The monk's words did not come true, Russia is just an outlier in European civilization. Political scientist Ruskin said: Americans are John Locke's sons, Russians are not. Locke believed that people are rational and reasonable, and they have natural rights to life, liberty, and property. For Russians, this is not common sense. They are more inclined to Rousseau's view: the state guided by the general will shapes society and then reshapes the individual. Lenin completely accepted this view and then imposed it on the Russian people.
Such a civilization cannot tolerate any individualistic heresy, whether his name is Pasternak or "Doctor Zhivago".
Pasternak was a futuristic poet who became a master and leader of avant-garde poetry in the 1920s, but he was labelled as a "devotional idealism" and was always suppressed and attacked. In the ten years after World War II, he devoted himself to the creation of the novel "Doctor Zhivago". After many rejections in the Soviet Union, the novel was published in Italy in 1957, and subsequently caused a series of disturbances.
Pasternak wrote about one of the most volatile periods in Russian history—the revolution of 1917 and everything that followed. The life, hope, ups and downs, displacement, loss and despair of the old Russian intellectuals represented by Doctor Zhivago under the torrent of the great era. The author makes a lot of out-of-place remarks about the era in the book, which, despite conscious caution, sound jarring enough. Since the birth of the novel, the praise from the western world and the siege from all walks of life in the Soviet Union, as well as the self-examination made by the author himself under great pressure, have injected many legendary colors into this novel.
Half a century has passed, and today people can finally transcend the limitations of ideology and interpret this great work in a deeper and broader sense. As the British writer Green put it, this is a "great epic": Yuri Zhivago, the orphan of a wealthy Siberian businessman, came to Moscow as a child, was fostered in the home of Gromeko, a professor of chemistry and a doctor, and completed university medicine. study. He became a compassionate, honest and upright old-school intellectual. The prospect of life seems to have unfolded, with wives and children, hanging pots to save the world, accompanied by a ball with wine and beauty. Outside the staggered Chinese house, there are pariahs crying out for hunger and cold. But who cares? In the blizzard and snow in Russia, there is always such a scene. He fell in love with Lana, the tailor's daughter, who was seduced by his mother's lover, lawyer and politician Komarovsky, and began a tragic life. Lana's lover, Pasha, the son of a road maintenance worker, is a hot-blooded young man eager to create a new world. He grew up in the revolution, and later became a bloodthirsty general who made the enemy and the villages where he passed by terrified. These people form an allegorical picture: individual lives are in full swing, and the thunder of revolution has sounded on the far side of the horizon.
With the collapse of the front line, dissatisfaction from all walks of life was ignited at the same time, and those who were insulted and persecuted chose to rise up. This is the great current of history that is bound to break the banks of all personal life. Revolutionary violence and counter-revolutionary violence were imposed on the broad masses of the people who were suffering from sinking and floating. Confused, this deep melancholy may be the portrayal of Pasternak's heart.
Fortunately there is love. Zhivago finally got to get together with Lana amid the turmoil. In a short and sweet time, the two lonely hearts warmed each other, and then it was a helpless parting. Zhivago ran up the stairs and pushed the ice away from the window, tears welling up in his eyes. On the endless Siberian ice sheet, the long-distance carriage gradually turned into a distant little black spot, like those times gone by, disappeared into the depths of history, never to return.
The Revolution is a tusk machine that devours everything around it, including its own son. Pasha became the object of cleansing and was forced to commit suicide; Lana, because of her relationship with Komarovsky, made the labor camp her home; and Zhivago, neither dissolved in the old times, nor by the new. The times tolerated, and finally fell to the streets of Moscow.
"Personal life in Russia is dead, history kills it". Pasternak expressed his feelings through Pasha's mouth. Revolutions shape history, and such history wipes out individuals. Russian thinking comes from almost the opposite of Locke and goes back to the geographical dilemma of living on an unshielded plain: build a strong state or perish. And the individual, and the individual's life, is always insignificant. The Bolsheviks were the logical product of the land, and under its rolling rolling wheels, the Zhivago doctors were just a little bit of dust being lifted up.
In 1960, a year-and-a-half after winning and being forced to reject the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pasternak died sullenly in KGB surveillance. Isaiah Berlin wrote fondly of this great man of thought: "Nowhere in the world is it possible to conceive of a man whose talent, vigour, unshakable integrity, moral courage, and steadfastness can hardly be imagined. Comparable people in terms of migration".
Moscow cannot accommodate saints, and it will never be Rome. Zhivago and his creator have the answer.
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