2015-07-21
684
Boris Pasternak has been offered the chance to leave the Soviet Union and has refused it. This is a fine decision, worthy of the man and of the high drama in which he is playing the leading part.
If he was the person his enemies say – a renegade, a “reactionary, hungry for all the delights of the capitalist paradise” – he could wish no better than for an open gate; on what his books would bring him he could live comfortably and securely in any Western country. He does not scorn their [western writers’] good opinion; the Nobel award gave him “a lonely joy”, even though he has been induced now to reject it.
Yet he refuses to go. He is a Russian. As he says in his letter to Mr Khrushchev: “I am linked to Russia by my birth, my life, and my work... To leave my country would be for me the equivalent of death.”
Living still in Russia, he keeps the light of his vision alive there. As he says in his letter, in words proud but not arrogant, “I have done something for Soviet literature, and I can still be useful to it.” Those are not words of grovelling recantation.
It is, of course, characteristic of Communist intolerance that it should regard the award of a Nobel prize as insulting. And the Writers’ Union has acted as if it was no better than a branch of the thought ‑ police.
What has shocked them? Mainly, perhaps, Pasternak’s treatment of the early years of the Revolution. Those have always been held as sacred, selfless, and heroic. Now Pasternak has shown the heroes of the revolutionary days as human beings, less than immaculate. In a harsher time Pasternak might have found himself banished to Siberia.
That he should be offered freedom to go into exile (a chance which millions now behind the Iron Curtain would seize with both hands) is something new. So is the publication by Tass of Pasternak’s letter to Khrushchev. It is always rash, with Communists, to believe that there is a touch of spring in the air.
Yet Pasternak himself has looked beyond the present tyrannies. “I have a feeling,” he wrote in a letter some time ago, “that a completely new era is beginning, with new tasks and new demands on the heart and on human dignity, a silent age which will never be proclaimed and allowed voice but will grow more real every day without our noticing it...
“That is why ‘Dr Zhivago’ is the most important piece of work I have been able to do so far in the whole of my life.”
EXERCISE 19. Act as an interpreter.
