Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

When reading Doctor Zhivago it is important to remember that it is Russian literature -- and by that I mean it is steeped in the thematic and stylistic conventions most famously formed by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Except it was written in the 1950s instead of the 1860s. That alone makes it interesting, but so is what it seems to be saying about Russia, about its revolution, and about the transcendence of the human soul.

Here’s an early clue, placed in the voice of Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin, the uncle of our titular Doctor Zhivago, an academic philosopher.

“Wait, let me tell you what I think. I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats -- any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death -- then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don’t you see, this is just the point -- what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.”

There’s a lot packed into that paragraph. The two most important pieces for my discussion are “the irresistible power of unarmed truth” and “the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.” Let’s try to deal with that second part first.

The Whole of Life Is Symbolic

Doctor Zhivago is a very symbolic novel -- so symbolic that I’m sure most of those symbols are lost on me because of my neophyte understanding of Russian history and the competing political philosophies that drove it.

Here’s the excerpt where this reality really hit home for me. It describes three sisters, “all confirmed spinsters -- but times have changed and so have the girls.”

“The oldest, Avdotia, is librarian at the public library. Dark, pretty, desperately shy, blushes scarlet at the slightest provocation. She has a terrible time at the library. It’s as quiet as the tomb, and the poor girl has a chronic cold -- gets sneezing fits and looks as if she’d like to drop through the floor. All nerves.

“The next one, Glafira Severinovna, is the family’s blessing. Terrific drive, a wonderful worker, doesn’t mind what she does. Livka, Comrade Forester, is supposed to take after her. One day she’s a seamstress or she’s working in a stocking factory, then before you know where you are she’s turned herself into a hairdresser. You saw the woman at the switch, who shook her fist at us? Bless me, I thought, if it isn’t Glafira gone to work on the railway. But I don’t think it was Glafira, she looked too old.

“And then there’s the youngest, Simushka. She’s their cross, she gives them no end of trouble. She’s an educated girl, well read, used to go in for poetry and philosophy. But since the revolution, what with all the general uplift, speeches, demonstrations, she’s become a bit touched in the head, she’s got religious mania. The sisters lock her up when they go to work, but she gets out of the window and off she goes down the street, collecting crowds, preaching the Second Coming and the end of the world.”

The sisters, each of them, are Mother Russia, and their progression mirrors the changes coming to Zhivago’s homeland during the length of the novel. That much seems obvious to me, but I know I probably missed lots of other symbolism in this highly symbolic work.

But, as Pasternak seems to frequently warn the reader, don’t get too carried away with your search for symbolism. Doctor Zhivago is a symbolic novel, the characters representing political philosophies, but they themselves often speak out against such an interpretation. To wit:

“It’s only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don’t you think you’d have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?”

And:

“I don’t like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one’s specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish.”

It is within this cauldron of symbolism and distraction that Pasternak’s characters and his readers will search, sometimes vainly, for the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

The Irresistible Power of Unarmed Truth

Doctor Zhivago, then, is not just a puzzle when it comes to separating fact from symbol, it is also a puzzle when it comes to determining which symbol -- which philosophy -- emerges transcendent. What is unarmed truth? And from whence does it derive its irresistible power? Well, one of the ways to explore those questions is to realize that Doctor Zhivago can be read as a treatise about the conflicting powers of the individual and the collective.

At first, the symbolism of the collective seems preeminent.

“So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours and not anyone else’s? Well, what are you? There’s the point. Let’s try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity -- in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others -- this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life -- your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you -- the you that entered the future and becomes part of it.”

This is the Doctor himself, in conversation with his mother-in-law, who is ill and has just escaped a narrow brush with death. She asks him to comfort her, to address her fears, and he surprises himself by being able to deliver an impromptu lecture, whole and complete.

And in it, he seems to be saying that our individuality is an illusion. That our meaning, any meaning that is worth anything at least, lives in our contributions to the whole, to the world around us and the way we impact it.

Not too many pages later, Zhivago’s mother-in-law will die, and her passing will prompt this inner dialogue, in which he compares his understanding of death today with such that he had ten years previous, when his own mother had died.

When his mother had died ten years earlier he had been a child. He could still remember how he had cried, grief-stricken and terrified. In those days he had not been primarily concerned with himself. He could hardly even realize that such a being as Yura existed on its own or had any value or interest. What mattered then was everything outside and around him. From every side the external world pressed in on him, dense, indisputable, tangible as a forest. And the reason he had been so shaken by his mother’s death was that, at her side, he had lost himself in the forest, suddenly to find her gone and himself alone in it. The forest was made up of everything in the world -- clouds and shop signs and the golden tops of belfries and the bare-headed riders who went as escort before the holy image of the Mother of God carried in a coach. Shop fronts were in it, and arcades, and the inaccessibly high star-studded sky, and the Lord God and the saints.

