To embody this “living, moving reality” required formal innovation, and therefore Doctor Zhivago had necessarily to be an experimental novel. But it is not experimental in a modernist or formalist way. Modernism is essentially defined by absence (Godot never comes). Pasternak’s vision is defined by real presence, by an intensity of physical sensation rendered in the abundance of natural description or translated into the voices of his many characters. Pasternak delights in the pathetic fallacy: in his world so-called inanimate nature constantly participates in the action. On the other hand, there is no historical or psychological analysis in his narrative, no commentary on the causes of events or the motives of characters. This gives a feeling of chaos, random movement, impulsiveness, chance encounters, sudden disruptions to the action of the novel. The trains and trams keep breaking down. But owing to the breakdowns, surprising new aspects of life appear. The Russia of three revolutions, two world wars, civil war, and political terror is portrayed in living detail, but from unexpected angles, and with no abstract ideological synthesis. Pasternak portrays happening as it happens, which is what Tolstoy also set out to do. But in Doctor Zhivago the seeming chaos of events will suddenly be pierced through by forces of a higher order, coming from a greater depth in time—folkloric, cultural, ultimately religious—which are also really present, which reassert their continuing presence, in the most ordinary everyday life. Now, fifty years after its first publication, when the circumstances of the Cold War are more or less behind us, we may be able to read the novel in a new way, to see more clearly the universality of the image that Pasternak held up against the deadly fiction of his time. As Viktor Frank wrote in his essay “Vodyanoi Znak” (“Watermark: The Poetic Worldview of Pasternak,” 1962): “Pasternak rolled the stone from the tomb.”
2
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890. His father, Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, was a painter and illustrator; his mother, Rozalia Isidorovna Kaufman, was a concert pianist. They belonged to the cultivated Jewish milieu of Odessa, and moved to Moscow only a few months before Boris, the eldest of their four children, was born. Leonid Pasternak had considerable success as an artist, taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and became an outstanding portraitist, which led to a close acquaintance with Leo Tolstoy, whose works he illustrated and of whom he painted several portraits, the last just after the writer’s death in November 1910 at the railway station in Astapovo. The twenty-year-old Boris accompanied his father to Astapovo on that occasion.
The young Pasternak showed considerable talent for drawing and might have become an artist himself, but in the summer of 1903, while the family was staying in the country, he chanced to meet the composer Alexander Scriabin, whom he overheard composing his Third Symphony at the piano in a neighboring house, and decided that his real calling was music. For the next six years, he devoted himself to a serious study of composition. But at a key moment in 1909, after playing some of his compositions for Scriabin, who encouraged him and gave him his blessing, he abandoned music. Meanwhile, he had discovered the poetry of Rilke and had joined a group of young admirers of the Symbolists that called itself Serdarda—“a name,” as he wrote later, “whose meaning no one knew.” And he had begun to write verse himself.
It was a member of Serdarda who persuaded Pasternak to give up music in favor of literature, but it was Scriabin himself who suggested that he switch his field at Moscow University from law to philosophy. He graduated in 1913, after six years of study, including a semester at the University of Marburg under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, but by then he had decided to abandon philosophy. In the summer after his final examinations, he stayed with his parents in the country, and there, as he recalled, “I read Tyutchev and for the first time in my life wrote poetry not as a rare exception, but often and continuously, as one paints or writes music.” His first book, A Twin in the Clouds, was published in December of that year.
Pasternak described these metamorphoses in his two autobiographical essays, Safe Conduct, written between 1927 and 1931, and People and Situations (published in English under the titles I Remember and An Essay in Autobiography), written in 1956. Different as the two books are in style and vision, they both give a good sense of the extraordinary artistic and philosophical ferment in Russia in the years before the First World War. The older generation of Symbolists had begun to publish in the 1890s, the second generation, which included Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, in the early years of the twentieth century. Then came the new anti-Symbolist movements: the Futurists (Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, among many other poets and painters), whose manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, was published in 1912; and the Acmeists (Nikolai Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova), who favored Apollonian clarity over Symbolist vagueness. In his essay “The Morning of Acmeism,” Mandelstam wrote banteringly:
For the Acmeists the conscious sense of the word, the Logos, is just as splendid a form as music is for the Symbolists.
And if, among the Futurists, the word as such is still creeping on all fours, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed a more dignified vertical position and entered upon the stone age of its existence.
Which gives at least a small idea of the lively polemics that went on in those years.
Pasternak first associated with the younger Symbolists around the journal Musaget and its publishing house. To a gathering of this group, in 1913, he read a paper entitled “Symbolism and Immortality.” The text was later lost, but in People and Situations, he summarized its main points:
My paper was based on the idea that our perceptions are subjective, on the fact that the sounds and colors we perceive in nature correspond to something else, namely, to the objective vibrations of sound and light waves. I argued that this subjectivity was not the attribute of an individual human being, but was a generic and suprapersonal quality, that it was the subjectivity of the human world and of all mankind. I suggested in my paper that every person leaves behind him a part of that undying, generic subjectivity which he possessed during his lifetime and with which he participated in the history of mankind’s existence. The main object of my paper was to advance the theory that this utterly subjective and universally human corner or portion of the world was perhaps the eternal sphere of action and the main content of art. That, besides, though the artist was of course mortal, like everyone else, the happiness of existence he experienced was immortal, and that other people centuries after him might experience, through his works, something approaching the personal and innermost form of his original sensations.
These thoughts, or intuitions, were to reach their full realization decades later in Doctor Zhivago.
In January 1914, Pasternak and some of his young friends shifted their allegiance from the Symbolists to the Futurists, forming a new group that called itself Centrifuge. There were other groups as well—the Ego-futurists and the Cubo-futurists, the latter including Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom Pasternak met at that time. These groups were all somewhat fluid and loosely defined, and their members kept forming new alliances and creating new antagonisms.