MOST FIRST-TIME NOVELISTS long for the publisher to call, they dream of that
moment when the manuscript is handed over. But in 1956, when the publisher's
representative walked out of Boris Pasternak's garden taking Doctor Zhivago
off to the printers, the author simply said: “You have invited me to my own
execution.”
And it's almost true — he was dead less than four years later. Did he regret
allowing the book's first publication to be outside Russia? Did it
contribute to his early death from heart disease?
It had been a knife-edge decision to allow the manuscript out of the country
but he had little real choice. Pasternak had submitted the book to the
literary magazine Novy Mir and, after months of prevarication, they sent it
back — along with a 10,000-word essay detailing its manifest faults (surely
one of history's longest rejection letters). Pasternak was not surprised, he
knew they would never publish something that failed “to depict the
Revolution as a cream cake”.
But the real tragedy of that moment in the garden is that the “smuggling out”
of the novel turned it into something it was never intended to be. Even
before it was published, it had become a five-star chance for the West to
promote its artistic freedoms while conveniently putting the boot into the
Soviets.
Doctor Zhivago was first published by Feltrinelli (in Italian and Russian) in
Milan in November 1957 and then round the world. Two years later Boris
Leonidovich Pasternak was awarded the Nobel prize — ostensibly for his
entire body of work but really for Zhivago. The Kremlin knew this full well
and leant on him until he refused the prize. After all, Novy Mir had never
censored his poetry (rarely political, never contentious) and indeed were at
that time planning a new collected edition.
Then David Lean got his hands on Zhivago and the fate of the novel was sealed.
It became the great tragedy of the brutal Bolsheviks crushing the good and
pure love of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. And yet it is so much subtler
and more ambivalent than this. So forget the film (and the more recent Keira
Knightley TV version if you were unlucky enough to stumble across that) and
start afresh.
Most importantly, it is not monomaniacally anti-Bolshevik. When Yuri Zhivago
first hears about the Bolshevik “revolution” in October 1917, he is excited,
enthused, delighted: “You take a knife and cut out all the old stinking
sores ... You take the old monster of injustice and you sentence it to death
... That's real genius.” Zhivago is a man who believes in the revolution and
only later is disappointed by how it works out. It is a hugely sympathetic
portrayal of the confusions and contradictions and defeated aspirations of
these years.
This is a novel about how individuals are broken and degraded by politics, by
history, by inevitability. At the heart of this is Lara and Yuri's daughter.
In Lean's film, Tanya is the smiling, balalaika-playing worker at the dam
(played by a toothy and burnished Rita Tushingham). In the novel, she is a
foul-mouthed street orphan, a thief who could not be more different from her
long-dead parents. She is what Russia has sunk to, Pasternak is telling us,
she is all that is left of these two great souls.
But she does at least survive. Her story is almost as miraculous as
Pasternak's own survival through the purges and show trials of the Twenties
and Thirties. Around him, his fellow poets — Mandelstam, Tabidze — were
dying in the camps. Even Pasternak's mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, did a
four-year stretch. Yet Pasternak seems to have sailed through it untouched.
No one knows why, though I like the theory that when Stalin's wife died,
Pasternak refused to sign the fawning, meaningless letter from the Union of
Writers. Instead he wrote a personal letter of condolence, crafted in his
own, genuine words. Was this daring act what earned him favoured status, his
file marked for protection?
He may have been protected but it doesn't mean he ever had much work. Which is
why he turned to translation — the work for which he is now best known in
Russia. He was a natural linguist and it is through Pasternak's translations
that most Russians now read Shakespeare. They have become the standard
versions, faithfully echoing Shakespeare's metrical patterns — iambic
pentameters into Russian iambic pentameters. These were more than hack work.
By the late 1930s and into the war Pasternak had lost his taste for writing
new verse but this monumental task enthused him. Evacuated with the other
writers to Chistopol in Central Asia, he would be found crouched over a bowl
of cabbage soup in the communal canteen, flicking through his English
dictionary.
From here Pasternak moved on to attempt his first (and only) novel. What is
surprising about Doctor Zhivago is not its anti-Soviet sentiments but its
relative lack of them. There is no mention of the purges or the famines
unwittingly and wittingly caused by Bolshevik policies. In many ways it is a
very controlled, and very honest, description of one man's journey through
those years. Yes, during the civil war, Zhivago and his family pass through
a village that has been shelled by the Reds as a punishment. But later, it
becomes equally clear that both sides were equally given to these cruelties.
In fact, Lara lives in a town occupied first by Whites and then Reds and
finds it much more peaceful under the Reds.
In the end, I imagine that what the editors at Novy Mir could not understand
was the humanity of Doctor Zhivago. The novel is punctuated with far-fetched
coincidences, characters reappearing in wholly new guises on the opposite
side of Russia. These might be considered a structural failing but they
principally create a picture of how any one individual might be transformed
into an entirely new role by the chaos of revolution. Pasternak is
constantly saying, It Could Happen to You, It Could Happen To Any Of Us.
This isn't a novel about a man's struggle against the Bolshevik superstate.
This is about two people who want to be left alone, who want to live their
own lives regardless of the Bolshevik apparatus. In a sequence that will
definitely have riled the apparatchiks at Novy Mir, Zhivago exclaims: “It
turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything
except change and turmoil ... Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
Life itself — the gift of life — is such a breathtakingly serious thing! Why
substitute this childish harlequinade of adolescent fantasies, these
schoolboy escapades?”
And this is what drives the novel, the sense of wasted lives, wasted talent,
wasted opportunities. By the end of the story — excised by Lean — Yuri is
wasting away in Stalinist Moscow, trapped in a futile marriage to the
caretaker's daughter, unable to write, uninterested in medicine. And Lara,
his one shining hope, has been taken from him by Komarovsky, the very sort
of tsarist who should have been swept away by the revolution.
This is clearly a novel by a poet, occasionally messy, sometimes clumsy and
yet somehow vastly greater than the sum of its parts. The book ends with a
collection of poems “by” Zhivago and if our adaptation has done one thing
right, it is to reinstate these poems and slot them back into the story,
into Yuri's life. He may be known as “Doctor” Zhivago but in his soul he is
Yuri Zhivago, Poet.
Jonathan Myerson's dramatisation of Doctor Zhivago, produced by Jonquil
Panting, starts on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow at 3pm and runs for six weeks.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Vintage, £7.99