Here again, is the idea of the individual, lost in the forest of the collective, but now, clearly, Pasternak will tie that collective forest to God.

This inaccessibly high sky once came all the way down to his nursery, as far as his nurse’s skirt when she was talking to him about God; it was close and within reach like the tops of hazel trees and the gullies when you pulled down their branches and picked the nuts. It was as if it dipped into the gilt nursery wash-basin and, having bathed in fire and gold, re-emerged as the morning service or mass at the tiny church where he went with his nurse. There the heavenly stars became the lights before the icons, and the Lord God was a kindly Father, and everything more or less fell into its right place. But the main thing was the real world of grownups and the city that loomed up all around him like a forest. At that time, with the whole of his half-animal faith, Yura believed in God, who was the keeper of that forest.

God is the keeper of the collective. But now, ten years later, Zhivago is an educated doctor, and while he has lost his belief in God, he adamantly maintains his faith in the forest of the collective, even as the individuality of his understanding, the “equal footing” he feels with the universe, comes poking through.

Now it was quite different. In his twelve years at gymnasium and university, Yura had studied the classics and Scripture, legends and poets, history and natural science, which had become to him the chronicles of his house, his family tree. Now he was afraid of nothing, neither of life nor death; everything in the world, all the things in it were words in his vocabulary. He felt he was on an equal footing with the universe. And he was affected by the services for Anna Ivanovna differently than he had been by the services for his mother. Then he had prayed in confusion, fear, and pain. Now he listened to the services as if they were a message addressed to him and concerning him directly. He listened intently to the words, expecting them, like any other words, to have a clear meaning. There was no religiosity in his reverence for the supreme powers of heaven and earth, which he worshipped as his progenitors.

Zhivago is not the only character who feels this growing tension between the collective and the individual -- although he may be the only one who can reflect on it intellectually. For the other characters in the novel, it is the rush and sweep of the forces of war and revolution, of despotism and anarchy, that reveals this tension without understanding that dwells within them all.

Here, Larisa Feodorovna Guishar, known as Lara, ponders the changes happening around her, and her place in them.

She had noticed a sharp change around her recently. Before, there had been obligations of all kinds, sacred duties -- your duty to your country, to the army, to society. But now that the war was lost (and that as the misfortune at the bottom of all the rest) nothing was sacred any more.

Everything had changed suddenly -- the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute -- life or truth or beauty -- of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good. But in her own case, Lara reminded herself, she had Katenka to fulfill her need for an absolute, her need of a purpose. Now that she no longer had Pasha, Lara would be nothing but a mother, devoting all her strength to her poor orphaned child.

Now, it’s fair to say that I might have been “super-attuned” to this tension between the individual and the collective because I happened to be reading Atlas Shrugged at the same time I was reading Doctor Zhivago (more on Rand’s treatise in a future post), and sometimes the conflicting philosophies underlying the novels just leapt off the page at me.

And through this prism, the collectivist and individualistic aspects of Doctor Zhivago seemed to keep dancing like angry partners before my eyes.

First, the power of the collective:

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka. And this was most vexing of all.

Or:

I don’t know whether the people will rise of themselves and advance spontaneously like a tide, or whether everything will be done in the name of the people. Such a tremendous event requires no dramatic proof of its existence. I’ll be convinced without proof. It’s petty to explore causes of titanic events. They haven’t any. It’s only in a family quarrel that you look for beginnings -- after people have pulled each other’s hair and smashed the dishes they rack their brains trying to figure out who started it. What is truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It confronts us as suddenly as if it had always been there or had dropped out of the blue.

But then, often, frustratingly, the power of the individual:

“It was then that untruth came down on our land of Russia. The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody’s throat. And then there arose the power of the glittering phrase, first the Tsarist, then the revolutionary.”

Or:

“Ah, that’s hard to answer. I’ll try to tell you. But it’s strange that I, an ordinary woman, should explain to you, who are so wise, what is happening to human life in general and to life in Russia and why families get broken up, including yours and mine. Ah, it isn’t a matter of individuals, of being alike or different in temperament, of loving or not loving! All customs and traditions, all our way of life, everything to do with home and order, has crumbled into dust into the general upheaval and reorganization of society. The whole human way of life had been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred, for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself. You and I and like Adam and Eve, the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with -- and now at the end of it we are just as naked and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in the world in all the thousands of years between them and us, and it is in memory of all those vanished marvels that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.”

This last passage, I think, may very well be the moral of Pasternak’s tale -- the place where he comes down clearly on one side or the other. Social upheaval and restructuring, ultimately, is irrelevant to the human soul. Empire, republic, soviet, collective -- do any of these matter as much as the human soul that comprises and transcends them all? The individual’s power may come from the variety of ways it organizes itself and its companions into these structures, but those structures are always and forever temporary. It is only the individual that survives.

