Seer Poets

Boris Pasternak

The portrait of the late poet (for he is more of a poet than a novelist, as has been pointed out) on the cover of the British edition of his novel Dr. Zhivago

seems to be the very image of the tragic hero. Indeed he reminds one of Hamlet as he stood on the ramparts of the castle of Elsinor. Curiously, the very first poem in the collection at the end of that book is entitled "Hamlet" and the significant cry rings out of it:

Abba, Father, if it be possible

Let this cup pass from me.

Here is a sensitive soul thrown into a world where one has to draw one's breath in pain. Even like the Son of Man, the exemplar and prototype, he has to share in the sufferings and errors of an ignorant humanity. He cannot escape and perhaps should not. It will not do like Hamlet again, to say

The time is out of joint. O cursed sprite

That ever I was born to set it right.

No, the son of man and every man has to bear his cross heroically and triumphantly. Life is a calvary and the Kingdom of Heaven can be reached only by traversing Gethsemane. There is no short cut.

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However, let us begin from the beginning. For Pasternak has a well-pronounced view of things and it is characteristic of his consciousness.

The first article of his faith then—it is not merely a faith but a deep and concrete perception—is that the world is one. Creation forms a global unity and there is one pulsation, one throb running through all life. In this regard he is a unanimist of the school of Jules Romains. Life's single pulsation, however, he feels most in the plant world; the global unity there moves in a wonderfully perfect rhythm and harmony. Mankind in its natural, unsophisticated state shares in that rhythm and harmony and forms part of it. That is perhaps the stage of happy innocence of which many of the first great Romantics dreamed, e.g., Rousseau and Wordsworth. Viewed as such, placed as a natural phenomenon in the midst of Nature, in its totality, mankind still appears as a harmonious entity fitting into a harmonious whole. But that is a global bird's-eye view. There is a near view that isolates the human phenomenon; and then a different picture emerges. That is the second article of Pasternak's faith. Life is a rhythmic whole, but it is not static, it is a dynamic movement, it is a movement forward-toward growth and progress. It is not merely the movement of recurrence; life does not consist in pulsation only, a perpetual repetition. As I say, it means growing, advancing, progressing, as well. That is, in other words, the inevitable urge of evolution. Ay, and there's the rub. For it is that which brings in conflict and strife: together with creation comes destruction.

Nature in her sovereign scheme of harmony accepts destraction,

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it is true, and has woven that element too in her rhythmic pattern and it seems quite well and good. She is creating, destroying and re-creating eternally. She denudes herself in winter, puts on a garb of bare, dismal aridity and is again all lush, verdant beauty in spring. Pain and suffering, cruelty and battle are all there. And all indeed is one harmonious whole, a symphony of celestial music.

And yet pain is pain and evil evil. There are tears in mortal things that touch us to the core. In mankind the drive for evolution brings in revolution. Not only strife and suffering but uglier elements take birth; cruelty, inhumanity, yes, and also perversity, falsehood, all moral turpitudes, a general inner deterioration and bankruptcy of values. In the human scheme of things nothing can remain on a lofty status, there comes inevitably a general decline and degradation. As Zhivago says "A thing which has been conceived in a lofty ideal manner becomes coarse and material."

An element of the human tragedy—the very central core perhaps—is the calvary of the individual. Pasternak's third article of faith is human freedom, the freedom of the individual. Indeed if evolution is to mean progress and growth it must base itself upon that one needful thing. And here is the gist of the problem that faces Pasternak (as Zhivago) in his own inner consciousness and in his outer social life. The problem—Man versus Society, the individual and the collective—the private and the public sector in modem jargon—is not of today. It is as old as Sophocles, as old as Valmiki. Antigone upheld the honour of the individual against the law of the State and sacrificed

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herself for that ideal. Sri Rama on the contrary sacrificed his personal individual claims to the demand of his people, the collective godhead.

Pasternak's tragedy runs on the same line. Progress and welfare of the group, of humanity at large is an imperative necessity and the collective personality does move in that direction. But it moves over the sufferings, over the corpses of individuals composing the collectivity. The individuals, in one sense, are indeed the foci, the conscious centres that direct and impel the onward march, but they have something in them which is over and above the dynamism of physical revolution. There is an inner aspiration and preoccupation whose object is other than outer or general progress and welfare. There is a more intimate quest. The conflict is there. The human individual, in one part of his being, is independent and separate from the society in which he lives and in another he is in solidarity with the rest.

