Political Handbook of the World, ed. Mallory

[p026] Political Handbook of the World. Edited by Walter H. Mallory and published in Britain for the Council on Foreign Relations by Oxford University Press, 44s. This extremely useful reference book contains concentrated political information on every country in the world: the composition of govern- ments, the programmes of the main political parties and their leaders, the political affiliation, editors and circu- lation of the leading newspapers and periodicals. The book also contains a. résumé of recent political events in many countries. Invaluable for serious students of politics who want to gét a quick grasp of the background facts to quick-moving political developments. G.G,

[p027] PASTERNAK AND THE REVOLUTION 25 jump the gulf between lyrical symbolism and prose narrative. This accounts for the incongruity between the various elements that make up Doctor Zhivago: on the one side lyrical passages, noble, richly imaginative, refined, and fastidiously polished; and on the other the core of the novel itself, flat, clumsy, laboured, and embarrassingly crude. It is as if the book had been written by two hands: the virtuoso- poet of 65 and a beginning novelist of 16. Scattered like jewels over the pages of Doctor Zhivago are Pasternak’s exquisite descriptions of nature or rather of mood in nature which serve him as keys to the moods and destinies of his hero. The method, with a long tradition behind it, is familiar; but Pasternak excels at it. There is richness and delicacy in his images of forest, field, river, country road, sunrise and sunset, and of the season of the year. The realistically painted landscape is shot through with a mystical symbolism, which selects a bush torn by a storm or a frozen tree as omen or token. The writing on the wall is the writing on the face of nature itself. Even in these passages, which would by themselves make an impressive anthology of Pasternak’s poetry in prose, his range is limited—he rarely succeeds, for instance, in the drawing of an urban scene; and not infre- quently there is a note of affection and preciosity in his manner of pressing on the reader the symbolical meanings ‘hidden’ in landscape or mood. All the same, Pasternak the image-maker and word-polisher shows himself at his best. Unfortunately, a novel aspiring to the large and realistic scale cannot be built around such lyrical fragments. The author’s evident attempt to do so has only shown up the perplexing contrast between his sophisticated word-mastery and his ineptitude as a novelist. His plot is, from beginning to end, a jumble of absurd and assiduously concocted coinci- dences, such as would have discredited a novelist even in Stendhal’s days. The deus ex machina jumps incessantly before our eyes. Without his help the author simply does not manage to establish any connection between the characters, to bring them together, to separate them, and to evolve and resolve their conflicts. He fails in this because he does not manage to develop and bring alive the characters themselves. Even Zhivago is little more than a blurred shadow. The psychological motiva- tion of his behaviour is incoherent. The author substitutes for it exalted lyrical and symbolic allusions; and he speaks for Zhivago and on his behalf instead of letting the personality speak for itself. ‘Everything in Yuri’s mind was mixed up together and misplaced and everything was ‘sharply his own—his views, his habits, and his inclinations. He was unusually impressionable and the freshness and novelty of his vision were remarkable.’ ‘The vigour and the originality of his poems made Yuri forgive himself what he regarded as the sin of their conception for he believed that originality and vigour alone could give reality to a work of art... .’ ‘Shyness and lack of simplicity [were] entirely alien to his nature.’ The superlatives which the author heaps on his hero and the subtle poetic aura by which he surrounds him cannot give reality or depth to the figure. Zhivago’s attitudes towards his wife and mistress, and towards his many children born of three women, are strained or never assume verisimili- tude: not for a single moment does the father come alive in him (and none of his children has any individuality). Not only the author sings his hero’s praises—nearly all the characters do the same. Nearly all are in love with Yuri, adore him, approve his ideas, echo his deep reflections, and nod their heads at whatever he says. The other characters are altogether puppet-like or papier maché, much though the author exerts himself to make them move of their own accord, or to make them look ‘ unusual’, enigmatic, or romantic. Even more than in the case of Zhivago, lyrical patches, naive and stilted dialogues, and affected superlatives have to stand for the portrayal of character and of actual relationships. This, for instance, is how the intimate concord between Lara and Zhivago is described: ‘ Their low-voiced talk, however unimportant, was as full of meanings as the Dialogue of Plato. ‘Even more than by what they had in common, they were united by what separated them from the rest of the world... . ‘They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it. To them—and this made them unusual— the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, or of even greater understanding of life and of themselves.’ In this histoire politique of the epoch the author makes no attempt to draw a single Bolshevik figure —the makers of the revolution are an alien and inaccessible world to him. He underlines that his revolutionaries are not party men. They are primitively picaresque types or wholly incredible eccentrics, like Klintsov-Pogorevshikh, the deaf-mute instigator of rebellions in the Tsarist army, Liberius, the chieftain of the Forest Brotherhood, and the most important of them, Strelnikov, Lara’s husband. Of Strelnikov we learn that he ‘had an unusual power [how Pasternak loves this adjective!] of clear and logical reasoning, and he was endowed with great moral purity and sense of justice; he was ardent and honourable’. From disappointment in family life— apparently his only motive— he plunges into revolu-

