The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 223

the cruel, indulgent ramblings of an Underground Man? Or worse? To be sure, dialectical materialism and “reality in its revolutionary development” were dry slogans when hacks and toadies applied them to art, but they were more than political opportunism. They implied that human beings could improve themselves by taking the high road. No one at the Writers’ Congress doubted the enormous benefits of the Thaw for “freedom from”: from arbitrary violence against writers, from a corrupt bureaucracy, from a moronic social command. But about “freedom to,” there was no consensus. From inside the profession, these troubled debates concerned not only “Stalinism versus freedom” (that simplistic and persistent binary) but also “Marxist-Leninist humanism” versus triviality, self-indulgence, and despair.

The virulent campaign directed against Boris Pasternak over the Nobel Prize in Literatureis oneindex ofthe tension and confusion.When Pasternakreceived the prize in 1958 for his novel Doctor Zhivago (an Italian edition had appeared the previous year, followed soon by the English), he was vilified in the press and at official meetings nationwide as a traitor, philistine, and “decadent formalist” – even though very few Soviets had read the novel, which was still unpublished in Russian. The Bolshevik Revolution is portrayed in that novel for what it was, a political coup rather than a mass uprising, and Strelnikov (the husband of Zhivago’s beloved, Lara) destroys peasant villages out of mili-tarynecessity.But arguably more serious than these political indiscretionsis the novel’s literary texture, its unapologetic alliance of poetry, medical healing, and erotic love. Russia’s suffering becomes background to a personal love story – actually, several love stories – whose resolution always seemed more pressing than any social or moral task. The ease with which this complex philosophical novel was reduced to a sultry, silly, but tuneful and picturesque Hollywood box-office hit (David Lean’s 1965 Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie) is confirmation of its “Western”-friendly plot, if judged by the perspective of party-minded Russian literature at mid-century. Even today, Russians despise the American film as unworthy of their great novelist-poet. In 2006, a Russian television serial based on the novel was produced that polemically targeted that Hollywood bowdlerization.

Pasternak was compelled to renounce the Nobel Prize. If he had left the country to receive it, he would not have been allowed back in. Other international prizes (Venice Film Festival, Cannes) were tolerated, but Soviet authorities bristled about Stockholm. The uneasy relationship between Russian writers and that coveted prize has helped shape the foreign footprint of the Russian canon. Since the founding of the Nobel prizes in 1901, five Russians have won the award for Literature, three of them while on Russian soil. (That Leo Tolstoy, the world’s most famous writer, was still alive during the first nine years of the