The Icon and the Axe

There were good reasons why the campaign against Pasternak had to be pursued vigorously despite awkwardness and embarrassment. For Pasternak's Zhivago posed in effect a challenge to the moral basis of the regime. Rather than follow the approved path of criticizing the particular cheers which writers had previously rendered to Stalin, Pasternak was challenging the entire conception of writer-as-cheerleader. He presented in Zhivago a challenge to the moral superiority of the imitative activist who has externalized and materialized life, who accepts the constant rationalization that the individual self must be sacrificed for "the good of the social collective."10 By creating an essentially passive sufferer and giving him a credible, even appealing, inner life, Pasternak offered an alternative to the two-dimensional "new Soviet man."

The editors who rejected his novel for publication in the USSR seemed particularly peeved that Zhivago did not take sides in the Civil War, so that the familiar label of counter-revolutionary could be applied to him. He was, perhaps, a counter-revolutionary, but only in the deeper sense of advocating "not a contrary revolution, but the contrary of a revolution." Pasternak was the real alternative to social revolution: one which Stalinist activists could not understand because it could be neither labeled nor bought off. Even in humiliation, Pasternak preserved dignity and integrity in the eyes of his countrymen. He refused to flee abroad as he was urged to do by his primitive tormentors, who accused him of seeking nothing more than the "delights of your capitalist paradise." In his letter retracting acceptance of the Nobel Prize Pasternak insisted that "with my hand on my heart, I can say that I have done something for Soviet literature."11 It was obvious that his tormentors could neither place their hands over their hearts nor say that they had done anything for Russian literature. No Soviet writer of the first rank signed the official denunciation that accompanied the campaign of defamation.

Both his Soviet critics and his Western admirers agree that the book is in some sense a throwback to pre-Revolutionary Russia, a voice that has come "as from a lost culture."12 There is indeed a deliberate assertion of long silent themes at variance with official Soviet culture. Yet at the same time the book deals basically with the origins and development of the Soviet

period, and Pasternak clearly viewed the work as a kind of testament to his native land. In his last autobiographical sketch, written after the novel was completed, he pointedly described it as "my chief and most important work, the only one of which I am not ashamed and for which I take full

responsibility."18

The greatness of the book lies not in the affair that grew around it, still less in the plot of the novel itself, but rather in the alchemy with which he combines three main ingredients: recapitulation of the pre-Revolutionary literary tradition; rediscovery of the deeper religious and naturalistic symbolism in the Russian subconscious; and a new view of the Russian Revolution and the Russian future.

The attempt to recapitulate the Russian literary tradition is evident at every turn. The work is first described in a manner reminiscent of Eugene Onegin, and is structured like Tolstoy's War and Peace-telling the interrelated tales of a great national epic and a lonely search for truth, complete with two epilogues. Zhivago himself is a combination and fulfillment of two key types in nineteenth-century Russian literature: the obyvatel', or "oppressed little man" who passively observes the misfortunes that fate has sent him, and the lishny chelovek, or "superfluous aristocrat" incapable of effective action and alienated from both family and society. Symbols from the Russian literary past are played back slightly out of tune: the troika from Dead Souls, the train that crushes Anna Karenina. Long sections of Dostoevskian and Chekhovian dialogue are inserted, often at the expense of the narrative. The old opposition between the rich, uncomplicated world of nature and the artificial world of the machine is played antiphonally throughout the novel. Zhivago dies trying to let fresh air into a crowded

trolley car.