Age and youth cannot live together
Andrei Navrozov
BORIS PASTERNAK: A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY, VOLUME ONE by Christopher Barnes CUP, £35, pp. 528 Pamela by Samuel Richardson, whose tercentenary is passing unnoticed even as I leaf through the autumn here in Cam- bridge, is so rarely read that today's undergraduates are likely to remember it solely as the inspiration for Fielding's parody, Shamela. Yet Richardson was a man of genius whose work surpasses Flaubert in subtlety and Proust in scope, while Fielding was and remains a relativist of boulevard proportions.
But imagine Pamela and Shamela as the work of one man, the former writer in youth and the latter in old age. This should certainly be possible if one imagines two widely different sets of political, social and cultural conditions under which this hypothetical author might have existed at the beginning and at the end of his life. Well, such an author did live. His name was Boris Pasternak, and no two sets of political, social or cultural conditions were more widely different in the history of mankind.
He was born a century ago this winter. Politics, like publishing, has a weakness for anniversaries, and 1990 will be The Paster- nak Year, proclaimed by Unesco and celebrated in the Soviet press. It is starting to rain biographies, and I must confess that I shall be contributing to the flood. But the story of Pasternak's art is a story of many deaths. One hopes that it can survive a death by water.
For now, this first of two volumes by Christopher Barnes is only a cloud on the horizon. Yet already the ominous contours of an impending cultural disaster may be discerned in its opening paragraph: 'Pas- ternak is no easy subject for the biog- rapher'. 'Who is?' a philosophical reader may wonder, but that, as Pasternak liked to say, is not the point. The reason for the difficulty, or at least its visible part, is glimpsed in the next paragraph: 'Paster- nak', writes Professor Barnes, 'produced two autobiographies — Safe Conduct which appeared in 1931, and an Autobiog- raphical Essay, written in 1956'. Accord- ingly, the index to his biography lists 76 textual references to the former and 51 to the latter.
Of course this numerary insight is absurd, but not as absurd as the principle of evenhanded scholarship upon which this biography, like so many others these days, is based. Let me put it simply. Here is a man who produced during the first 20 years of his adult life something by which Rus- sian culture will be measured for millennia to come. The rest is Shamela. But no Western reader can pry that fundamental truth from the clutch of Professor Barnes's octopus of scholarly compilation.
It is equally unlikely that the general public in Russia will confront that truth in 1990. Doctor Zhivago, which received the Nobel Prize in 1958, was 'anti-soviet', was it not? To say that it is, by the standards of Pasternak's youth, third-rate — on the level, say, of Fedin's Cities and Years or Mann's Doctor Faustus — is tantamount to acknowledging one's employment by the police. In Russia, Pasternak is saved from spiritual oblivion, in the old 'Soviet' shape as well as the new, by the continuity that exists in a tiny milieu, a survivor of the cultural holocaust called totalitarianism. In the name of that milieu I am writing about Pasternak in a free Britain.
Professor Barnes, by contrast, does not write in the name of any milieu save the academic community as a whole, which includes a group of scholars who may be dubbed Pasternakologists. It is futile, therefore, to expect that The Pasternak Year, like this book, will bring insights commensurate with the destiny of their subject.
And, if not commensurate, why bother? The man emerging from the pages of Professor Barnes's biography could be greater or smaller, Indian or Tadzhik, Richardson or Fielding. He arises, like the composer hero of Mann's Faustus, from the mists of fact, yet because no music ever sounds we may just as well be reading the biography of a plumber. In short, his is the dull story of every famous man, dull because fame is not an idea.
Yet if the true story of Boris Pasternak were told, not in facts and figures but in a few words, as in ancient chronicles, by a man with an idea, our very conception of literature, and perhaps of history to boot, would be rocked to its Philistine founda- tions.
In the ancient songs it would even amuse . . .
Would that not imply lilacs made into garlands, The splendour of daisies crushed by the dew, Lips squandered like mad on celestial parl- ance?
Would that not imply embracing the vault, Entwining the hands round the hero's collar, Would that not imply spending ages of malt To brew heady evenings of nightingale dolour?
It certainly would.
A collection of Andrei Navrozov's transla- tions, Second Nature: Forty-Six Poems by Boris Pasternak, will be published by Peter Owen in January.
Previous page
