Read Why Read the Classics? Online
Authors: Italo Calvino
Why Read the Classics? (28 page)
That is how Pasternak’s novel ends: without him being able to detect in this ‘crude matter’ a spark of anything ‘lofty and noble’. The ‘lofty and noble’ elements were entirely concentrated in the late Yuri Zhivago, who in his increasing asceticism manages to reject everything, reaching a crystalline purity of spirit which leads him to live like a beggar, after abandoning medicine and earning his living for a while writing small volumes of philosophical and political reflections which ‘sold out to the last copy’ (!), until finally he dies of a heart attack in the tram.
So Zhivago takes his place in that gallery—so crowded in contemporary Western literature—of heroes of negation, those who refuse to integrate, the
étrangers
, the outsiders.
11
But I would not say that he has a particularly prominent artistic place there: the
étrangers
, though they are hardly ever rounded characters, are always strongly defined in the extreme situation in which they move. By comparison Zhivago remains a shadowy character;
and it is that part 15,
12
the one which deals with his last years, in which we expect an assessment of his life, that strikes us for the disproportion between the importance that the author would like to attribute to Zhivago and his insubstantial presence in the novel.
In short, I have to say that the thing with which I least agree in
Doctor Zhivago
is that it is the story of Doctor Zhivago, in other words that it can form part of that vast sector of contemporary narrative called the intellectual biography. I am not speaking so much about the explicit autobiography, whose importance is far from diminished, but of those professions of faith in narrative form which have at their centre a character who is a spokesman for a particular philosophy or poetics.
Who is this Zhivago? Pasternak is convinced that he is a person of boundless fascination and spiritual authority, but in fact the reasons we like him are all to be found in his status as an average man. It is his discretion and mildness, his always sitting, as it were, on the edge of his chair, the fact that he always lets himself be persuaded by externals, and be overcome by love bit by bit.
13
Instead, the halo of sanctity that Pasternak at a certain point wants him to wear weighs heavily on him; we readers are asked to worship Zhivago, which we cannot do, since we do not share his ideas or choices, and this ends up by undermining even that all too human sympathy which we feel for the character.
The story of another life runs through the novel from beginning to end: that of a woman, who appears to us as a rounded, distinct character (even though she says very little about herself, and her story is narrated more from the outside than from within) in the terrible events we see her live through, in the resolution which she draws from them, in the sweetness that she manages to spread around her. This is Lara, Larisa: she is the great character of the book. We find that by shifting the axis of our reading so that Lara’s story, not Zhivago’s, remains at the novel’s centre, we place
Doctor Zhivago
in the full light of its literary and historical significance, reducing to secondary ramifications its imbalances and digressions.
The life of Lara is in its linearity a perfect story of our times, almost an allegory of Russia (or of the world), of the possibilities which gradually opened up for her (or it), or which were all presented to her (or it). Three men revolve around Larisa. The first is Komarovskij, the unscrupulous racketeer who has made her live from childhood with an awareness of the brutality of life, who represents vulgarity and unscrupulousness, but also a basic, concrete practicality, the unostentatious chivalry of a man who is sure
of himself (he never fails her, not even after Lara tries to kill the impurity of her previous links with him by firing a revolver at him). Komarovskij who personifies everything that is base about the bourgeoisie, but whom the revolution spares, making him—still through dubious means—still a sharer in power. The other two men are Pasha Antipov, the revolutionary, the husband who leaves Lara so as to have no obstacles to his solitary determination to be a moral but ruthless subversive, and Yuri Zhivago, the poet, the lover whom she will never have entirely for herself, because he has surrendered totally to the things and opportunities of life. Both occupy the same level of importance in her life, and the same poetic importance, even though Zhivago is constantly in the spotlight, and Antipov hardly ever. During the civil war in the Urals, Pasternak shows us both men as though they were already destined for defeat: Antipov-Strel’nikov, the Red partisan commandant, terror of the Whites, has not joined the Party and knows that as soon as the fighting is over he will be outlawed and eliminated; and Doctor Zhivago, the reluctant intellectual, who does not want to or is not able to be part of the new ruling class, knows he will not be spared by the relentless revolutionary machine. When Antipov and Zhivago face each other, from the first encounter on the armed train to the last one, when they are both being hunted in the villa at Varykino, the novel reaches its peak of poignancy.
If we retain Lara as the novel’s protagonist, we see that the figure of Zhivago, relegated to the same level as Antipov, is no longer overpowering, he no longer tends to turn the epic account into ‘the story of an intellectual’, and the long narrative about the doctor’s partisan experiences is then confined to a marginal digression which does not now outweigh and crush the linearity of the plot.
