Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [7]
Pasternak made two trips to the Urals during that period. In 1931 he was sent as a member of a “writers’ brigade” to observe the Five-Year Plan in action and report on its successes—in other words, to be “re-educated.” He was curious to see what changes had occurred since his last trip there fifteen years earlier. What he found disturbed him very much—not the scale of the construction, but the depersonalization of the people. He quit the brigade early and returned home. In the summer of 1932, the official attitude towards Pasternak improved and a collection of his poems, entitled Second Birth, was published. He was rewarded with a new trip to the Urals, this time for a month’s vacation with his second wife, Zinaida Neuhaus, and her two sons. Here for the first time he saw the results of the forced collectivization of agriculture, which had led to the breakdown of farming on a vast scale and a famine that cost millions of peasant lives. These disastrous effects of Stalin’s policy went entirely unreported in the Soviet press. He wrote a letter to the directors of the Writers’ Union detailing what he had seen, but it was ignored.
In another letter, written to his parents in Berlin in the spring of 1933, on Hitler’s accession to power, Pasternak defined the tragedy that was being played out in Europe with remarkable clarity and in terms that reveal the essence of his historical understanding as it would finally be embodied in Doctor Zhivago:
… however strange it may seem to you, one and the same thing depresses me in both our own state of affairs and yours. It is that this movement is not Christian, but nationalistic; that is, it runs the same danger of degenerating into the bestiality of facts. It has the same alienation from the age-old, gracious tradition that breathes with transformations and anticipations, rather than the cold statements of blind insanity. These movements are on a par, one is evoked by the other, and it is all the sadder for this reason. They are the left and right wings of a single materialistic night. (Published in Quarto, London, 1980)
After the appearance of Second Birth, Pasternak entered a more or less silent period, in terms of publication, which lasted until 1941. But he did address congresses of the Writers’ Union several times during those years. In an important speech to a plenum session of the union, held in Minsk in February 1936, he said:
The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it … Art is inconceivable without risk, without inner sacrifice; freedom and boldness of imagination can be won only in the process of work, and it is there that the unforeseen I spoke of a moment ago must intervene, and there no directives can help.
He went on to describe the inner change he was undergoing:
For some time I will be writing badly, from the point of view that has been mine up to now, and I will continue to do so until I have become used to the novelty of the themes and situations I wish to address. I will be writing badly, literally speaking, because I must accomplish this change of position in a space rarefied by abstractions and the language of journalists, and