Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Dr. Zhivago: Dixiecrat of the Steppes" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 214-217). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: 1958
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
I have read Dr. Zhivago and I am appalled by it.
Behind all the lyric poetry and delicate rhythms and celestial hymns to nature and tone-poem delineations of striking scenes and vistas lies a sniveling and petulant demand for middleclass security and comfort, plus an outright assertion of political and ideological support for the counterrevolution, for Christianity, for medieval logic and for capitalist individuality of the most Philistine sort.
And this is accompanied, of course, by the corollary leitmotifs of anti-semitism and male chauvinism of a type so outrageous that they are humorous, so backward in their glaring simplicity that they pre-date by far their more sophisticated bourgeois-democratic forms.
From the point of view of technique, the book is even worse.
Boris Pasternak is a poet, dedicated to the instant, the moment of a mood, the flash of an insight, the sudden—and passing—inspiration of a symbol, the intensified and concentrated perception of a concrete idea. He is lost, technically and personally, before the structural demands of a panoramic sweep of space and history wherein human beings are meaningfully and realistically integrated. The novel is not and cannot be his métier; in his hands it becomes an embarrassingly awkward, cumbersome, clumsy piece of literary machinery which grinds and groans its way to final death along with the extinction of its hero, to the merciful relief of the reader.
The characters are wooden, undetermined, impossible to grasp and remember. The women aren’t even characters; they are words, vague shadows. The socialists and revolutionaries are dope fiends or weaklings or crafty opportunists; the NEP men—Stalinist bureaucrat thugs—are the socialists; the criminals are the partisan leaders. Love, honor, goodness, art and beauty reside only in the counterrevolutionary doctor, an admitted weakling, but what can one person do in a world gone mad?
This book is a powerfully strong and lucid philosophical essay in anti-socialism. The story, the people, the backgrounds vanish—the author could not make them live; and indeed, they were conceived only as a device to hang the politics and philosophy on. For this book is a personal statement of belief, and nothing more; to call it a novel degrades the calling and product of novelist. This book is the twin and the opposite of the validly condemned “proletarian novel”; stripped of its ephemeral plot and people, it is a White Paper against socialism, a pamphlet dressed in lyricism, but a pamphlet essentially and purposefully.
What an exposure of Stalinism and its results it is; that is why the Kremlin hates it. But revolutionaries should hate it too, and explain its political stupidity.
Pasternak equates Stalinism with Leninism, with the revolution itself, and he hates it and wishes its destruction. If we could cut through the Cold War, Nobel Prize aspects of the hysteria about the book, and see it coldly for what it is, which nobody has yet done, we will recognize a document that is terrible and ugly and an author who is a man convulsed by searing hatred and bitter, resigned futility, a man writing with emotional wretchedness and misery.
His faint hope of progress, of thaw, expressed surprisingly on the last page, is unreal, with that tacked-on, censor-imposed look; it fails to even dent or reorient his hammering, merciless, stunning theme that socialism, that the revolution, has corrupted and brutalized and tortured and perverted humanity.
No wonder the Nobel Prize. What a gift to the State Department, what an unexpected and unsolicited pot of political gold! Half mad with joy, they went wild and engineered the prize.
The literary critics, though embarrassed with the vulgarity and unabashed political exploitation of the book, pulled out all stops and convinced the public that doesn’t read novels that this was really a great, heroic, historic and thrilling artistic achievement in itself. They even went so far as denying its anti-communist theme, so enraged were they at the crassness of the diplomat-politicians. They said it was “a-communist,” i.e., above and beyond and without relationship to politics and theory. Just a beautiful book about people, they said, knowing that beautiful people would rush to devour this beautiful book and find themselves stuffed with the most beautiful arguments against socialism yet contrived in the 20th century.
And what of the non-Stalinist Left? After slapping the Cold War and the blissful literary endorsements of Secretary of State Dulles (even as did the critics), after slapping Kremlin literary standards and artist-oppressing (even as did the bourgeois critics), they fell all over themselves to show how objective and truly artistic and indulgent toward artists they were—and to a man (read male) decreed that Dr. Zhivago was a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and whosoever denied it was vulgarly mixing up politics and art. They said this was a work about individuals, about emotions, humanity, about life and truth and love and creativity. They said it must be judged by its own standards, that indeed the book was apolitical.
I contest this. Pasternak intentionally produced a political document; Pasternak, in true Stalinist style, sacrificed art in order to create a mechanical tool to espouse his manifesto, and in so doing renounced his integrity and stature as artist. Pasternak, the Kremlin and the State Department all understand each other perfectly; only the Left fails to understand. The standards, the raison d’êêtre, the meaning and be-all and end-all of this book were to express a man’s long suppressed but never killed defiance of the workers state.
Zhivago is a delayed-reaction explosion; an outburst of fantastic energy; a volcanic eruption of the vitriol and flaming hatred so long repressed within this man’s soul. And it is strange this aspect of the work, its truly heroic character, is ignored. For Pasternak sees himself with, and is indeed akin to, the unquenchable counterrevolutionary rebels and oppositionists of all time.
Though his cause is deplorable and his outlook reactionary and historically doomed, his stand has the personal honor and the glamour and the gallantry and the pathetic courage and the romantic, reactionary, barbaric, decadent beauty of the Confederacy and the plantation house