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COURAGE OF GENIUS. THE PASTERNAK AFFAIR by Robert Conquest. (Collins.)

About a year ago I attended a disarmament rally at the Boston Arena. The first speaker, an eminent chemist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had played his part in the making of bombs, began his speech with the words, ‘Pasternak and Pauling’. Pauling, a Nobel Prize winner like Pasternak, had been campaigning for nuclear ‘sanity’ and had consequently been hounded by twenty-one Congressional committees and denied a passport. Both men, pursuing their personal ideal and rising above narrow considerations of ideology and étatism, had fallen foul of the cold war merchants, and there was the parallel. At the close of the scientist’s speech a number of young patriots ran on to the stage and pelted him at close quarters with rotten eggs. No single political system has a monopoly of this sort of intolerance and bigotry, panic and stupidity are rooted everywhere.

     Mr Conquest’s provocative and stimulating new book leaves no doubt that the Soviet treatment of Pasternak can be neither condoned nor excused. The pro-Communist Halldor Laxness cabled Kruschev: ‘Kindly spare friends of the Soviet Union an incomprehensible and most unworthy spectacle.’ As Mr Conquest says, the Russian claim that the award of the Prize was an ‘interference’ in Soviet internal affairs came strangely from a government which has systematically awarded Lenin and Stalin Prizes to foreign writers conspicuously hostile to their own domestic systems.

     Mr Conquest subtitles his book: ‘The Pasternak Affair: a documentary report on its literary and political significance’. This may be somewhat misleading. What he has done is to illuminate the events, stage by stage, in detail, with a wide range of invaluable documentation and research, weaving into this fabric his own deeply felt case. Behind this case are political, literary and moral assumptions which spring from his own liberal ideals and having little to do with documentation. With many of his general presuppositions about Soviet Russia I am out of sympathy. When, for example, he writes that ‘compared to Tsarist times, the Soviet period has proved something of an ice-age culturally’, I would substitute a more quantitative approach for what seems a purely qualitative one. While I would argue in terms of mass education, cheap books, scientific advances, the multiplication of cinemas and theatres, Mr Conquest (I assume) would reply in terms of Party dictatorship, narrow formulas imposed on writers from above leading to creative sterility, arrests, prison camps and executions. While he dismisses Dr Arnold Kettle’s hostile opinion of Dr Zhivago with the sharp comment that a Moscow writer (Pasternak) should be better qualified to judge Soviet ‘facts’ than an English intellectual, it seems fair to add that there are a number of Moscow writers and a number of English intellectuals, Mr Conquest not excluded.

     Setting Pasternak in his context as a man of the Enlightenment, the author goes on to analyse the literary intentions behind Dr Zhivago, quotes a varied range of opinions on the novel’s literary qualities, examines the motives behind the award of the Nobel Prize and the hysterical Soviet campaign which ensued, adding a postscript on the case of Olga Ivinskaya. Nine appendices, English translations of the original Russian documents, are attached, giving the Soviet case a full airing.

     Whether or not Dr Zhivago is a great novel remains a moot point. Pasternak’s letter (quoted in this book) in which the author explains that he was consciously attacking the nineteenth century concept of causality, ‘the iron chain of causes and effects’, does something to allay, if not to stifle, one’s doubts about the poor characterization and the use of improbable coincidence in the novel. But Pasternak was already a poet universally acclaimed, even in the Soviet Union, and a previous candidate for the Prize, and although I doubt Mr Conquest’s judgement that for the Swedish Academy ‘the political element need have been little more than a feather added to one of the scales’, it would be idle to dispute Pasternak’s claim, as an artist, to the Prize.

     Mr Conquest contends that Dr Zhivago ‘is not, in the ordinary political sense, anti-communist....’ Elsewhere he writes that Pasternak ‘had long since looked at both the claims and ideas of the Party and been completely unimpressed’. If Pasternak, in his own words, wished ‘to represent the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness . . . as if reality itself had freedom and choice . . .’, if he was rebelling against nineteenth century concepts of an iron chain of causality, then here was a radical denial of the basic tenets of Marxism, let alone of communism. And this attitude, as Pasternak said, and as any reader can see, impregnates the whole novel. It is not simply a private view. It is in the last chapter of Dr Zhivago that we read that ‘it has often happened in history that a lofty ideal has degenerated into crude materialism. Thus Greece gave way to Rome, and the Russian Enlightenment became the Russian Revolution’.

     As the editors of Novy Mir pointed out in 1956, great care is lavished on Zhivago’s moods and thoughts, while the rest, the revolutionary masses, exist in the novel only quantitatively, as a ‘herd’. Reflecting on his colleagues who have gone over to the Bolsheviks, the Doctor concludes, ‘yes, my friends, how hopelessly banal are you and the circle you represent and the glitter and art of your own big names and celebrities. The only thing that is alive and bright in you is that you have lived at the same time as land have known me.’ Although Pasternak is too good an artist to make of Zhivago a hero in the conventional, spotless sense, it would be hard to deny that the central figure of the novel, his experiences and reactions, represent Pasternak’s own total judgement on the revolution.

     Mr Conquest is of the opinion that in the novel ‘there is no sort of implication of praise for a counter-revolution. . . .‘ While it is true that Zhivago avoids open counter-revolutionary activity (he is not unmindful of his own safety) his sympathies are transparent. In chapter four of the second part of the novel he gets caught up in a skirmish. ‘The Doctor was lying in the grass, unarmed, watching the fighting. All his sympathies were with those children’ (the Whites) ‘who were meeting death so heroically. He wished them success with all his heart. They sprang from families who were probably akin to him through the same upbringing, the same moral outlook and mentality.’ What could be plainer? The fact that the novel is largely concerned with non-political characters does not render it a-political by any standards, particularly Marxist ones, and the communists have to be, after all, the ultimate judge of what is anti-communist. This said, few will disagree with Mr Nehru (and Mr Conquest) that ‘a noted writer, even if he expresses an opinion opposed to the dominating opinion, according to us should be respected and it should be given free play’. I hope they would apply the same standards to the Pauling Affair.