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5. Doctor Zhivago and the Tradition of National Epic

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5. Doctor Zhivago and the Tradition of National Epic 5. DocTor zhivago and the tradition oF nationaL epic In 1927 Boris Pasternak wrote, “I consider that the epic is what our time inspires, and accordingly in the book Nineteen Five, I move across from lyrical thinking to epic, though this is very difficult. Subsequently I mean to work at prose.”1 In the two decades since the sensational publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West, readers and critics have been most uncertain about how Pasternak’s masterpiece is to be read as a work of prose: how much did he finally abandon “lyrical thinking”? Clearly the work is heir to the nineteenth-century Russian novel, in particular to the religious and philosophical preoccupations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The ineffectual Yuri Zhivago perpetuates the type of superfluous man so familiar from Eugene Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, Rudin, and Oblomov. But the language of Doctor Zhivago, its diction and imagery, clearly come from the pen of a poet, a man who had heretofore published mostly verse. Perhaps, as one critic suggests, we have a “poem in prose,”2 a phenomenon familiar enough in Russia, where novels have a long tradition of trying to become something else. Pushkin wrote Eugene Onegin in iambic tetrameter and subtitled it a “novel in verse”; Gogol wrote Dead Souls in prose and called it a poem. Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time is actually a cycle of five stories with a common hero, while Turgenev distinguished his short novels from his long short stories only on the basis of theme.3 And in telling the great tale of the Russian nation, Tolstoy’s major rivalry is often not with the novelists at all, but with Homer. The faithless Helene Kuragin is not just an emigree from a French novel, but clearly and distinctly the avatar of her namesake, Helen of Troy.4 1 Boris Pasternak, Sochinenija (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1961), III, 215-16; the translation is our own. 2 Alexander Gerschenkron, “Notes on Doctor Zhivago,” Modern Philology 58 (1961), 196. 3 Turgenev originally called only Virgin Soil (1876) a novel. In his letters he refers to the six works that he ultimately categorized as novels (Rudin, On the Eve, A Nest of Gentlefolk, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, Virgin Soil) as “long tales.” 4 One recalls Tolstoy’s remark to Maxim Gorky that “without false modesty, War 176 5 . Doctor Zhivago and the Tradition of National Epic 177 Tolstoy is very much on Pasternak’s mind in Doctor Zhivago, especially, as Poggioli notes, in the book’s epilogue.5 It has been charged that the novel lacks Tolstoy’s “epic sweep”;6 yet the book covers more years than War and Peace, a larger and incomparably more horrible war, and a more significant turning point in the life of the nation. Already in 1927, as we have seen, prose and epic seemed to be a common destination for Pasternak. What then of the possibility that he means Doctor Zhivago to be read not just with War and Peace but, like Tolstoy’s own heroic canvas, beside the epics of other nations as well? Writers of epic, we recall, have clear and efficient ways of attaching their works to the tradition as it stretches forward from Homer. Virgil’s Aeneid, as every schoolboy once knew, begins with a proper obeisance to both Homeric epics: arma virumque cano: “Arms (Iliad) and the man (Odyssey) I sing.” So it is that from the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy comes Zhivago’s sense at the crisis of his middle years of standing in “the dark forest of his life” (p. 444).7 Much earlier in Moscow, during his nearly fatal bout with typhus, Yuri had revealed his ambition to depict in poetry the three days of Christ in Hell. His unconsciousness had allowed him to participate in that passage through death, even as Dante had envisioned himself doing in the Inferno. Pasternak’s allusion is not just symbolist posturing, for it reinforces our sense of the scope of the symbolic reference: Zhivago’s spiritual pilgrimage, his own imitation of Christ as it develops throughout the whole of the work, reflects as broadly on all mankind as and Peace is like the Iliad.” Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, trans. Katherine Mansfield, S.S. Kotelianky and Leonard Wolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1948), p. 57. For a brief discussion of Tolstoy’s relationship to Homer, see Chauncey E. Finch, “Tolstoy as a Student of the Classics,” The Classical Journal, 47 (1952): 205-10; R. F. Christian, Tolstoy’s War and Peace: A Study (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962); and George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (London: Faber and Faber, 1960). 