The Truths of Literature, the Lies of History
On Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the Russian Revolution
When we speak about politics or history, we speak about ideas and ideology and speaking about events like this war or that revolution, we come to believe that the entire thing can be neatly accounted for by these ideas. Pasternak’s Nobel Prize winning novel Doctor Zhivago, though fictional, is a great humbling force and shows us plainly how arrogant this method for understanding human events truly is. The novel is a perfect specimen illustrating the adage that fiction is truer than non-fiction, no where more starkly, than in the recording of the truth of history, not merely in its facts but in its spirit.
Doctor Zhivago takes place during the early years of the Russian Revolution. Although the eponymous protagonist, Yury Zhivago, is the centre around which the story is organized, the story does not follow just one man or just one family or just one “side” of the revolution. In fact, by reading this novel alone, the events of the Russian Revolution are quite challenging, if not impossible to decipher. The reader has no idea about who the main players are in the revolution, why one side despises the other, or what their ideologies or demands are.
This is perhaps one of the most challenging part about reading this book, and in fact, this is not a flaw in the writing, but the very point of it––the essence of of Pasternak’s genius. This is the point of the book: to tell us how pointless the ideological reasons are that supposedly are the reasons for the revolution.
Understanding these ideologies did not equip these people to survive the Russian Revolution any better or worse. In fact, those individuals such as Gordon and Dudorov, who did not understand the ideology well at all and blindly espoused the politics of whoever was in charge, were the ones who survived the best. Part of Yury’s misery was that he understood too too well.
To the ordinary Russian experiencing the revolution from the inside, there is nothing but a change from some semblance of order to utter chaos. From the world of men to the world of beasts. Whatever the purported goals of the revolution might have been, Pasternak shows us what it actually achieves: destruction and tragedy.
“In those days it was true, if ever, that ‘man is a wolf to man’. Traveller turned off the road at the sight of traveller, stranger meeting stranger killed for fear of being killed. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The laws of human civilisation were suspended. The laws which men obeyed were jungle laws; the dreams they dreamed were prehistoric dreams of cave dwellers.”
Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, page 341
A person today can get a very good and clear book on the history of the Russian Revolution. He can learn all the dates of major events and incidents. He can learn about what each faction wanted and how they splintered. He can learn the names of the major players. Distance from these events will afford him a “clarity”, but in every simplification, there is some truth that is cut out. What truth is cut out in this way of studying history? With this little map of the “historical event” in his mind, the common man may proudly say “yes, I know a great deal about the Russian Revolution”. But really, he knows nothing but the most convenient categories that the historians could organise the “event” into. He does not contend with the chaos that breathed into the silhouette of the beast, of which he sees only a shadow.
Pasternak’s novel reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of first person accounts in understanding history. These accounts written in the novel are based on things that actually happened to real people who went through the revolution.
One may read about people being punished for keeping their excess food, but one must read the novels to hear about the old woman found buried in her yard with just her feet sticking out, in the same ditch where she had kept some extra potatoes for the winter, because her townspeople believed her to be greedy.
One must read the literature to hear about the youth who had an arm and a leg amputated and attached to his back with a wooden plank bearing a warning to the other faction, and made to crawl all the way to them to deliver it. When the families were torn apart or abducted, forced to serve this or that faction, engage in battles with no real endpoint or reason, when chaos became the rule of life, there was only one thing left that mattered: medicine, shelter, food and firewood.
Survival.
What ideology or political idea does this serve? All it does is make people desperate for order and in their desperation, makes them loyal to whomever delivers this order, in whatever form it appears.
Not being able to predict and plan for the future is a hallmark of anarchy and is also a significant form of psychological torture. I remember reading about one character afflicted with anxiety about what would happen to his family if they were caught by “enemy” forces. The identity of the enemy faction was purposely obscure, in order to remind us that all factions were functionally the same even if they claimed to be ideologically different.
“His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he already saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faced distorted by pain and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish––to prevent their future sufferings and to end his own––he killed them himself, felling his wife and his three children with that same, razor sharp axe which he had used to carve toys for the two little girls and the boy who had been his favourite.”
Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, pg. 334
For some characters like Yury, family is what keeps him sane and alive. It gives him the strength to keep going despite the hardships. In a world of anarchy, family is the only order left, that and the predictable laws of nature, the changing of its seasons. For other characters like Pamphil from the above passage, family drives him insane. It gives him something whose loss he could not bear. The suffering of his family is what makes the anarchy so unbearable to him. Some men, perhaps, function better when they have nothing to lose; some men function better when they have everything to lose. Only the latter, I believe, can be trusted to do something good with their power because they have people they love who must live in the world they help to create or defend. Without this, there is nothing holding them back from creating hell on earth.
In an ordinary war (if there is such a thing) it is much clearer what the motivations are. One country wants more territory or control over a certain resource. They send thousands of young men to die and through this they gain the power they wanted. The most dangerous wars are ideological because the leaders of such wars are convinced their cause has a religious legitimacy. For this reason, there is no cost too high to pay and there is no endpoint at which they will be satisfied with their victory; the war when it is ideological, is everlasting. Of course, leaders of such wars never shed their own blood, but the blood of other peoples’ sons.
In Doctor Zhivago, many characters proclaim the ends of the revolution with religious zeal. They believe the revolution is a panacea and that all the suffering now is merely a noble sacrifice for the end cause. What is the end cause? They never quite get to that part in their rhetoric. Because it is only rhetoric, but it is powerful enough to get men to behave like demons and think they are heroes.
The revolution is the false idol to whom they offer up the corpses of babies, the tears of widows and the blood of young men who never got to grow up.
Around all this, Pasternak’s beautiful prose wraps around almost sacrilegiously as he describes the breathtaking pastoral beauty of the Taiga, Russia’s forest. How could it bear witness to so much suffering and still deign to be so beautiful? Pasternak’s writing is at once a consolation and reprieve from the darkness, as well as a perverse contrast to the human suffering it enfolds. It seems vulgar that spring can bloom in the same ground watered by the blood of innocents. Nature is the Old Testament God looking unfeelingly upon mankind.
Could we get all this from a history book? No. This is something only someone who lives through, breathing in and endured the events could understand. This is something only someone who cares to read the real stories could appreciate. Someone who knows a little history is often more confident in his knowledge than someone who knows a great deal. More knowledge, true knowledge, means more nuance and this means it is hard to put things into simple words and categories because there is so much that belongs nowhere and everywhere.
We must not put so much stock into ideology in order to understand history. Human beings are not rational or logical creatures. You cannot logic or reason with evil in order to stop it. All you can do is prepare yourself, make yourself stronger so that when the time comes, you can defend your family––the only thing that has a chance to outlast all this.
The most intriguing thing missing from this book was, of course, God. I don’t know if that was deliberate or not, but it revealed something interesting about a modern secular reading of history that often views religion as a superfluous epiphenomenon rather than a fundamental organising force for the psyche of a people. One wonders how Orthodox Christianity taught people to understand their events during the Russian Revolution, how to persevere through its atrocities, and taught them to navigate the subsequent chaos. We know that one hallmark of the Marxist revolution in Russia was its abhorrence of religion...it is one dimension of the story that leaves a hole right in the middle of its heart, like a gunshot wound the story wraps itself around and around, trying to find itself.
"The most intriguing thing missing from this book was, of course, God."
It was written in the Soviet Union and Pasternak tried to have it published there. Mentioning God would have doomed the novel to not being published. The Soviet publishers still refused to publish it.
I have a copy of the book within arms reach as I type this. Maybe I will read it next.