Word: pasternaks
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...Territory of Conscience. In far-off Peredelkino, in his fir-and birch-engirdled, two-story dacha 15 miles southwest of Moscow, Boris Pasternak was mute but not inglorious. Against the sky he could see silhouetted the blue, oniontop cupolas of the village Orthodox Church, symbol of the Christian faith that enables his hero, Dr. Yurii Zhivago, to endure the torment, humiliations, sins and tragedy of war and revolution. On the walls of his study glow the illustrations that his artist-father drew for Resurrection by the great Tolstoy, whom Boris Pasternak has called "the territory of conscience." On that territory...
...write this book," he said weeks ago, before the Kremlin clamped down. "These 40 years of storm were calling for an incarnation." In his token submission to Nikita Khrushchev and Pravda (TIME, Nov. 10-17), Pasternak recanted not a line of his book, expressed not a moment's regret that it has been published outside Russia. To a German reporter who saw him for a few moments after the Nobel announcement and the resulting political storm, Pasternak said: "I am sorry, I didn't want this to happen, all this noise . . . But I am glad I wrote this...
Disengagement, the ÉIan to Good. For literature, Pasternak's appearance on the world scene may mark the end of an era. For three decades far too many writers have tilted at every political windmill and ambulance-chased every passing cause. This was what Sartre called "engagement." Pasternak calls for disengagement. By that he does not mean detachment from the world, but attachment to human values. It is not the function of the writer, says Pasternak, to serve principalities and powers. Communism or capitalism. The task of men of letters, as he sees it, is to heed "the living...
...mankind, Pasternak is a symbol of the "élan to good" which he believes is the spirit of the coming age, even in Soviet Russia. As Dr. Zhivago puts it, "I believe that man is only drawn to goodness through good." In Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak has fulfilled his personal definition of the highest purpose of art: to create "an image of man [that] is greater than man," thus leading him to nobler realms of being. He also reminds men that Christ and the Christ-in-everyman is the last best hope of earth. In a perplexed, ravaged and despairing...
...Pasternak has called his book's tremendous success the "Zhivago miracle," but the paradox of the Pasternak miracle is equally compelling. He is a stubborn man who is not really a martyr. He is an aggrieved man and yet not an avenger. He is a man without weapons, wielding "the irresistible power of unarmed truth." Most paradoxically of all, out of Communist Russia, a society that officially denies the existence of God, Pasternak has sent a deeply Christian statement of the condition of man, such as most writers of the professedly Christian West are too embarrassed or too unbelieving...