Pasternak refuses to accept any claim for the primacy of ideological systems. Given the atmosphere in which Pasternak must live and work, this kind of a return to the Tolstoyan novel comes to seem a profoundly liberating act.

His aim is not to mimic its external amplitude, as do most Soviet writers, but to recapture its spirit of freedom and then bring this spirit to bear upon contemporary Russian life. With apparent awareness of the symbolic meaning of his choice, he has turned back to the old-fashioned leisurely Tolstoyan novel. As a result, their work has occasionally thinned out into parables concerning the nature and possibility of freedom.īut where certain Western novelists have wrenched their narrative structures in order to reach some 'essence' of modern terror, Pasternak has adopted a quite different strategy. Sacrificing part of the traditional richness of the European novel, they have kept searching for new, synoptic structures that would permit them to dramatize the modern split between historical event and personal existence. Some of the most serious Western writers hive turned impatiently from the task of representing familiar experience and have tried, instead, to make the novel carry an unprecedented amount of speculative and philosophical weight. The European novel has traditionally depended on some implicit norm of 'the human.' In our time, however, this norm has become so imperiled that the novel has had to assume the burdens of prophecy and jeremiad, raising an apocalyptic voice against the false apocalypse of total politics. Quietly and resolutely Pasternak speaks for the sanctity of human life, turning to those 'eternal questions' which made the 19 th Century Russian novel so magnificent and besides which the formulas of Russia's current masters seem so trivial. On a level far deeper than politics and with a strength and purity that must remove all doubts, it persuades us that the yearning for freedom remains indestructible. Doctor Zhivago opens in the first years of the century, spans the revolution, civil war and terror of the thirties, and ends with an epilogue in the mid-1940s.

The poems of doctor zhivago