Reclaiming Our Brains Without Losing Our Minds by Wiehl Inga;

Author:Wiehl, Inga;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780761862383
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2013-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

13

Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse

In the winter of 2006, following our third and last meeting on Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago (published in English in 1958), I received four e-mails expressing the senders’ delight in the novel, the “spirited” discussion it had engendered, and their regrets at its having come to the end. “I hate to see it end,” wrote one Reader, and another admitted that her brain “would be processing for quite some time the many and varied ideas presented.”

Pasternak considers Dr. Zhivago his “chief and most important” work. To allow publication in England and Italy, he risked the wrath of Soviet officialdom and even exile. We read his touching letter of October 31, 1958, to Mr. Khrushchev pleading to be allowed to stay in Russia and assuring him that he would and could reject the Nobel Prize offered him for the novel. “For me to leave my country would be to die. I, therefore, ask you not to take this extreme measure against me. I can say with my hand on my heart that I have contributed to Soviet literature, and that I can still be of use to it.”

It is unclear whether this appeal or pressure from the West on the Soviets, or perhaps a combination of the two, effected his permission to stay. But remain in Russia he did although his parents and two sisters had departed for Europe.

Soviet critics objected to the spirit of religion pervading the book, the openly critical stance towards Marxism as a science, and the scorn for the empty rhetoric of leaders and politicians. In short, they criticized all that, in Pasternak’s view, constitutes being human rather than animals in a circus, snapped into obedience by the whip of a tamer.

Like John Donne, who insisted that “no man is an island,” Pasternak believed that there is no action not tied to other actions; no life is independent. Keeping that in mind, Readers made a careful study of the intricate interweaving of action and characters in Part I of the novel: Yuri and his uncle, Nikolai, his friend Pasha, and Nika, who hides to avoid the younger Yuri who wants to engage him in play. We got caught up in the lives of Tonia Gromeko, who becomes Yuri’s wife, in Lara most especially, his future lover, and her demon, the lawyer Komarovsky. Their encounters and separations, planned or accidental, prepare us for the many coincidental meetings occurring through the rest of the novel and invite us to look beyond the surface realism of the work. Facts are transcended. A horse or a train takes on meanings beyond its function as transportation.

For example, we discussed Lara’s experience looking at the hobbled horse in the yard, the thief who comes and goes, her sense of colors in the world around her, and we learned from her reactions about a world beyond the obvious, as enigmatic to her as it may be to us. Horses occur again and again in a world that is being destroyed as in an apocalyptic vision.

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