A Spectator's Notebook
I WAS REMINDED Of the fact that truly creative minds survive in Russia, even if they do not flourish, by an announcement this week more notable in its way than the technological triumphs beyond the atmosphere. I have often heard the opinion expressed that Mr. Boris Pasternak is the finest living poet in any language. The news that his novel Doctor Zhivago is to be published here by Collins, as it cannot be in Russia, points to the shortcomings, and weaknesses too, of the Soviet regime quite as strikingly as the sputniks do to its strength. Pasternak has been practically silenced since the war (except for his magnificent translations of Shakespeare). I look, forward to his novel, despite the fact that it has been accused of putting in doubt the validity of the October Revolution. I do not expect it to con- tain anything at all revolutionary in the political sense—except to the mind of a government to which creative work is automatically seditious.
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