Antipov, the enthusiastic and ruthless applier of the revolution’s laws, under which he knows he himself will perish, is an imposing figure of our times, full of echoes of the great Russian tradition, portrayed with clarity and simplicity. Lara, a hard but delightful heroine, is and remains his woman even when she is and remains Zhivago’s woman. In the same way—or rather in an inexplicable and indefinable way — she is and remains Komarovskij’s former woman. It is by him, after all, that she is taught the fundamental lesson: it is because she has learned the rough taste of life from Komarovskij, from the smell of his cigar, from his gross, philanderer’s sensuality, from his arrogance at being simply physically stronger, that Lara knows more than Antipov and Zhivago, the two naïve idealists of violence
and non-violence respectively; and it is for this reason that she is more important than they are, she more than they represents life, and we come to love her more than them, to follow her and seek her out amidst Pasternak’s elusive periods which never reveal her to us in her entirety.
14
I have tried in this way to bring out the emotions, questions, disagreements that the reading of a book like this — or rather the struggle with it—arouses in someone who is concerned with the same set of problems, and who admires the immediacy of its representation of life, without sharing its fundamental thesis: history as transcending humanity. On the contrary I have always sought the exact opposite in literature and in thought: an active involvement of man with history. Not even the operation that was a crucial part of our literary education, of separating the ‘poetic’ elements from the author’s ideological world, works here. This idea of history-nature is that same idea that gives
Doctor Zhivago
the quiet solemnity that fascinates me as well. How can I define my relationship with this book?
An idea which is realised artistically can never be without meaning. But being meaningful does not correspond at all to uttering a truth. It means indicating a crucial point, a problem, a source of alarm. Kafka, thinking he was writing metaphysical allegory, described contemporary man’s alienation in a way that has never been surpassed. But Pasternak, so terribly
realistic?
On closer inspection, this cosmic realism of his consists of one single lyric moment through which he filters the whole of reality. It is the lyric moment of man seeing history—either admiring or execrating it—as a distant sky above his head. That in today’s Soviet Union a great poet should elaborate such a vision of man’s relations with the world—the first vision in many years to have developed autonomously, not in conformity with official ideology—has a deep historical and political significance. It confirms that the ordinary man has had very little sense of having history in his control, of creating socialism, and expressing within it his own liberty, responsibility, creativity, violence, interest or disinterest.
15
Perhaps Pasternak’s importance resides in this warning: history — whether in the capitalist or socialist world — is not yet history enough, it is not yet a conscious construct of human reason, it is still too much a succession of biological phenomena, of brute nature, not a realm of liberties.
In this sense Pasternak’s idea of the world is
true
—true in the sense of
assuming the negative as a universal criterion, just as Poe’s and Dostoevsky’s and Kafka’s ideas were true in this way—and his book has the superior
utility
of great poetry. Will the Soviet world know how to make use of it? Will socialist literature in the world be able to elaborate a response to it? This can be done only by a world which is in a ferment of self-criticism and creativity, and only by a literature which can develop an even stricter adherence to things. From today onwards,
realism
means something deeper. (But has it not always meant that?)
[1958]
*
Page references to
Doctor Zhivago
in this essay are both to the Italian edition (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957) and to the standard English translation,
Doctor Zhivago
, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (London: Collins Harvill, 1988).
1
Even in the nineteenth century, on closer inspection, it was often nostalgia for the past that enlivened the mimesis of the great novels, but it was a nostalgia with a critical, even revolutionary, approach towards the present, as Marx and Lenin clearly showed with, respectively, Balzac and Tolstoy.
2
Someone should study and analyse this surrender of man to nature (which is no longer felt as an
alterity)
, which has been constantly expressed in recent years: from Dylan Thomas’ poetry to the paintings of the ‘aformalists’.
3
There seem to me to be two uses of the word ‘history’ in Pasternak: the one used here means history assimilated into nature, and the other means history as the realm of the individual, founded by Christ. Pasternak’s ‘Christianity’ — particularly as expressed in the aphorisms of uncle Nikolai Nikolaevich and his disciple Misha Gordon—has nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s terrible religiosity, but belongs in the context of a symbolic, aestheticising reading and dynamic interpretation of the Gospels, in which Gide had also indulged (the only difference being that here it rests on a more profound sense of human compassion).
4
Italian translations of the poems ‘The Year 1905’ and ‘Lieutenant Schmidt’, by Angelo Maria Ripellino, are in Boris Pasternak,
Poesie
(Turin: Einaudi, 1957).
5
In fact we never manage to see the communists clearly, face to face. The
cocaine-addicted partisan commander, Liverij, is not a fleshed-out character. Much is said about Antipov the father and Tiverzin, two old workers, now Bolshevik chiefs, but we are never told how they exist, what they think, why they have become bureaucratic ogres after being fine revolutionary workers at the beginning of the book. And Yuri’s brother, Yevgraf Zhivago, who appears to be a communist of some authority, a
deus ex machina
who descends every now and again down from the heaven of his mysterious authority: who is he? what does he do? what does he think? what is his significance? The rich gallery of Pasternak characters also has some empty frames.
