The Icon and the Axe

Above all stands the idea that increasingly obsessed the literary imagination of the late imperial period: the belief that a woman, some strange and mysterious feminine force, could alone show the anguished intellectuals the way to salvation. This was the missing Madonna of Russian romanticism: the "beautiful lady" of Blok's early poetry, the "sophia" of Solov'ev's theosophy, the "Ophelia" of Olesha's fantasy. As often in Dostoevsky, women are given a special clairvoyance. Pasternak's mysterious lady of salvation has been defiled, yet she offers a mixture of sensual and spiritual quality. Lara is many things: Russia, life, poetry, a tree, unaffected simplicity. The wandering Zhivago seeks her throughout the great events of the revolutionary period. He achieves physical union with her in the snow-covered countryside; and then, beyond death, there is a moving last vignette where she weeps over Zhivago and makes the sign of the cross over his dead body. What might seem trite in another context suddenly

becomes transformed into a powerful scene containing elements both of a Pieta, wherein the Mother of God weeps over the broken body of her son, and of a Liebestod, wherein swelling music finds harmonic release only as Isolde joins her lover in death.

Lara has the same combination of beauty, integrity, and ambiguous depth which lay behind the greatest achievements of Russian literary culture. In the brave new world of twentieth-century Russia, Lara must bear the fate of that culture: disappearance and anonymous death. For Pasternak as for the theologians of the Eastern Church, all of nature participates in the suffering and martyrdom of sacred history. Through one of his innumerable images Pasternak points out that this culture suffers martyrdom at the hands not of evil men but of pharisees with their "retouching" and "varnishing over" (lakirovka) of truth. Even the coming of spring is affected by the Civil War.

Here and there a birch stretched forth itself like a martyr pierced by the barbs and arrows of its opening shoots, and you knew its smell by just looking at it, the smell of its glistening resin, which is used for making varnish.

Yet suffering and deception do not have the last word; for the over-all frame of the book is religious. The work is saturated with images from Orthodox Christianity; and one senses that they will in some way be recovered like the old images on the icons whose purity was only rediscovered through layers of varnish during the years of Pasternak's youth. The name Zhivago is taken from the Easter Liturgy and the communion prayer of John Chrysostom; events are repeatedly related to the Orthodox calendar, and Zhivago's tour with the partisans and experience of atrocities occurs during Lent. The old sectarian idea that people actually re-experience the passion and suffering of Christ is often hinted at, and the idea suggested that the period of revolutionary torment in Russian history is related in some way to that terrifying interlude between Christ's crucifixion and His resurrection. As with Dostoevsky and so many others, the basic Christian message is placed on the lips of a seeming fool: "God and work." There is really nothing else that matters. Yet these are the very things that have been missing from the lives of the secular intelligentsia. "It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical teaching and commandments," Pasternak writes in criticism of the abstract ethical fanaticism of modern Russian thought. "But for me the most important thing is the fact that Christ speaks in parables taken from daily life, that he explains the truth in terms of everyday reality." The natural universality of the central New Testament miracle, the birth of a child, is contrasted with the

nationalistic melodrama of the central Old Testament miracle, the passage through the Red Sea. Throughout the work, Pasternak's religious feeling is portrayed in images rather than abstract ideas; and as such his work represents a return to the old Muscovite culture of sounds, sights, and smells rather than the St. Petersburg culture of words and ideas. Pasternak used the old word for "icons" (obraza) to describe poetic images, which he denned as "miracles in words"14 rather as one used to speak of the miraculous paintings "not made by hands." Moscow and the deep interior rather than St. Petersburg and the West provide the mis-en-scene for Zhivago. For Pasternak Moscow of the silver age "far surpassed Petersburg," and he spent almost all his life in its environs. "Moscow of 1600 belfries" had become the Moscow of Scriabin, who was perhaps the greatest of all formative influences on Pasternak.15