[p028] 26 tion, becomes a legendary Red commander, the scourge of the Whites and of the people at large; but eventually falls foul of the Bolsheviks—we do not know why and how but presumably because of his ‘moral purity and sense of justice’; and he commits suicide. A few workers appear fleetingly in pale episodes, and are either half-wits or servile post- seekers. We do not see the Whites at all, apart from Vv Yet despite this void, and the unctuous moralizing and all the falsettos, there is in Doctor Zhivago a note of genuine conviction. The suggestive indict- ment of the revolution must make its impression on the reader who is unfamiliar with the background of the years 1917-22 but is vaguely aware of the horrors of the Stalin era. Confusing the calendar of the revolution, Pasternak projects those horrors back into the early and earliest phases of the Bolshevik rule. The anachronism runs through the entire novel. In the years 1918-21 Zhivago and Lara are already revolted by the tyranny of the monolithic regime which in fact was not formed until a decade later: “They were both equally repelled by what was tragically typical of modern man, his shrill text-book admirations, his forced enthusiasms, and the deadly dullness conscientiously preached and practised by countless workers in the fields of art and science in order that genius should remain extremely rare. ‘It was then that falsehood came into our Russian land [Zhivago and Lara agree]. The great mis- fortune, the root of all the evil to come was the loss of faith in the value of personal opinions. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must sing the same tune in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, the notions which are being crammed down everybody’s throat. ‘I do not know [says Zhivago] of any teaching more self-centred and farther from the facts than Marxism. Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn their back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I do not like people who are indifferent to the truth.’ Zhivago-Pasternak goes on in this vein without any substantial contradiction from any other character. Yet, the ‘ forced enthusiasms ’, the deadly uniformity in art and science, the ‘ singing of the same tune in chorus’, and the degradation of Marxism to an infallible Church—all this fits the fully-fledged Stalin era but not the years in which these words are LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1961 one remote and evanescent apparition. One could not even guess from this grand cross-section of the epoch who were the men who made the revolution, who were those who fought the civil war on either side, and why and how they lost or won. Artistically as well as politically the epoch-making upheaval remains a vacuum. spoken. Those were years of Sturm und Drang, of bold intellectual and artistic experimentation in Russia, and of almost permanent public controversy within the Bolshevik camp. Does Pasternak- Zhivago confuse the calendar of the revolution or is he confused by it? Whatever the truth, only this confusion enables him to to make his case. He could not have actually argued in 1921 the way he does. Yet readers familiar only with the atmosphere of the latter-day Stalinism are all too likely to believe that he could. It may be objected that the author need not concern himself with historical chronology, and that he has the right to compress or ‘telescope’ various periods and so reveal the evil embedded in the thing itself. Where then are the limits of the compression? And does not historical and artistic truth came out mangled? Pasternak, at any rate, establishes most carefully, almost pedantically, the chronology of the events which form the background to Zhivago’s fortunes; and so he should be expected to demonstrate the ‘spirit of the time’, on which he dwells so much, in accordance with the time. To be sure, the deadly uniformity in art and science, the disregard and contempt of personal opinion, the infallibility of the ruler, and so many other features of the Stalin era evolved from germs which had been present in the early phase of the revolution; but they evolved in continuous and inexorable conflict with that phase. No great artist could possibly have missed, as Pasternak has, the colossal tragedy inherent in this chain of cause and effect and in the tension between the early and the late phases of the revolution and of Bolshevism. What Pasternak does is not merely to blur the con- tours of the time—he pulverizes all the real aspects of the revolution and dissolves them into a bloody and repulsive fog. Art and history alike, however, will re-establish the contours and make their distinction between the revolution’s creative and its irrationally destructive acts, no matter how entangled these may have been, just as, in the case of the French Revolution, posterity, with the exception of extreme reactionaries, has drawn its distinction between the storming of the Bastille, the proclamation of the

