338
t.4AX HAYWAlD
as 1918. The title, which in Russian is an invented word
(bezlJU–
bye,
meaning roughly "lovelessness") evidently refers
to
the
sup–
pression of all personal feeling in the name of the Revolution,
about which the young social-revolutionary conspirator Kovalev–
sky is thinking as he travels with
his
easy-going friend Goltsev
to
some industrial town in the Urals. The contrast between Goltsev (
and Kovalevsky foreshadows the relationship between Yury Zhiv–
ago and Antipov-Strelnikov in the novel written some forty years
I
later. While Goltsev is thinking of the woman he loves (who,
like Lara in the novel, goes to the front as a nurse), Kovalevsky
is entirely absorbed in
his
thoughts about the Revolution-
i
thoughts which "meant more to
him
than his fur coat and
his
belongings, more than his wife and child, more than
his
own life
and more than other people's lives...." There is an obvious
symbolism in the fact that, while dreaming
his
dreams of Revo–
lution, Kovalevsky imagines that
his
companion is asleep
and
that he
himself
is awake. In reality it is the other way round: it
is
Goltsev, with
his
more down-to-earth thoughts, who is awake.
"Without Love" hence already contains in embryo one of
the
central themes of
Dr. Zhiuago,
namely the trance-like state
of
those men who, like Kovalevsky and Antipov, attempt to apply
"final" solutions
to
all the problems of humanity and who
even·
tually wake up
to
the illusoriness of their efforts.
In the first decade after the Revolution it was p<l5Sible for
such moods as these to be expressed with more or less freedom.
True, there was a fairly tight censorship, known as
Glaviit,
but
~
its functions were mainly negative, i.e. to prevent the appearance
in print of openly "counter-revolutionary" work. The
Soviet
prose of the period was, on the whole, remarkably objective
in
portraying the realities of the Revolution, the Civil War and
the
period of N.E.P. The brutal naturalism of Isaac Babel (repre–
sented in
this
~ue
by ''The Journey") was accepted almost
with–
out criticism; Leonid Leonov was able to show, in
The Badgers
( 1925), the hostility of the peasant masses to marauding Bol–
shevik requisitioners from the towns, and in
The Thief
(1927),
