Symposia Held for Alumni

Premier Khrushchev's treatment of Boris Pasternak after the publication of Pasternak's Nobel Prize winning novel Doctor Zhivago is an example of what happens when a despot poses as an intellectual, James H. Bellington, Research Fellow in the Russian Research Center stated, at one of the four forums yesterday morning.

Billington and Renato Poggioli, Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, participated in a forum entitled "The Case of Doctor Zhivago." Billington analyzed the political implications of the novel while Poggioli spoke on its literary significance.

Despite the tempest Doctor Zhivago created, Billington emphasized that the book itself is not a predominantly political tract, "for Pasternak is not a tractical, didactic writer." But the passages which do give rise to anti-Communist sentiments, Billington continued, are the ones most quoted in Russia and in the West for political purposes.

The controversy over Zhivago implies a definite truth about the role of the dissenter in Russian society. The dissenter can "cheer slightly differently than his neighbors," Billington explained, but the role of the cheerleaders must be completely uniform. Pasternak, then, defied this uniformity in writing Zhivago.

Pasternak, Billington feels, seems to have the solid support of all significant Russian authors. Very few of them signed a petition to expel Pasternak from the Writers Union and there has been much criticism levelled at the leader of the Soviet Youth Congress who had stated that "calling Pasternak a pig slanders the pig."

Billington also cited "the malaise of Soviet youth." In Russia, he said, there seems to be an inability to handle the new generation. In fact, the Youth Congress has termed adolescents in Russia "bugs and beetles who must be blotted out by insect exterminant."

Discussing the literacy aspects of the novel, Poggioli said that "one can call Zhivago a morality play: its message is the message of individualism." Zhivago, he explained, "is a passive victim of his ordeal, but he triumphs over his ordeal even in death."

It is a "mysterious thing," Poggioli commented, "that it is virtually impossible to continue writing avant-garde literature. under a totalitarian regine." The reason for this, Poggioli said, is that any literature written under such a regime must reflect a reversion to tradition, and, "since the tradition upheld under the Soviet regime is cheap, Zhivago represents a search for something else."

Further, "it is paradoxical that under a totalitarian regime, an aesthetic deviant has a more difficult time than a political deviant," Poggiolo commented. "You don't create avant-garde works alone in the cellar of a Moscow or Leningrad building--you need a little group."