[p029] PASTERNAK AND THE REVOLUTION Rights of Man, and the rise of the new and modern, be it only bourgeois, France, on the one hand, and the nightmares of revolution and the gods that were athirst, on the other. Pasternak hardly ever alludes (even in his ‘Conclusion’ and ‘ Epilogue ’) to the great purges of the 1930s. Yet he constantly uses their black hue for his picture of the earlier period—this indeed is the only respect in which he draws for his writing on any significant social experience of the last three decades. His silence about the great holocaust of the 1930s is not accidental. This was tragedy within the revolution; and as such it does not concern the outsider, let alone the internal émigré. What is striking here is the contrast between Pasternak and writers like Kaverin, Galina Nikolaeva, Zorin and others, whose post-Stalinist novels and plays (unknown in the West and some of them virtually suppressed in the Soviet Union) have centred precisely on the tragedy within the revolution, the tragedy which they also see from within. In Pasternak’s pages the transposed horrors of the Stalin era exist mainly as the source of his own moral self- confidence, the self-confidence he needs for his critique of the revolution at large. We have said that he might have written Doctor Zhivago in the early 1920s; but he could not have written it then with his present self-confidence. At that time, with VI Pasternak has been hailed in the West for his moral courage; and much is written about his poetry as a ‘challenge to tyranny’ and his stubbornly non- conformist attitude throughout the Stalin era. Let us try and disentangle facts from fiction. It is true that Pasternak has never been among Stalin’s versifying sycophants. He has never bowed to the official cult and observance; and he has never surrendered his literary integrity to powerful taskmasters. This alone would have been enough to earn him respect and to make of his writing a startling phenomenon. His poetry stands out sharply against the grey back- ground of the official literature of the last thirty years. Against that lifeless and unendurably monotonous background even the old-fashioned quality of his lyricism could appear and has appeared as a thrilling innovation. One may therefore speak of him as of a great and even heroic poet in that semi-ironical sense in which the Bible speaks of Noah as a just man ‘in his generation’, a generation of vice Pasternak stands indeed head and shoulders above the poetasters of the Stalin era. However, his courage has been of a peculiar kind— the courage of passive resistance. His poetry has 27 the ‘heroic’ phase of the revolution still fresh, the internal émigré laboured under the sense of his moral defeat. After all the experiences of the Stalin era, he now feels that he has morally recovered; and he flaunts his self-righteousness. This is a spurious recovery, however; and it is helped along by a suggestio falsi. Pasternak traces back Zhivago’s ideas and his Christianity to Alexander Blok. In Blok’s Twelve, Christ walked at the head of armed workmen, tramps, . and prostitutes, leading them, in the blood-red dawn of October, towards a greater future. There was a certain artistic and even historic authenticity in this daring symbol. In it were merged the primitive Christianity and the elemental revolutionary élan of the Russia of the muzhiks who, chanting Prayer Book psalms, burned the mansions of the aristocracy. The Christ who blessed that Russia was also the Christ of primitive Christianity, the hope of the enslaved and the oppressed, St. Matthew’s Son of Man, who would sooner let the camel go through the eye of a needle than the rich man enter into the Kingdom of God. Pasternak’s Christ turns his back on the rough mob he had led in October and parts company with them. He is the pre-revolutionary self-sufficient Russian intellectual, ‘refined’, futile, and full of grudge and resentment at the abomination of a proletarian revolution. been his flight from tyranny, not his challenge to it. To this he has owed his survival, in a generation in which the greatest poets, Mayakovsky and Yessenin, committed suicide, and most of the best writers and artists, Babel, Pilniak, Mandelstam, Kluyev, Voronsky, Meyerhold, and Eisenstein, to mention only these, were deported, imprisoned and driven to death. Stalin did not allow many of Pasternak’s poems to be published; but he spared their author and, by the despot’s benevolent whim, even surrounded him with care, protecting his safety and well-being. The poet did nothing to gain these favours; but Stalin knew that he had little to fear from his poetry. He sensed a threat to himself not in the archaic message of the man who harked back to pre-revolutionary times, but in the work of those writers and artists who, each in his own way, expressed the ethos, the Sturm und Drang, and the non-conformity of the early years of the revolution —there Stalin sensed the genuine challenge to his infallibility. With those writers and their message Pasternak has been in implicit conflict; and it would be unjust to their memory to hail him as the most heroic and authentic spokesman of his generation.