The freedom of the individual is a double-edged sword —it is a help to progress, it is also a bar. Individuals, great individuals, are the spearhead of progressive movements. They initiate new and advanced beginnings. But if freedom means whims and caprices, too great a stress on personal likes and dislikes, then that brings about a deviation in the straight path, or rather, obstacles in the forward march. And the advancing time-spirit or world-spirit has to push them and cast away. There is also the other side of the shield. Collectivity, like the individual, may also be a help as well as a bar. It means the enlargement and diffusion of the individual's gain, a sharing in wide com-

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monalty, an element or asset of human progress; it may also hamstring, for it is normally conservative and averse to movement and progress.

Zhivago at almost every step shows how the individual is thwarted in his inner and personal fulfilment—even in those matters that concern his higher and nobler inch-nations and pursuits, not merely his affairs of selfish interest. The demands of the collective urge, the progress that society needs and exacts is often a millstone that slowly grinds the individual down to personal frustration and failure. That is, I suppose, the central lesson of Pasternak's autobiography.

That is why even when Pasternak speaks of social progress, a better humanity, we are not sure. For what matters is the present. A brave new world in the offing, yes. But how to take life in the meanwhile? Evidently, it is the life of the cross, you have to choose that or it is imposed upon you. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you and in spite of what the world and life are, you can create within you, possess in your inner consciousness something of the divine element, the peace that passeth understanding, the purity and freedom and harmony with oneself and with the entire creation, including even one's neighbours.

Inner divinity does not save you from an outer calvary. But you know how to accept it and go through it, not only patiently but gladly, for thereby you take upon yourself the burden of sorrow that is humanity's share in the life here below. I referred at the beginning to the tragedy of a sensitive soul; I may turn the phrase and speak of the

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sensitivity of a tragic soul. There are souls that are tragic in the very grain—it is that which gives an unearthly beauty, nobility—indeed the martyr's aureole. It is not only that our sweetest songs arise out of our saddest thought, but that, as our poet says,

The whole existence awaits its warmth

From just a little suffering.¹

Pasternak's poetry is characterized by this tragic sensitivity, a nostalgia woven into the fabric of the utterance, its rhythm and imagery, its thought and phrasing. "The eternal note of sadness" which Arnold heard and felt in the lines of Sophocles, we hear in the verses of Pasternak as well. Almost echoing the psalmist's cry of Vanity of vanities, Pasternak sings:

But who are we, where do we come from

When of all those years

Nothing but idle is life

And we are nowhere in the world!

Here in this world, upon this earth we move as in a dream—I, you, everything, living or non-living, all together forming together one indivisible flow passing eternally to eternity!

¹ Rendered from the French version:

C'est que toute existence attend

Sa chaleur d'un peu de souffrance.

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But their hearts are beating,

Now he, now she Struggles to awake,

Falls back to sleep.

Eyes closed.

Hills. Clouds.

Rivers. Fords.

Years. Centuries.

A beautiful picture in the Chinese style—a few significant strokes, simple and clear, evoking a whole landscape, brimful of yearning and resignation and tearful quietness in which the whole creation is embalmed.

Pasternak's snowscapes are beautiful, they are particularly expressive of this nostalgia that pervades his whole consciousness like a perfume as it were. Here, for example, is a haunting scene:

The driven snow drew circles and arrows

On the window pane.

The candle on the table burned.

The candle burned.

Or again

The frosty night was like a fairy tale,

Invisible beings kept stepping down

From the snowdrifts into the crowd.

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But the cardinal point is in the final settling of accounts.

In all the world

Are there so many souls?

So many lives?

So many villages and woods?

These three days will pass

But they will push me down into such emptiness

That in the frightening interval

I shall grow up to the Resurrection...

This is one world, one and indivisible, and it moves, whole and entire, through a kind of wintry blizzard, bearing its heavy cross, moves yet to a new life, a miracle that shall happen—for such is the lesson of the life that the lord of life, the Son of Man lived and showed. Even like his master and guide, Pasternak says, to himself, above all

Surely it is my calling

To see that the distances should not lose heart

And that beyond the limits of the town

The earth should not feel lonely.

For the miracle does happen and man is waiting for that in spite of all the tragic interlude:

If the leaves, branches, roots, trunk

Had been granted a manual of freedom,

The laws of nature would have intervened.

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But a miracle is a miracle, a miracle is God.

When we are all confusion,

That instant it finds us out.

Yes, the captive tree rooted to the soil for eternity is as much of a miracle as the free wide-winging bird in the infinitude, even as Death too is a miracle, the passage to Immortality, only its mask perhaps.

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