The Dispossessed: Pasternak Weeps For His Wolves

All we have is dispossession. The ability to cast off, to break away, to rupture, this is our true property, the only possession that is entirely our own. It is the expression of our perfect longing for that which lies beyond desire, freedom reflected in an empty mirror, the purest part of ourselves. That alone which is not fated to wither and decay, a defense against the sentimentality of dependance and our addiction to the vulnerability of love. We exist in solitude and sorrow, in those places we cannot touch or heal because they are unfathomable, invisible and cold to the eyes and hearts of others. It is the movement toward isolation, the only right worth having, that every artist pursues in building a community around his art.
The fine new translation of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 epic novel Doctor Zhivago by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by Pantheon Books, continues the high standard of work readers have come to expect from the married translation team. This is the first English translation of the work since the original 1958 version by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, and promises to be the standard translation for generations to come. Since the book was first smuggled out of the Soviet Union and released by an Italian publisher in simultaneous Russian and Italian editions, a great deal of ambivalent political and cultural detritus has accrued around the work: the CIA’s alleged role in procuring Pasternak the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, his refusal to accept the award at the behest of Soviet authorities, the novel’s suppression in the USSR until Glasnost, David Lean’s highly Anglified 1965 film adaptation, and the book’s overshadowing of Pasternak’s other, more aesthetically significant work. Lost in this sociopolitical furor is the work itself, an earnest reckoning of the personal costs of the Bolshevik Revolution, an elegy to what was lost in the pursuit of greater social and economic equality.
Begun before the revolution, the novel bears the stylistic and thematic imprints of the Silver Age of Russian literature, of which the Jewish Pasternak was a leading figure: concrete metaphysics, vaguely Christian mystical yearnings, the sacrifice of art and love to economic and political utility, the “real” spiritual world underlying the false world of appearances, a belief in the efficacy of the Word made flesh, a barely repressed sense of an approaching redemptive apocalypse, Liberal politics (i.e. reactionary by Soviet standards, “White” in Western terms, actually apolitical), and a vision of the poet as both prophet and healer. The novel, like much of Pasternak’s work, is a restorative gesture, balm for a fated generation, curative for the griefs of an age that found its purpose in suffering and survival. Purposely conservative in style, the work looks back to the revolution that set all of this in motion in a prophetic effort to give meaning to the uncertainty of a Cold War world that seemed on the brink of complete annihilation. Pasternak’s novel is an elegy to the Russian spirit, a song of praise to the unfortunate heroism of a tragic age, but perhaps most of all it is a lament  for a lost epoch, part of what he called (in a letter to his muse and fellow poet Marina Tsvetaeva) his “continuing efforts aimed at restoring to history a generation that seems to have dropped out of it, the generation to which you and I belong.” This effort to rehabilitate the Silver Age, at a time when most of its greatest artists were banned or forgotten in the Soviet Union, did not yield the immediate results Pasternak might have hoped for, but it pointed the way.
Protagonist Yuri Zhivago, doctor-poet (whose real vocation is sorrow) and authorial stand-in, captures the enthusiasm and ultimate disillusionment that so many artists and intellectuals felt toward the revolution. Pasternak-Zhivago cannot act because he belongs to everyone but himself, and yet he is able to recognize the concrete decisions that so many around him do make, the results of which are often so depressing as to become almost unbearable: Lara’s selflessness and total bereavement, Antipov-Strelnikov’s executioner-like Bolshevism (whose righteous cruelty masks a moral emptiness that turns him into both an Angel of Death and, by novel’s end, an existential antihero), Komarovsky’s cynical but not inhumane power brokering, and Liberius’ pompously heroic Bolshevik zealotry. Zhivago grieves for the wolves lurking beyond the light, knowing he is their intended prey, as Pasternak finds compassion for the agents of destruction on both sides of the political spectrum because he sees that they exist in a world beyond their understanding and reckoning.
Lara’s love is the only thing that gives any meaningful shape to Zhivago’s reality, and only by abandoning her does he finally ascend to the world and humanity, whose sole domain is love. Pasternak was never able to leave his wife for his mistress Olga Ivinskaya, and his letters to Tsvetaeva show a similar tension between his spiritual love for her and the earthly love he felt for his wife and family. Zhivago is also torn between his devotion to the calling of poetry and his doubts about its efficacy, purpose, and even its legitimacy in such a momentous and chaotic time. The Tsvetaeva letters refer constantly to this ethical and artistic confusion, telling her at one point that he was completely alienated from his work between 1918-1926, the years between the publication of his major works of the period and the time when most of the novel’s action takes place.
By the end of his life, Pasternak no longer possessed the ability to dispossess. Incapable and unwilling to leave his wife for his lover and his nation for a life abroad with his family and artistic adulation, he floated like Zhivago through the final pages of the novel, bereft of recognition and desire. The sense of desolation and nobility passing without appreciation or love is the novel’s most uncanny prophecy, looking back in time to discover what the future would bring to the artists of Russia’s Silver Age, including their ultimate resurrection. Pasternak mourned for those that would take his life and bent his artistic will to accommodate his work to the tyrants of art and censorship because he recognized that they were all part of the same life, the same struggle. He sacrificed love and fame abroad in the name of national unity, much as he subordinated his own similar needs to Tsevataeva’s desire for the recognition and time of their mutual acquaintance Rainer Maria Rilke (whom Pasternak had introduced). His last great novel is both a chronicle and vindication of this loss, an embrace of the human as the ultimate dispossession of ideology and state. And while the novel charts Pasternak’s own ideological growth from reform to disillusionment, what he ultimately could not dispossess (outsider that he was) were the Russian people, their language, and the collective destiny of their land. The ability to dispossess is what makes a man, but his humanity lies in what he cannot abandon. Pasternak-Zhivago’s ambivalence stems from his recognition that the infinite complexities of love lie in its utter simplicity, and the sorrow of this knowledge prolongs us.

Oleg Ivanov writes with words, which he then gives away. Take these words, they are yours.