The Icon and the Axe

Like Scriabin, Pasternak sought to affect a kind of fusion of the arts in which music played a special role. Pasternak's description of Scriabin's artistic quest applies to his own: an effort to find "an inner correspondence in musical terms to the surrounding world to the way people thought, felt, lived, dressed and travelled in those days."16 To Pasternak Scriabin's work was not just music, but "a feast, a celebration in the history of Russian culture."17 His own work is an attempt to carry on that interrupted feast. It is not accidental that Lara's faith is described as "inner music," that the prose part of Zhivago ends with "the unheard music of happiness" swelling up out "of this holy city and of the whole world.". Thereafter, the novel turns to song, and ends with the posthumous poems of Yury Zhivago, some of Pasternak's most hauntingly musical verse. If his father was a painter and he a student of philosophy, it is the sound of music first heard, perhaps, from his pianist-mother that lends a special magic to both image and idea in Pasternak. It seems fitting that his death and burial should be accompanied, not by the prosaic speeches and editorials of the official Soviet press, but rather by the pure music of Russia's greatest pianist and interpreter of Scriabin, Sviatoslav Richter, playing until drenched with perspiration at a small upright piano in Pasternak's cottage, near the dead body of the poet. If Pasternak's novel does not reach as high as those of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it moves in the same direction. Like them, Pasternak was driven by religious concerns that he was unable to resolve in any conventional way. In his last years, he described himself as "almost an atheist"18 and denied that he had any philosophy of life whatsoever, admitting only to "certain experiences or tendencies." He confessed a special tendency to see art as an act of "consecrated abnegation in a far and humble likeness with the Lord's Supper,"19 and to believe that out of voluntary suffering in imitation of Christ would come the miracle of resurrection.

Resurrection is the real theme of the novel-a fact which links him once again with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the submerged culture of Orthodoxy. "Why seek ye the living [zhivago] among the dead?"20 Christ's followers were asked when they came to His tomb on the first Easter. Henceforth, all who would "rightly praise" his name should cry forth "Christ is risen! … In troth risen." Dostoevsky's last testament to new life out of death, The Brothers Karamazov, begins with the legend: "Except a grain of wheat fall in the ground and die . . ." Tolstoy's last novel bore the title Resurrection; and the original illustrations of this work by his father were on the walls of Pasternak's dacha at Peredelkino when he was writing Zhivago.

Pasternak's novel begins with a funeral and ends with the resurrection on the third day of a man to whom the centuries are moving "out of darkness to judgment." Pasternak suggests, moreover, that God may be bringing a new kind of life out of death on Russian soil; that a cultural resurrection may lie at the end of the revolutionary Calvary even for those like himself and Zhivago: the confused observers and superfluous figures of Old Russia. Nothing which they did earned salvation. But, for all their faults, they had been touched in some mysterious way by the warm forgiving natural world, and by the image of Christ Himself. These two supernatural forces converge on the lonely, dead body of Zhivago. There was to be no formal church funeral; and Lara had already bid him farewell.

Only the flowers compensated for the absence of the ritual and chant. They did more than blossom and smell sweet. Perhaps hastening the return to dust, they poured forth their scent as in a choir, and steeping everything in their exhalation seemed to take over the function of the Office of the Dead.

The vegetable kingdom can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbour of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees and flowers of graveyards. Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus risen from the grave, "supposing him to be the gardener."

Russia's resurrection is hinted at in a no less powerful manner. Indeed, for the historian of culture, Pasternak's view of the Russian Revolution and of the Russian future is perhaps even more important than his views on personal fulfillment and salvation. It is significant that, despite Zhivago's intimate relationship with Lara, she chose to marry his spiritual opposite, Strelnikov, the "shooter," the revolutionary activist. For the spiritual culture of Old Russia did, to a considerable extent, wed itself to the Revolution in the initial period of purity and new vision.

The story of Strelnikov offers a marvelously distilled account of the