis actio
In his diary Pasternak-Zhivago thus expresses his artistic programme:
"Progress in science follows the laws of repulsion-every step forward is
made by reaction against the delusions and false theories prevailing at
the time.... Forward steps in art are made by attraction, through the
artist's admiration and desire to follow the example of the predecessors
he admires most." Nothing is further from the truth. In art as well as
in science progress is achieved by a combination of "repulsion" and
"attraction" and the tension between these two forces. Every step for–
ward, as H egel knew, is a continuation of tradition and at the same time
a reaction against tradition. The innovator transcends the heritage of
1.
Meshochniki,
those who travelled with their bags in search of food or trading
food.
