The Icon and the Axe

The cycle continues through a world of progressing seasons and natural images into which are woven poeticized passages from scripture and other religious allusions. At the end, there are several poems on the birth and early days of Christ, two on Mary Magdalen, who mistook Christ for a gardener, and a final poem, "The Garden of Gethsemane." His final affirmation of faith comes only after the Christ of his poem has bid Peter put up the sword and has reconciled Himself to drinking His cup to the full. Thus, Pasternak, in his last three stanzas, writes of coming suffering with the prayerful resignation of a monastic chronicler:

The book of life has come unto a page That is more precious than all holy things. Now that which has been written must take place. So be it then. Amen.

There is meaning in all of this. Man's only mistake has been that of all the heretics from the early Judaizers to the Bolsheviks: presuming to unravel the secrets and determine the path of history. The ancient flame symbol is summoned up to suggest the impulsive and unpredictable quality of providential history: and the Christian message of voluntarily taking up the cross is suggested:

Thou see'st the passing of the years is like a parable

And could burst into flame along the way.

In the name of its awful majesty

I go in voluntary suffering to the grave.

In the final verse men move from the world in which they see through a glass darkly toward their final destination and place of judgment. He reverts to the classical image of a ship at sea. It had served him as a symbol of sensual deliverance in his poem of 1917, "Oars at Rest," where a boat lies motionless and the poet and his lover within it are blended into a kind of liquid union with one another and with their natural surroundings.24 In the last lines of Zhivago, however, Pasternak returns the image to its older religious framework. He seems to be saying that beyond the private fate of the poet united briefly with Lara at Varykino, there is another destination; that all the barges so long hauled up the Volga by the sweating multitudes are in truth storied vessels which will yet lead Russia out of its landlocked insularity to worlds beyond.

I descend into the grave, and on the third day

rise again And, like barks weaving down a river The centuries shall come like a caravan of barges Out of the darkness, unto me.

They are the last lines in an extended chronicle, the last image in a long series of icons. The message which Pasternak left to a Russia in turmoil and conflict in the twentieth century is very much like that which a revered metropolitan of Siberia left to his flock amidst the troubles and schism of the seventeenth century-and which the official journal of the Moscow patriarch quietly reprinted in mid-1965:

Christians! even in darkest days a sunflower completes its circular course, following the sun by unchangeable love and natural inclination toward it. Our sun, which brightens our life's path, is the will of God; it illuminates for us, not always without shadows, the path of life; dark days are often mixed with clear ones; rain, winds, storms arise. . . . But may our

love to our sun, the will of God, be strong enough to draw us inseparably to it in days of misfortune and sorrow, even as the sunflower in dark days continues without faltering-navigating through the living waters, with the "barometer" and "compass" of God's will leading us into the safe harbor of eternity.25

Out of some such deeper vision was it possible for the land of "scientific atheism" ironically to produce through Pasternak some of the most magnificent religious poetry of the twentieth century. Perhaps his Zhivago is only another poignant Chekhovian farewell, the last afterglow on a solitary peak of a sun that has already set. Yet it may also represent the beginning of some new magnetic field: a kind of unexpected homing point for the spinning compasses of the space age. We turn now to that age and to the aspirations of the young generation in which Pasternak placed such high hopes.

New Voices

The crucial question for the future of the creative life in Russia deals not with internal emigres from late imperial culture but with the purely Soviet young generation: not with Pasternak but with his judgment that "something new is growing . . . and it is growing in the young."

It is, of course, extremely difficult to characterize an entire generation of a sprawling and complex modern nation. Large numbers of competent and often gifted people obviously enjoy profitable careers as faithful servants of the state and party. Many more-perhaps even a majority of the young generation-feel genuine pride in the accompUshments of Soviet science and technology and a measure of gratitude for the opportunities that have opened up under the new order.