A Postscript for Atlas Shrugged

I’m sure I’ll get into this when I compose my post on Atlas Shrugged, but it’ll be important to remember some of what happens in Doctor Zhivago in order to place my comments on Atlas Shrugged into a helpful context.

At one point, Zhivago is pressed into providing medical service to a group of revolutionaries. While among them, he has some illustrative conversations with one of them, Anfim Yefimovitch Samdeviatov. Here, Samdeviatov is talking favorably about his father.

“A good firm, I said. Can you hear? A good firm. They made agricultural machinery. It was a corporation. My father was a stockholder.”

“I thought you said he kept an inn,” [Zhivago said].

“He did. That didn’t mean he couldn’t have stock. Very shrewd investments he made, too. He had money in the ‘Giant.’”

“You sound as if you were proud of it.”

“Of my father being shrewd? Of course I am.”

“But what about your socialism?”

“Good Lord, what has that got to do with it? Why on earth should a man, because he is a Marxist, be a drivelling idiot? Marxism is a positive science, a theory of reality, a philosophy of history.”

“Marxism a science? Well, it’s taking a risk, to say the least, to argue about that with a man one hardly knows. However -- Marxism is too uncertain of its ground to be a science. Sciences are more balanced, more objective. I don’t know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t like people who don’t care about the truth.”

Samdeviatov took the doctor’s words for the fooling of a witty eccentric. He listened with a smile, and did not contradict him.

I’m a little bit on Samdeviatov’s side here -- especially after having read Atlas Shrugged. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Marxism is a science, what seemed ridiculous to me is the way people in Rand’s novel acted like “drivelling idiots,” slaves to the obtuse philosophies that Rand would have them represent. It made Atlas Shrugged far more a fable than a novel.

Later, Zhivago and Samdeviatov have this exchange, in which Samdeviatov admits that he has continued his private law practice during the revolution. Zhivago asks:

“But what kind of business can there be, these days?”

“Anything you please. Old unfinished deals, business operations, breaches of contract. I’m up to my ears in it.”

“But haven’t all such activities been abolished?”

“Of course they have, nominally. But in practice people are asked to do all sorts of things, sometimes mutually exclusive. There’s the nationalization of all enterprises, but the municipal soviet needs fuel, and the Provincial Economic Council wants transportation. And everyone wants to live. This is a transitional period, when there is still a gap between theory and practice. At a time like this you need shrewd, resourceful people like myself. Blessed is the man who doesn’t see too much. Also an occasional punch on the jaw doesn’t come amiss, as my father used to say. Half the province depends on me for its livelihood. I’ll be dropping in at Varykino about timber one of these days. Not just yet, though. You can’t get there except by horse, and my horse is lame. Otherwise you wouldn’t catch me jolting along on this pile of scrap. Look at the way it crawls. Calls itself a train! I might be useful to you in Varykino. I know those Mikulitsyns of yours inside out.”

“Do you know why we are going there, what we want to do?”

“More or less. I have an idea. Man’s eternal longing to go back to the land. The dream of living by the sweat of your brow.”

“What’s wrong with it? You sound disapproving.”

“It’s naive and idyllic, but why not? Good luck to you. Only I don’t believe in it. It’s utopian. Arts and craftsy!”

“How do you think Mikulitsyn will receive us?”

“He won’t let you in, he’ll drive you out with a broomstick, and he’ll be quite right! He’s in a fine pickle as it is. Idle factories, workers gone, no means of livelihood, no food, and then you turn up. If he murders you, I won’t blame him!”

“There you are. You are a Bolshevik, and yet you yourself don’t deny that what’s going on isn’t life -- it’s madness, an absurd nightmare.”

“Of course it is. But it’s historically inevitable. It has to be gone through.”

“Why is it inevitable?”

“Are you a baby, or are you just pretending? Have you dropped from the moon? Gluttons and parasites sat on the backs of the starving workers and drove them to death, and you imagine things could stay like that? Not to mention all the other forms of outrage and tyranny. Don’t you understand the rightness of the people’s anger, of their desire for justice, for truth? Or do you think a radical change was possible through the Duma, by parliamentary methods, and that we can do without dictatorship?”

“We are talking at cross-purposes, and even if we argued for a hundred years we’d never see eye to eye. I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.”

“Are you a baby, or are you just pretending?” is now one of my favorite lines in fiction. In this exchange, it is Samdeviatov, not Zhivago, who has aligned his politics with the realities of human nature -- something Rand seems singularly incapable of doing. In this regard, Atlas Shrugged is idealistic, Doctor Zhivago more practical.

My upcoming post on Atlas Shrugged should be quite a doozy.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.