Word: pasternaks
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...critical hobby-horses have been ridden to hell, and the trumpets are put away. Edmund Wilson and the Nobel Prize Committee and the Soviet Writers Union and the American newspaper editorial pages have had their say on Pasternak--and perhaps now a second reading and some thoughts are in order...
...story of the Russian intellectual--the disintegration of the man of ideas. Zhivago, as a student in the University, welcomes the Revolution; as a professional man displaced, repudiates it; as a degenerate in a one-room Moscow flat, is finally destroyed by it. In the process of that destruction, Pasternak tells the story of Russia in the 20th century--of the parasites who feed on emergent ideologies, of men serving and struggling against systems and faiths they cannot grasp, of the miasma of bureaucracy, land reform, nobility, and military that was Russia after October...
...social conscience, that the book itself was devoid of a social meaning. And, in a way, it is legitimate criticism. When a protagonist of great stature fails to come to terms with reality, it is seldom a social novel; but it is often great tragedy, and such is Pasternak's book...
Zhivago's tragedy is somewhat confused by Pasternak's limitations as a novelist. This is his first novel. He is a poet, and during the Stalin era of literary frigidity, he devoted himself to Russian translations of Shakespeare. As a poet, he has been schooled to write from a single point of view, a single consciousness ranging on a variety of subjects or focusing on one. Most poetry is characterized by this synthesis of artist and the created personality. For poetry, it is basic; for the novel, it can be disastrous. The fusion of Zhiva-go and Pasternak admits...
...Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak...