Books: The Passion of Yurii Zhivago

(5 of 10)

Few, other than Pasternak's Communist critics, have noted his unfeigned and unwavering sympathies for the educated middle class in which he was reared. In this section, Pasternak takes pains to make his protagonist's loyalties unmistakable. The partisan commander is a cocaine-sniffing hophead whom Dr. Zhivago loathes, as much for his boring platitudes as for his cruelty. By contrast, when a band of teen-age White soldiers storms the Red positions, the doctor admires their gallantry. He feels that he must shoot in self-defense, but he cannot bring himself to aim at the boys who "were probably akin to him in spirit, in education, in moral values." And so, in a perfect illustration of Zhivago's essential refusal to do harm, he aims his fire at a dead tree.

While his family is forced to escape to western Europe, Zhivago escapes from the partisans for one last reunion with Lara. It is a weird, snowbound, dreamlike idyl on the edge of disaster, rapturous with love but also with an almost Chekhovian paralysis of the will. Eventually Lara is swept away to temporary safety by her old traducer, Komarovsky.

During the brief remainder of his life, Zhivago goes to seed.

As an ironic token of the complete reversal of the social hourglass, he lives with the daughter of his former porter. He is mocked and ridiculed. A kind of Suffering Servant, he does odd chores for his neighbors. One morning, in a Moscow trolley, he feels suffocated, tugs vainly at the window for a breath of air and dies short minutes later of a heart attack—buried alive, as the first-page parable foretold, for lack of the vital air of freedom.

Weather of the Heart. An oldtime literary colleague of Pasternak's and a party-liner, who has managed to survive Moscow's murderous political traffic by carefully watching the Kremlin lights, ventured (before the Nobel Prize fracas) to praise Doctor Zhivago. Said Ilya (The Thaw) Ehrenburg: "The description of those days is excellent. Pasternak and I belong to the same generation, so I can pass judgment on this." But the editors of the Moscow magazine Novy Mir, to whom Pasternak submitted the manuscript in 1956, stated the Communist case against the novel. Apart from Pasternak's sympathy for bourgeois characters, they cited 1) his failure to distinguish between the several wings of the revolutionary movement and even between the February (Democratic) and the October (Bolshevik) revolutions; 2) the unheroic desire of his characters to stay alive. From the editors' point of view, both criticisms were just.

All factions, friend and foe, are suffused by Pasternak with a profound pity, and their death is mourned. In one of the more fascinating passages, he introduces a village witch in Siberia who, even in the dawn of scientific socialism, clings to her visions. She prophesies: "Take your red banner. You think it's a flag, isn't that what you think? Well, it isn't a flag. It's the purple kerchief of the death woman."