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TUNA PRAY MT

PASTERNAK “UNMITIGATED SNOB’

Why anti-Soviet propagandists
have seized on Doctor Zhivago

= FACT generally over-
looked in the controversy
provoked by the selection of
Soviet writer Boris Pasternak
is that Nobel awards popularly
are associated with the world
peace, even though the asso-
ciation has always been more
formal than real.

If, however; in naming Pas-
intention of the
committee had

ternak, the
Nobel : ‘prize
been to intensify cold war
propaganda it could not have
made a better selection.

Since they were first award-
ed in 1901, the Nobel prizes,

> immense for-

derived
tune amassed from armaments
by Alfred Nobel,
chemist who in-

manufact
the Swedis!
vented dynamite, have rarely

gone to those whose political

opposed to the
of -these
rare exceptions was the Ice-
landic writer Haildor Kiljan
Laxness, who was awarded the
Nobel prize for literature in
1955. But Laxness was a re-
luctant tardy and
grudging admission of literary
achievement could no
nied because of
t

I
ef

views were
capitalist system. One

choice, a

longer be de
te

his known

Agains ground, the
motive for awarding a Nobel
prize for literature to Boris
Pasternak is more than sus-
pect. Shrewdly, the commit-
tee made the award to Paster-
nak for his poetry but in the
certain knowledge that
whether Pasternak accepted
or refused, the award would
become a million-dollar pro-
motional campaign for Doctor
Zhivago, the novel in which
Pasternak utterly rejects the
socialist concepts of his own

society.

With one accord, anti-Soviet
editors and reviewers in West-
ern countries seized on Doc-
tor Zhivage as a means of

slanders and

They were

ed with its

literary merit than the Nobel
prize committee itself. What
interested them was its propa-

ganda value

In recent years, books by
embittered Russian exiles,
shameless renegades and de-
serters seeking to exploit their
renegacy, have had a failing

nce. Soviet achievements,
particularly in the arts and
have exposed such
at they are

sclrences,

books for w

But in Pasternak the anti-

Soviet propagandists have a

writer whose novel rejects the
socialist society- in which he
lives — and lives very well.
With scant regard for truth,
distorting his self - imposed
withdrawal into seclusion as
“persecution,” his intellectual
snobbery as a defense of his
“integrity as an individual,”
they are trying to present him
as a heroic figure rather than
the ivory towerist he is, cling-
ing to the ruins of the past.

So the New York Times de-
votes the front. page of its
book review section to Doctor
Zhivago,. describing it as a
“great novel” and its author
as “the genuine voice of this
other Russia.” And Life maga-
zine runs a spread on Paster-
nak under the heading: “A
Brave, Defiant Russian
Writer.”

t a Xt

What kind of work is this
200,000 - word novel, Doctor
Zhivago, which was rejected
for publication in the Soviet
Union itself as a
pasquinade”’ (lampoon) of
Soviet life but which now
shares the bestseller lists in
the United States with that

latest among novels having
sexual perversion as_ their

theme, Lolita?
Reviewing the book in World
News, Ivor Monagu writes:
“All reviewers have noticed
that the principal characters
are always

coincidentally

Viadimir Ashkenazy (above),
gifted young Soviet pianist now
on his first® tour of North
America, will be heard in a
recital to be given ‘in Van-
couver’s Georgia Auditorium,
December 3, 8:30. p.m. Ash.
kenazy won first prize at the
1956 Brussels International
Contest.

“political.

each other. This is
not, as it might be with an-

meeting

other author, failure in con-
structional invention. It is ob-
viously quite deliberate.

“But the result is, we real-
ize that although the canvas
embraces spaces of thousands
of miles, time in decades,
three revolutions and two
world wars, really all we are
doing is to witness the gyra-
tions of a small batch of peo-
ple arbitrarily selected to il-
lustrate an argument,

“Pasternak’s personages are
not living creations at all, they
never develop according to the
laws of inward being. They
are, a fact often concealed by
the brilliance of the surface
descriptions, crudely cut out
puppets who behave only to
suit Pasternak =

review,
point

Elsewhere in his
Montagu illustrates a

which is itself expressive of

Pasternak’s life and work —
the obscurantist intricacy of
his poetry despite his poetic
talents (he has been’ likened
to T. S. Eliot), his remoteness
from reality and his inability
to grasp the significance of the
great changes that have swept
the Soviet Union in the past
40 years, changes from which
he has deliberately estranged
himself.

Montagu observes that Pas-
ternak “is that rare bird in
Russian literature, an unmiti-
gated snob. The bearers of
Pasternak’s creed for human
salvation are invariably gentry,
his groundlings — like Shake-
speare’s — are all clowns or
rogues, but whereas Shake-
speare’s are painted with hu-
mor and humanity, Paster-
nak’s alas, almost to a man,
are shown not only with con-
tempt but malice.” -

Pasternak’s the is is that the
science of Marxism leads men
to ignore the truth, that the
violence and destruction en-
gendered by revolution are fu-
tile because they, bring out the
evil in man and that supreme
goodness can come only out
of good. And for him, placing
the individual above society,
the supreme goodness lies in
the virtues expounded by
Christ, enshrined in the in-
dividual conscience.

The symbolism through which
Pasternak invests his shoddy
characters with false virtue,
all in the name of the free-
dom of the individual, has
nothing in common with the
concepts and aspirations of the

- talist

= ag oh of
Living costs in this country rose to a record new high fi

126 in September.

socialist society in which he
lives. It has however, much

-in common with the concepts

of the ruling class in the capi-
world, for whom the
freedom of- the individual has
ever been the freedom to ex-
ploit, to rob, pillage and cheat.
Pasternak’s characters; like
himself, while they may linger
in the present, belong to the
past of that growing part of
the world that has abolished
capitalism.
xt 503 it

On November 1, the 68-year-
old Pasternak sent a personal
appeal to Premier Nikita
Krushchev after hearing the
government’s announcement
that it would not obstruct his
leaving the Soviet Union.

An English edition of poems
by Canadian poet J. S. Wallace
(above) has just been pub-
lished in the Soviet Union in
10,000 copies under the title
The Golden Legend. It will
be followed by a Russian edi-
tion translated by famed Sov-
iet poet Samuel Marshak.

November 14, 1958 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—

agency released a St

“This is impossible fot ie
he. wrote. “I am conne@
with Russia by birth, life *
work. :

“T do not conceive mY ule
separated from her and a ee
side of her. Whatever MY fh
take and delusions, 1 oA
never imagine that 1 woe
find myself in the centre a8
such a political campale?
has been aroused aroune=
name in the West.

“Realizing this, I informes
the Swedish Academy of e
voluntary rejection of 7
Nobel prize.

d
“To leave my mother
would be equal to deat est
me and I therefore ae
that this extreme ing e
should not be taken wit
gard to me. “4
it, 1 Be
jet ?
viet ie

“Tf it comes to
done something for 50
erature and may still b©
to, serve it.”

95
The same day, Taso
reiterating the goverh™ et
position that it would ne
any obstacles in Paste,
way if he wished to leave pe!
country to accept his

prize. jshe
“In case B. Pasternak vaio”
to leave the Soviet 20"

whose social system 3D “jis
ple he has slandered ng
anti-Soviet work Doctor egicll!
ago, for good,

with an opportunity 1 eo

‘ 0
the Soviet Union and a J
perience all the ‘plessh ;

the capitalist paradise: pt
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