The Price of Revolution

Anyone who was around in the mid-1960s can probably whistle ‘Lara’s Theme’, and quite a few will remember the film for which the tune was written, in which the glamorous Julie Christie and Omar Sharif modelled fur coats in the snow. But how many people today read the book on which the film was based, the literary scoop of the twentieth century, the bestseller that won the Nobel Prize for Boris Pasternak?

 Doctor Zhivago was a political as well as a literary sensation. Smuggled out of Russia and published by Feltrinelli of Milan in 1957, it became a Cold War cause célèbre. One of its greatest fans was the American Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA secretly produced the first Russian-language edition and arranged for it to be handed out to Soviet visitors to the Brussels Expo in 1958 – not by Americans, to be sure, but by priests and lady volunteers with ‘pointed noses and blessed smiles’ in the Vatican pavilion, according to Novy Mir. As for its literary merits, Vladimir Nabokov, a near contemporary of Pasternak’s, was scathing. He described Zhivago as ‘a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences’, adding – with a final jab – that it must have been written by Pasternak’s mistress Olga Ivinskaya. As the authors of a fascinating recent book (The Zhivago Affair, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée) point out, however, Nabokov may have been motivated by jealousy: Doctor Zhivago knocked his Lolita off the top of the bestseller list. Is Zhivago a great book, or just an important one? That was the question that bothered me when recently I discovered a copy of the first English edition (1958) in a remote bookshelf at home. The book had my father’s name written inside but the writing looked like mine. Had I borrowed it to read years ago? I couldn’t remember. There was only one way to find out. I sat down to read it. My first impressions were mixed. The early narrative with its many short scenes was confusing; and the structure was indeed clumsy. It was difficult to remember who was who and I felt the need for an index. On the other hand the descriptive passages were stunning. As for the coincidences, I could see Nabokov’s point: they are bafflingly far-fetched, increasingly so as the novel progresses. But the first of them is a brilliant stroke. The boy Yury Zhivago, visiting a nearby estate, sees in the distance a train which comes inexplicably to a halt. A page later we learn that the train has stopped because one of its passengers has jumped to his death. The passenger is Zhivago’s lost father. Another passenger is involved: the lawyer Victor Komarovsky, who will play a sinister role in the story. Harder to accept were the long speeches which Pasternak gives his protagonists to describe their feelings about the world, or each other. These set-pieces hark back to an earlier literary age. They remind us that Pasternak was a child of the 1890s who revered the great novelists of the nineteenth century but whose own reputation rested on his poetry. I began to wonder if something was lost in translation. That first English edition was done at high speed by Max Hayward, an English academic whose fluency Russians mistook for that of a native, and Manya Harari, an émigré from St Petersburg. They employed a freehand, robust English vernacular which only occasionally sounds dated. (As they explain in a modest foreword, they didn’t have time to provide more than a literal translation for the ‘Zhivago poems’ Pasternak appended to the novel.) There is a much newer translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published in 2010, which claims to have restored ‘the rhythms, tone, precision and poetry’ of the Russian but this seems to have erred in the opposite direction. Anna Pasternak Slater, Boris’s English niece, gave it a very bad notice, complaining in the Guardian of its ‘russified English’, alien word-order and misguided literalism, especially when rendering Russian colloquialisms. Being a reader who prefers fidelity to the sense rather than to the words, I decided to forego the new translation. Instead, I read the old one again. This time, the novel came alive for me. With a better sense of the plot, I could more easily succumb to the power of Pasternak’s writing, the depth of his feeling and the intensity of his imagination. I was more than ever struck by his dynamic use of the natural elements. Wind and snow, sun and rain, light and shade are principal actors in his drama, reflecting and reinforcing the mood of the human characters. Pasternak is also a wonderful painter of scenery: storm-tossed trees are ‘bent brooms sweeping the sky’, the butterfly in a glade is ‘folding and unfolding like a scrap of coloured stuff’. Weather becomes a conscious metaphor for social upheaval, as when news of the Bolsheviks’ October coup in Petersburg reaches Yury, struggling through a snowstorm in Moscow:

the snow thickened and the wind turned into a blizzard, the kind of blizzard that whistles in a field, blanketing it with snow, but which, in town, buffets about at its wits’ end as if it had lost its way. There was something in common between events in the moral and the physical world, between disturbances near and far, on earth and in the sky. Here and there came volleys from islands of half-broken resistance. Bubbles of dying fires rose and broke on the skyline. And the snow too bubbled and funnelled in the wind and smoked on the wet stones at Yury’s feet.

