The Icon and the Axe

But, for Pasternak, poetry was everything: not just a form of consolation for the adversity of contemporary political and economic life, but rather a way of cutting through all artificiality to the real world-the throbbing and sensuous world of persons, places, and things. Pasternak seeks to defend that world against the less real world of abstract slogans, creeds, and statistics. Individual poetry is the language of the former; corporate prose, the medium of the latter. In a land bent on producing quantities of the most artificial prose in a pretentiously bureaucratic century, Pasternak remained an uncompromisingly lyric poet. His commitment was not to ideas but to life itself-from the verses he wrote in the revolutionary year of 1917 entitled My Sister Life to the last poems of Doctor Zhivago, whose name means "living."

Why was the poet of life permitted to survive? He was too well known to have been overlooked; yet, despite long periods of silence and diversion into translating, Pasternak never renounced his poetic course nor compromised himself by writing servile odes to Stalin and hymns to collectivization, Stalin himself must have willed or agreed.to his survival. Perhaps he was in some way moved by the uncorrupted quality of this pure poetic offshoot of Old Russia. Or perhaps Stalin sensed a certain occult power

in the one who defined the poet as "brother to a dervish."5 Certainly Pasternak had a singular record of nonconformity to the artistic mores of Stalinist Russia, beginning with his letter to Stalin at the time of the mysterious death of Stalin's first wife in November, 1932. Refusing to sign the stereotyped letter of consolation offered by other leading writers, Pasternak published a letter of his own to Stalin:

I align myself with the feelings of my comrades. On the eve I was thinking deeply and tenaciously about Stalin; for the first time as an artist. In the morning I read the news. I was shocked exactly as if I had been alongside, had lived and seen.6

Whatever the reasons, Pasternak survived and stayed on in Russia. With the coming of the first "thaw" after Stalin's death, Pasternak published in April, 1954, ten poems described as "poems from the novel in prose, Dr. Zhivago." There was a good deal even in this first announcement. The statement that the poet had nearly finished his first and only novel created considerable anticipation, for it meant that he had for some time been occupied with a new kind of work. He had accepted the prosaic world of contemporary Russia, and decided to communicate at length with it apparently in the language it could understand. The description "a novel in prose" indicated that he intended to replay with variations older literary themes, since Pushkin had characterized his Eugene Onegin as a "novel in verse." The idea that the novel would deal with Soviet reality and at the same time recapitulate some of the older Russian cultural heritage was quietly set forth in the author's explanatory note that Zhivago was to "cover the period from 1903 to 1929," and deal with "a thinking man in search of truth, with a creative and artistic bent."7

There are many ways of looking at this work, which was published abroad three years later despite strenuous Soviet objections, and then awarded a Nobel Prize which its author was forced to decline. Stalinists in Russia and sensationalists abroad have referred to it as a kind of anti-Revolutionary diatribe; literary specialists have demonstrated their critical sang-froid by calling it inferior to his poetry and assigning to it a kind of B+ to A- rating on their literary scorecards; students of the occult have looked at the work as a kind of buried treasure chest of symbols and allusions.8 Behind this critical din stand the massive shadows of two less articulate groups: the millions with no knowledge of Russia who have read and been moved by it; and the millions within Russia who have not been allowed to see it.

If Stalin would not permit Pasternak to be done away with altogether, neither would Stalin's successors permit him to publish freely. Pasternak's

last years were spent in forced isolation, surrounded by petty harassments and veiled threats. Indeed, no figure within the USSR was treated to a more shrill and vulgar chorus of official denunciation during "de-Stalinization" than this mild poet. To the all-powerful Communist bureaucrats of Khrushchev's Russia he was the bearer of a "putrid infection," the producer of "decadent refuse," and generally "worse than a pig," because "a pig will never befoul the place where it eats and sleeps."9