Notes On Boris Pasternak And "Doctor Zhivago"

*** Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak's mistress and his inspiration for the character of Lara, was lodged with Soviet hospitality in the Lubyanka in 1949. At one point, her interrogator flexed what has been called a "surreal sense of humor":

"After months of sleep deprivation, she was promised a meeting with Pasternak. Overcome with joy, she was taken out to another building, and led down into a basement. She was thrust through a door into semidarkness: the door clanged shut behind her. She saw zinc-topped tables, motionless bodies covered by gray tarpaulin sheets, and over everything a sweetish smell. She sank down into a pool of water on the concrete floor, realizing she was in the Lubyanka morgue and terrified that one of the bodies might be Boris's. After a long time, she was removed, and told with an apologetic smile that she had been taken to the wrong room by mistake. As a consequence of this and other traumas, she lost the child she was expecting by Boris."

(D.M. Thomas, "Alexander Solzhenitsyn -- A Century In His Life", 1998)

*** Pasternak declined to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Pravda called "Zhivago" "low-grade reactionary hack-work" and Pasternak himself a "weed" in the garden of socialism. The Soviet Writers' Union instantly voted to expel him, an effective revocation of professional license. Ivinskaya convinced him to write to Khrushchev, begging to be allowed to live in his homeland, because she feared that his age (he was almost seventy years old) and poor health would not survive deportation.

*** Many years before "Zhivago" was written, Stalin personally vetoed his murder, proposed by the moral pygmy, Yezhov. The reason was that he figured that Pasternak might yet be useful to the Party. Pasternak had begun to walk very fine lines through the first half of the century, giving up poetry for many years and living on translations. Edvard Radzinsky ("Stalin",1996) reports that Pasternak, among others (including Anna Akhmatova), wrote to Bukharin seeking intercession in the 1934 arrest and banishment of poet Osip Mandelstam. Bukharin then wrote to Stalin and spilled the beans, himself wondering at the arrest. (This was undoubtedly charged against Bukharin's account four years later.) It's important to understand the subtle psychology and practice of terror here: Stalin's response was, "Who authorized Mandelstam's arrest? Disgraceful." Mandelstam's sentence was immediately reviewed, a case of bureaucracy whip-sawed on the merest hint of command from the top. (The banishment remained in force, however.) Stalin's fine touch for this sort of thing is evident in the fact that he called Pasternak, who -- in Radzinsky's words -- "was taken aback. Petitioning Bukharin was one thing, talking to Stalin quite another." The discussion is excerpted on p. 310. Stalin suggested that Pasternak take up the matter with the Writers' Union, whereupon Pasternak pointed out that the Writers' Union hadn't dealt with this sort of thing since 1927. When he suggested to Stalin that they should meet for a talk about "life and death", Stalin hung up on him.

It was Stalin who took the larger point: in a memo to Molotov, he observed that Pasternak "couldn't manage to defend his friend." The case is regarded as a bellwether: Pasternak had been one of the boldest in literary circles. He'd had the temerity to question the arrest, but not enough to completely engage the fight: speaking circumlocutions to Stalin instead of direct moral attack on the matter at hand. It told Stalin that the intellectuals were not quite completely subdued, but well on the way: he was on the right track. By 1936, the literary journals (all state-commanded, it might have gone without saying) were hinting that Pasternak's days were already numbered. It's a curious fact, however, that as late as 1937, Pasternak wondered aloud whether Stalin knew about what was known as "Night Life": the regular procession of Black Mariahs conveying victims every night to Soviet prisons. Pasternak was not alone in this, of course. It was an enormously widespread self-delusion almost unique to that time and place. "If only Stalin knew..." (The revisionist Roy Medvedev reports this refrain from Pasternak as well: "Let History Judge", p. 524.)

*** Martin Malia asserts that "Doctor Zhivago" inaugurated "the great tradition of samizdat" by publishing the book abroad in 1957. ("The Soviet Tragedy", p. 323.) The first thing of note to my mind is that this only happened after Stalin was four years in his grave. It's said that Khrushchev wept on reading it, something completely unimaginable with Stalin. I'm an amateur: I would not argue with Malia's assertion, which had never occurred to me before, but the predominant connotation of the word (samizdat) in my mind was always something considerably different, having to do with strictly clandestine hand-to-hand transmission of subversive material within the USSR. It's not a show-stopping conceptual extension, however, to qualify the book as a path-breaking ideological indictment (more than a decade ahead of Solzhenitsyn's smuggling-out of "The Gulag Archipelago") beyond the reach of Soviet suppression; a sign-post demonstration of the power of ideas, which was the whole hope and aim of what samizdat became in the popular connotation.

The book was only published in the USSR in 1988: thirty years after it was a smashing sensation all over the rest of the world.


It's generally regarded as a remarkable mystery that Pasternak survived. My broad sense is that he walked the line between moral outrage and supine submission with a very fine survivor's instinct, which worked -- at considerable practical remove -- with the sheer arbitrariness of Stalin's character. The monster is known to have been moved to what appears to be something like "mercy" in all kinds of individual cases, and we'll surely never know every calculation that went into episodes like this, although the prospect that Pasternak's reputation might someday be useful to the regime (see Maxim Gorky, for example) most certainly cannot be dismissed.


I have never read "Doctor Zhivago". This is a terrible lapse, which I think I will remedy as quickly as possible. (I think I'll call Vlad, my local book dealer -- and not to be confused with Ernest Brown, my great parcel-post book-benefactor -- right away.) John Sabotta will likely rend his garments in despair, since he's constantly all over me to read Nabokov and I keep telling him that I don't have time for fiction. In any case, that's why I cannot compare it with the film.

However, the film is one of my all-time favorites. This post goes out to Martin McPhillips. I want to point out that, even with all the "glossing...over with Zhivago’s romantic intrigues", the essence of the thing remains obvious, certainly to me: this is the story of a ruined life -- not by the metaphysical chances of earthquake or storm, but by the deliberate action of human beings who took others' lives for their disposal completely without moral warrant. Zhivago's life was never what it could and should have been, even if he was still smiling on the very day he died. It's the story of murdered values, and a vivid demonstration of the folly of Is/Ought dichotomy ringing through history:

Zhivago didn't have to face everything it meant.

His daughter did, as the hell went on.

(Addendum -- Sabotta remarks by IM: "Having not read the book, I don't endorse this opinion, even though it's from You Know Who.")