6
In these pages on the Second World War there is also the indirect, distant appearance of the only ‘positive communist hero’ of the book: a woman (p.656; 451). And she is (as we learn from another fleeting reference on p.627; 431) the daughter of a Tikhonovite priest. While still a child, in order to eliminate the shame of her father being in prison, she becomes ‘a childishly passionate follower of what seemed to her to be the least dubious elements of communism’. When the war comes, she has herself parachuted beyond the Nazi lines, performs a heroic partisan action and ends up being hanged: ‘they say that the Church counts her among the saints.’ Is Pasternak trying to tell us that Russia’s ancient religiosity lives on in the communists’ spirit of sacrifice? The juxtaposing of the two attitudes is not new; and to those of us who espouse a totally secular communism it has been rather hard to take. But the tone of the story of Christina Orletsova, contained in just a few lines of the novel, links up immediately in our memory with the tone—in fact identical in human attitude, though existing in different faiths and ideals—of the
Lettere dei condannati a morte della Resistenza (Letters of the (Italian and European) Martyrs of the Resistance)
.
7
There is still a final chapter, barely a page long, about our times, with a little optimistic fanfare, but it is stuck on, rather sugary in tone, almost as if it were not by Pasternak at all, or as if the author wanted to show that he had written it with one hand tied behind his back.
8
See my article on Viktor Nekrasov’s
In His Home Town
, in
Notiziario Einaudi
, 5:1-2 (January-February 1956).
9
This anguish at the civil war reminds me of Cesare Pavese’s
Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Crows)
. The second story,
La casa in collina (The House on the Hill
), seemed to me, when it appeared in 1948, to have a tone of resignation; but rereading it today, I think that in it Pavese went further than anyone else down the road of a moral conscience engaging with history, and all this in an area which has nearly always been the preserve of the others, of mystical and transcendental conceptions of the world. In Pavese too we find the same terrified compassion for any blood spilled, even enemy blood, of those who died without knowing why; but just as Pasternak’s pity is the latest
incarnation of a Russian tradition of mystical relations with one’s neighbour, Pavese’s pity is the most recent incarnation of a tradition of stoic humanism, which has influenced so much of Western culture. In Pavese too we find: nature and history, but on opposite sides; nature is the countryside of the first discoveries of childhood, the perfect moment, outside history, the ‘myth’ history is war, which ‘will never end’, which ‘ought to bite deeper into our blood’. Like Zhivago, Pavese’s Conrado is an intellectual who does not want to escape the responsibilities of history: he lives on the hill because it has always been his hill, believing that the war does not concern him. But the war populates that world of nature with the presence of others, of history: evacuees, partisans. Nature too is history and blood, wherever he turns his eyes: his flight is an illusion. He discovers that even his previous life was history, with his own responsibilities and failings: ‘Every man who dies resembles the man that survives and asks him to account for it.’ Man’s active involvement with history stems from the necessity of making sense of the bloody march of man. ‘After shedding his blood we must placate it.’ Man’s real historical and civic commitment is in this ‘placating’, in this ‘accounting for it’. We cannot be outside history, we cannot refuse to do everything in our power to give a reasonable and humane stamp to the world, all the more so, the more the world presents itself to us as senseless and vicious.
10
We really need, from the subject specialists, an analysis of Pasternak’s cultural roots, of the way he develops many of the key discourses relating to Russian culture.
11
The Outsiders
is the title of a book about this type of literary character, written by a young, rather confused Englishman, Colin Wilson, who has risen to undeserved fame in his native land.
12
The exceptions are the chapters evoking Zhivago’s final wanderings through Russia, the horrific march amongst the rats: all the journeys in Pasternak are wonderful. Zhivago’s story is exemplary as an Odyssey of our time, with his uncertain return to Penelope obstructed by rational Cyclops and rather unassuming Circes and Nausicaas.
13
Some of these qualities make this imaginary doctor-author resemble (and many have already noted this) a real doctor-writer from the previous generation, Chekhov; Chekhov the man, with the force of his sense of balance, as we can see from his letters (soon to be published by Einaudi). But in other ways Chekhov is the exact opposite of Zhivago: the plebeian Chekhov, for whom refinement is a wild flower with its natural grace, whereas Zhivago is refined both in terms of his birth and his origins, looking down on ordinary people; the mystical-symbolist Zhivago and the agnostic Chekov, who did pay homage with a couple of short stories to mystic symbolism, but these are such isolated examples in an oeuvre which is the
exact opposite of any mysticism, that they can be considered as a mere tribute to a fashion.
14
In the end they obliterate her from us, dispatching her hurriedly to a Siberian concentration camp; this too is a ‘historical’ death, not a private one like Zhivago’s.
15
Perhaps the period on which Pasternak’s book dwells most is the very one to which this argument applies least. In writing, Pasternak reflected on to the past his consciousness of the present. Probably, in the portrait of the doctor held prisoner by the partisans, who while still regarding himself as their enemy still works with them and ends up fighting alongside them, Pasternak wanted to express the situation in his homeland under Stalin. But these are all conjectures: we would really need to know above all whether Pasternak ended Zhivago’s story deliberately in 1929, or whether, after starting a story that was meant to come down to our own times, he realised at that point that he had already fully expressed everything he wanted to say.