In the tumultuous sixties, as an undergraduate at Harvard (for which I have prayed for forgiveness most of my life), I was disappointed again and again by the common Victorian and early twentieth-century convention of beginning a chapter with lush description and then abandoning it in favor of social interaction, philosophical reflection, and plot development. Nature was treated mainly as a stage direction: “Night. Wind in the pines. Soldiers around a campfire.” Even such details as those were to me more evocative and meaningful than much that followed, dry and disconnected from the universal language of creation that is the grammar and syntax of great art because it is the language given to us in the fullest and deepest measure.
Lasting writers seldom divorce themselves from it, finding its echo at every turn. In so doing they discipline themselves as if in prayer, with almost incanted repetitions in reference to what is real—that is, the universe granted to us by God in all its depth, weight, expanse, color, detail, action, beauty, mystery, and surprise—allowing their thoughts to run both freely and parallel with the truth.
The inseparable substance and beauty of Boris Pasternak’s now rather neglected masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, have managed to survive in translation. This is a rarity, in that one of the characteristics of great writing is that it cannot be entirely uncoupled from the language with which it is intertwined, any more than the soul can be surgically removed from the body.
Though it would be best not only to know Russian but to have a native appreciation of it, the text of Zhivago is saturated with a universal language intelligible to anyone, regardless of background. It is written in the language, to borrow a phrase from Jefferson, of “nature and nature’s God.”
Zhivago itself is continuously weighted with and refreshed by natural description, color, sound, and metaphors d’éclat. Pasternak and his protagonist exult in these, and this is what sustains them through the violent and senseless times in which they live—because these beauties, some humble, some magnificent, are God himself speaking reassurance of perfection. And if perfection is inviolable and cannot be marred, then in the vast, omnipresent language of nature, the message is everywhere and insistent that evil will be defeated and the prospect of redemption is alive.
In the novel, the moon, snow, flowing water, effulgences of light, the richness of color, the many different moods of the wind, and the sound of music, birds, and horses’ hooves on snow and board and stone are symbols of more things than I can address here. A marvelous, compressed expression of them exists in the David Lean and Robert Bolt movie based on the book. In the wretched cattle car taking the Zhivagos beyond the Urals, Zhivago (played by Omar Sharif), who has lost everything, who knows that he and his family may be imprisoned or executed at any moment, looks through the cracks at a round, almost blindingly bright moon hovering in the frigid, glassy space above the snow, and from this he takes heart and renews his faith. Not only because it is so strikingly beautiful, but because it is majestically inviolable. More comforting than Psalm 23, it is proof that the splendor and perfection of natural law confirm the promise of justice and tranquility.
But in times of madness and violence, intractably endemic to history, is it not simpleminded to find comfort, reassurance, and even victory merely in the notion that the context in which we live operates independently of us, that there are countless blazing galaxies, snowbound forests, and immense seas in an imperturbable work of which the bright and luminous moon that lifted Zhivago was only the tiniest part? All such things are, of course, in more than one sense of the word, a given. Why would contemplating them overcome loss, pain, and defeat? How might devoted envisioning of God’s universe suggest that he is just? First, consider the limits of perception, and then the nature of time.