I found the philosophical debates between the lovers as awkward as before, and was especially unconvinced by the confessional speech that Pasha Antipov, Lara’s husband, delivers to Yury before killing himself. But now I could forgive the bizarre coincidences. I understood them as a device for compelling the reader to follow to the end the fate of characters torn apart by an appalling succession of war, revolution and civil war, a period in which – as Zhivago says to Lara – ‘the whole of Russia has had its roof torn off’. Pasternak is doing what Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace and Vassily Grossman in his Second World War epic Life and Fate did, writing Russia’s history through the eyes of a cross-section of its people.  Doctor Zhivago is a tragedy, a grim love story set in dreadful times which ends with the ruin of most of the lives it describes. It’s not a book to read when you’re feeling low. It opens with Yury as an orphaned boy who witnesses the upheavals of the 1905 revolution. Sent to live with the Gromeko family in Moscow, he marries their daughter Tonya, trains as a doctor and works on the Western front in the First World War where he meets Lara. After the October Revolution of 1917, he and his family seek safety at Tonya’s former estate near the town of Yuryatin in the Urals, where he discovers Lara again and falls in love with her. Before he can confess to his wife, he is captured by a band of Bolshevik army deserters who have taken to the forest. He escapes to learn that his family have fled abroad for safety, seeks out Lara and – now a wanted man – takes her with him to the same estate. Lara’s repentant seducer Komarovsky turns up offering to arrange safe passage for them both to eastern Siberia. To persuade her to escape, Yury appears to accept the offer. But he has no intention of following. Instead, he makes his way back to Moscow, ill and disillusioned, where he starts another family but dies of a heart attack on a rickety tram. In an epilogue set during the Second World War we meet Tanya the laundress, who proves to be the abandoned child of Yury and Lara. Much of Doctor Zhivago is plainly autobiographical. Yury’s revulsion at the consequences of war and revolution is Pasternak’s; so are his desperate need to write poetry and his refusal to flee to safety. At the moving climax of the novel Yury shows an almost wilful indifference to his own wellbeing in letting go of the love of his life. Pasternak could have been describing his own character. As Komarovsky says to Yury earlier: ‘No one flouts [the communist] way of life and thought as openly as you do. Why you have to flirt with danger, I can’t imagine. You are a mockery of that whole world, an insult to it.’ Pasternak certainly flouted the system. If he escaped exile, jail and the gulag it was only because Stalin, an avid reader and a poet in his youth, seems to have regarded him as some kind of holy fool and felt a superstitious reverence for him. He reportedly told the OGPU, forerunner of the KGB, to ‘leave the cloud-dweller alone’. He even telephoned Pasternak one night to assure him that he, Stalin, would not be avenging himself on Osip Mandelstam for penning an insulting poem. Naturally, the Kremlin declared that the literary merits of Doctor Zhivago were greatly exaggerated by Westerners – not least by the Nobel Prize judges – in order to make political propaganda. Like the CIA, it saw the book as straightforwardly anti-Soviet. But the truth is more complicated. Pasternak supported the 1917 revolution, which he saw as inevitable. What he could not stomach was the cruelty of the regime that followed, especially under Stalin in the 1930s – a period he touches on in the novel’s epilogue when one of the characters describes the Second World War as a genuine struggle of liberation, ‘a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie’. For it was not just the atrocities and killings, the breakup of families, the agonies of separation, hunger and disease that Pasternak wanted to record, but the loss of personal autonomy, the mindless slogans and slavish conformism of a false religion which decreed that human beings could be reshaped like raw material and which put loyalty to the collective far above love of neighbour. He wanted, in short, to depict the moral as well as material damage done to humanity when Utopian fantasies are applied to the real world. Reviewing the book for the New Yorker in 1958 the critic Edmund Wilson implied this when he predicted that Zhivago would ‘come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius.’ We are at a sufficient distance now to see that Pasternak’s message is essentially a humanitarian one and goes deeper than the political controversy surrounding it at the time allowed. And it is this message, embodied in powerful poetic language, that makes Doctor Zhivago, for all its false notes and melodramatic moments, a great book. Having read it twice I should like to read it again – in Russian, if only I could.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Christian Tyler 2016