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death, he accepts, in a mood of trusting patriotism,
all
that has
happened in the country and offers up
his
soul to October and
May. He could no more compete with the crude "proletarian"
versifier Demyan Bedny than the poor foal could catch up with
the locomotive, but in a pitiful gesture of defiance he refused to
abandon his "beloved lyre" to the Revolution. He did not live
to
see
the day when it would inevitably have been wrenched from
his
grasp.
The c.ase of Mayakovsky is the most intriguing of all. The
self-appointed poet laureate of the Revolution, only too anxious
to
abandon not only himself, but his lyre to the service of the
Party
("I want the
Gosplan
to sweat / in debate, / assigning
me / goals a year ahead. / I want / a commissar / with a de–
cree / to lean over the thought of the age") he seemed, on the
surface, to be more in tune with
t~e
new age than any of
his
contemporaries.
In fact, however, he was one of those hypersensitive and
!
introspective intellectuals for whom only total involvement in the
tunnoil and chaos of universal upheaval can offer any solution
to hopeless inner agony. The Revolution, or rather
his
image of
i~
supplied a personal need which had nothing to do with
his
overt political convictions. When the image began to fade and
when he could no longer hide the fact from himself, he put a
bullet through his heart.
Boris Pasternak, the fourth great poet of the Soviet era and
the only one to survive its worst rigors, was not spellbound by
the Revolution. Judging from the evidence of
Dr. Zhivago,
he
may
have felt a momentary thrill of admiration at its "splendid
I
surgery," but we may surmise that
it
was as shortlived as with
the hero of his novel. Yet perhaps he understood the revolution–
ary
temperament better than most .of his contemporaries. The
portrait of Antipov-Strelnikov in
Dr. :(hivago
is full of sym–
pathetic insight intothecharaeter of a man who sacrifices life
and love to an impersonal cause. The fragment "Without Love"
shows that Pasternak was preoceupied with this problem as early
