"Zhivago's Children": A brief flowering of thought after a dark time

"Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia"

by Vladislav Zubok

Harvard University Press, 440 pp., $35

In 1957, Boris Pasternak published his novel "Doctor Zhivago" in Italy. It quickly became an international literary sensation, was translated into dozens of languages, spent six months on the top of The New York Times best-seller list, and helped its author win the Nobel Prize for literature the following year. The book's reception was even greater in the Soviet Union, the author's home, where his work was officially banned and so all the more eagerly read.

After the long night of Stalinism, when the country's greatest thinkers and artists had been killed or hounded into conformity, silence, and despair, Pasternak's novel appeared like a bright shaft of light. As Pasternak himself put it, he had written in a direct manner about the "dearest and most important things: land and sky, great passion, creative spirit, life and death." His own death in 1960 drew scant notice from the authorities, yet hundreds still showed up for his funeral, which, Vladislav Zubok writes, "was the occasion for the first sizable demonstration of unofficial civic solidarity in Soviet Russia."

The mourners and the thousands who shared their sentiments are the subject of "Zhivago's Children," a revealing, thoroughly researched and important book infused with elegiac tones. Stalin's Russia had encouraged education and technical know-how, yet its leaders had blindly assumed that the country's intellectuals would remain unthinking, easily controlled cogs in the vast machine of the state. But some men and women born in the 1930s and '40s refused to play their assigned role, particularly after the leader's death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev's new policies of de-Stalinization and the Thaw suggested a new dawn was at hand.

Despite their relatively small numbers and concentration in Moscow and Leningrad, the new generation of intellectuals exerted a profound influence on the cultural and political spirit of the age. Unlike the first intelligentsia of the 19th century, the radical critics of the czars who had laid the groundwork for the revolutions of 1917, this last intelligentsia did not wish to overthrow the system, but to reform it. For them, Stalinism marked a grotesque perversion of the Communist revolution, whose original lofty spirit, in their interpretation, they would revive through their own example as the new moral vanguard.

Zhivago's children flourished throughout the second half of the 1950s and into the '60s. It was a time of great optimism and hope. Among the best known in the West of these shestidesiatniki, or men of the sixties, is the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, but Zubok's book chronicles the stories of many other noteworthy figures.

Khrushchev's retreat from reform followed by the long stagnation of the Brezhnev years robbed the intelligentsia of opportunities for expression and sapped its spirit. But it was the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s that finally killed it. In the new Russia, where popular culture reigns and art is chiefly a commodity, a small elite of idealistic intellectual prophets has become, Zubok writes in an insightful epilogue, "a historical anachronism."

Seattle resident Douglas Smith is the author of "The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia" (Yale University Press).