[p030] 28 Moreover, their message, even though it, too, belongs to its time and can hardly meet the needs of our day, has certainly far more relevance to the experience and the aspirations of the new Russia than have the ideas of Doctor Zhivago. When all this has been said, one cannot react otherwise than with indignation and disgust to the suppression of Docfor Zhivago in the Soviet Union, and to the spectacle of Pasternak’s condemnation. There exists no justification and no excuse for the ban on his book and the outcry against it, or for the pressure exercised on Pasternak to make him resign the Nobel award, the threat of his expulsion from the country, and the continuing witch-hunt. The Writers’ Union of Moscow and its official instigators or accomplices have achieved nothing except that they have given proof of their own obtuseness and stup:dity. What are Pasternak’s censors afraid of? His Christian:ty? But the Soviet State Publishers print in millions of copies the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, every page of which breathes a Christianity far more authentic than Pasternak’s. His nostalgia for the ancien régime? But who, apart from a few survivors of the old intelligentsia and bourgeoisie, people of Pasternak’s age, can share that nostalgia in the Soviet Union today? And even if younger people were to experience it vicariously— what possibly could the Soviet Union fear from that? It cannot and it will not go back to the past, anyhow. The work of the revolution can no longer be undone or reversed: the huge, formidable, and ever growing structure of the new Soviet society will hardly stop growing. Can perhaps a poet’s eye, turned inwards and backwards, and wandering over the wastes of his memory, cast an evil spell? Zhivago still represents a powerful force, frequently felt and heard, in Poland, Hungary, Eastern Germany, and elswhere LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1961 in Eastern Europe; but in the Soviet Union he is the survivor of a lost tribe. In the fifth decade of the revolution it is time to view him with detachment and tolerance and to let him mourn his dead. Pasternak’s censors, too, are evidently confusing the calendar of the revolution. They have broken away from the Stalin era, or have been wrenched out of it; but somehow they still imagine themselves to be living in it. They are still superstitiously seized by old and habitual fears and resort to the customary charms and exorcisms. Above all, they distrust their own, modern and educated, society which is growing mightily above their heads as well as Pasternak’s. Time does not stand still, however. Ten years ago l’affaire Pasternak would not have been possible. Pasternak would not have dared to write this novel, to offer it for publication in Russia, and to have it published abroad. If he had done this, Stalin’s frown would have sent him to a concentration camp or to death. Despite all the present witch-hunting in Moscow, however, Pasternak’s personal freedom and well-being have so far remained undisturbed; let us hope that they will remain so to the end. He might have gone abroad and in the West enjoyed fame, wealth, and honour; but he has refused to ‘ choose freedom’ in that way. Perhaps he does indeed hear that ‘silent music of happiness’, of which he says, in the last sentences of Doctor Zhivago, that it spreads over his country, even if he does not quite understand that music. Slowly yet rapidly, painfully yet hopefully, the Soviet Union has moved into a new epoch, in which the mass of its people is seizing anew the sense of socialism. And perhaps in ten years time another affaire Pasternak will also be impossible, because by then the fears and the super- stitions of Stalinism will have long been forgotten. The Weekly Journal of the Socialist Labour League sini The Newsletter Editorial Board: Brian Arundel, Michael Banda, Harry Finch, Gerry Healy, Tom Kemp, Peter Kerrigan, Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, Jim Swan (INHMM! Subscription 5s. for 12 issues post free from 186 Clapham High Street, London, $.W.4

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