5 Renato Poggioli, The Poets of Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 332. Poggioli extended his discussion of the novel in “Boris Pasternak,” Partisan Review 25 (1958): 541-54. 6 Vladimir Markov, “Notes on Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago,” Russian Review 18 (1959): 18. 7 Translations and page references to Doctor Zhivago are from the Pantheon edition (New York, 1958), prose translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, poems by Bernard Guerney. 178 5 . Doctor Zhivago and the Tradition of National Epic Dante’s had. Christian typologies will become inescapable by the end of the work, when Yuri and Lara come to figure Adam and Eve in their troubled idyll in Varykino, as well as Christ and Magdalene in the concluding cycle of Yuri’s poems.8 But early in the story Pasternak, by evoking the model of the Divine Comedy, gives the reader terms with which to interpret the level of spiritual allegory in the work. A yet older legacy from the tradition of epic is present in the revenge theme through which such sagas are regularly resolved. Achilles’ companion Patroclus, a gentle soul, after his one day of glory on the battlefield, dies at the hands of Hector in what may be for the reader the single most painful scene in the epic. What follows is Achilles’ vengeance. Virgil heightens the pathos of this theme by making the victim a mere boy, Pallas, who likewise has his single day of battle and dies. For this his murderer, Turnus, will be killed by Aeneas when he might better have been spared. From Pallas we find the boy-warrior Petya Rostov in War and Peace, whose relationship with Pierre Bezukhov is very much like that of Pallas and Aeneas. Again the boy dies pathetically in his first taste of battle. Finally, Pasternak creates his own version of this figure as Zhivago’s and Lara’s lost daughter tells the concluding tale of savagery in the book, the strangling of a crippled boy, again called Petya, the last and in some ways the most pathetic victim of the tale. This is a curious moment in the work, when the writer has almost exhausted his tale, and we are at the furthest margins of Zhivago’s biography, in a backwater of history. But suddenly tradition shows through, so that Doctor Zhivago ends its action precisely as does the Aeneid and no less disconcertingly, with the revenge for the boy and a particularly grisly murder. Where Aeneas had slaughtered the unarmed Turnus, Petya’s murderer is lashed to the rails and run over by a train. Thereby the deepening chaos of history comes to stand in piquant counterpoint to the constancy and continuity of the literary tradition. In epic, more than in any other genre, the chains of transmission are strong and unbroken. Not a few of them lead to Doctor Zhivago.9 8 Typological interpretation is demonstrated later on by Sima Tuntseva in explaining the correspondence of the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea to the Virgin Birth (p. 412). 9 For comparable themes recurrent in the epic tradition, see for example Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven and London: Yale 5 . Doctor Zhivago and the Tradition of National Epic 179 The single book of which we are most often reminded in the narrative and especially in the cycle of poems that ends the work is, of course, the Bible, in particular Genesis and the Gospels. Pasternak inherits from Dante and other Christian poets the double time sense, the steady cross- referencing of the current moment to the life of Christ. The same device had been used in Russia for political commentary by Mikhail Bulgakov in his brilliant satirical novel, The Master and Margarita (1940), which periodically shifts the action from Russia to Jerusalem under Roman hegemony. The interweaving of the main plot line with the story of Christ’s persecution by Pontius Pilate suggests an analogy to Stalinist destruction of individual dignity which could never be openly articulated. Pasternak, no less concerned with making a response to the political order, similarly evokes the age of Christ with a strong reminder that it is equally the age of Caesar. Indeed the first political pronouncement in the book, from Yuri’s adored uncle, Nikolai Nikolaievich, centers on Rome: “There was no history in [the spiritual] sense among the ancients. They had blood and beastliness and cruelty and pockmarked Caligulas who do not suspect how untalented every enslaver is. They had the boastful dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and man could breathe freely. It was not until after Him that men began to live toward the future” (p. 10). An informed reader, as Vladimir Markov has observed,10 would not miss the image of Stalin, nowhere mentioned in the work, lurking behind the pockmarked tyrant Caligula.
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