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Pasternak has called his book's tremendous success the "Zhivago miracle," but the paradox of the Pasternak miracle is equally compelling. He is a stubborn man who is not really a martyr. He is an aggrieved man and yet not an avenger. He is a man without weapons, wielding "the irresistible power of unarmed truth." Most paradoxically of all, out of Communist Russia, a society that officially denies the existence of God, Pasternak has sent a deeply Christian statement of the condition of man, such as most writers of the professedly Christian West are too embarrassed or too unbelieving to make.
Beyond Politics. Around the world the name of Boris Pasternak, until recently familiar to few except fellow poets and literary specialists, has assumed a kind of magic. In U.S. book stores, Zhivago, the No. 1 bestseller, is periodically out of stock; U.S. sales to this week: 344,000 copies. The publisher (Pantheon) has a new printing of 430,000 copies scheduled, and the Book-of-the-Month Club is rushing Zhivago to its subscribers as an alternate choice. It has been translated into 17 languages: the book without a country will shortly span the globe. At least some clandestine copies of the book are being read in Russia, too.
Much of the West's interest in Zhivago is political. Inevitably, the book has been used as a weapon in the cold war. Inevitably, Moscow's refusal to let Pasternak accept the Nobel Prize and his denunciation by the hired hacks of the Animal Farm ("A black sheep in a good flock," "a pig," "a snake") have alienated intellectuals outside Russia—even India's Nehru protested directly to Khrushchev. But to assess the book primarily in political terms would be making a major error about Doctor Zhivago and about Boris Pasternak. The bitter criticism of Marxism cannot be missed, and Pasternak obviously wrote exactly what he wanted to write. But he also says: "My novel was not intended to be a political pamphlet. I wanted to show life as it is, in all its wealth and intensity. In the West they always quote the same two or three pages of my work. Have they read the rest? I am not a propagandist. This is not the meaning of my novel."
That meaning is manifold. Zhivago is a historical novel of "Russia's terrible years," bearing witness to the sufferings of the Russian people. It is also a novel of Christian humanism that opposes the materialism of both East and West, affirms the sanctity of every man's soul under God. It is a novel in praise of the continuity of life, which for Pasternak means resurrection. It is, finally, a novel dedicated to the primacy of the individual and his private life in defiance of superstates, of groupthink, of social and ideological regimentation. If this is a devastating indictment of the essence of Communism, it is by implication equally critical of much that is currently lodged in Western habits of thought; for the book flatly pits the individual against "adjustment to the group," the soul's need against economic need, the organic against the mechanical.