Boris and Brigham

I don’t often read novels, but after making it through the most recent Harry Potter, I thought I would try slumming it in fiction for awhile. I have been reading Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Zhivago, a novel set during the Russian Revolution, was first published in Italy during the 1950s. It could not be published in Russia because the Soviet authorities disapproved, particularly in its portrayal of the Revolution. Pasternak was offered the Nobel Prize for literature, but declined in the face of Soviet pressure. Good free-market liberal that I am, I figured that any novel banned by the Soviets couldn’t be all bad.

I have not been disappointed. Zhivago is a wonderful book. There are all sorts of deep, literary things going in the book. It also contains occasional monologues about Tolstoy and the nature of Christianity. All of this is good, clean fun, but I take the heart of the book to be its basic affirmation of life in the face of ideology. The name Zhivago is apparently derived from the Russian word for life (or so the preface to my copy says), and throughout Zhivago is presented as a character who affirms the joy and meaningfulness of living over and against the revolutionary story of ideology triumphant. The basic gist of the message — and being a Russian novel, I take it that being didactic is permissible — is that decent and loving life is far superior to grand ideological projects that aim to transform the world by sheer force of vision.

I find Pasternak’s story extremely appealing. The way that he skewers the heartlessness of intellectualism cum politics is wonderful, and his vision of the basic pathos and wonder of life makes me want to move right now to a dacha in the birches with my family. My problem, of course, is that I find Brigham at least as compelling as Boris. Brigham Young was nothing if not a visionary intent on transforming the world into an ideal. Zion, the Kingdom, and the Restoration are, in this sense, ideologies. And the excesses of our history reveal that faith cum ideology is not without its own dangers and its own contempt for life. Even as I write this Pasternak-ian critique of Mormonism, however, I think of Brigham’s heroic contempt for ease and contentment. Merely living, for all its beauty and pathos, is incomplete; and a contempt for the things of this world promises more than simply the risk of heartless ideology expressed by Pasternak but also the peace that passes all understanding.

There is something Hegelian or Aristotelian in my soul that likes to set up dichotomies and then claim the middle road between them. Yet, I don’t think that ideology and religion are best negotiated by finding some via media. Rather, it seems to me that to live with ideals, dreams, and hopes for a better world to come — in short to live with faith — requires that we live with risk. We are, in some sense, always playing without a net, and there is no final guarantee that we do not slip into the errors that Pasternak portrayed. The danger of ideology is the price we pay for the City of Enoch.

9 comments for “Boris and Brigham

  1. “[A]nd being a Russian novel, I take it that being didactic is permissible. …”

    Not accordingt to Nabokov, who loathed Pasternak for that very reason.

  2. My understanding is that Nabakov also loathed Dostievsky (or however you spell his name) and Tolstoy for the same reason…

  3. I haven’t read Pasternak in the original Russian, but I understand that this is that rare book where the English translation is considered far superior to the original Russian.

    Aaron B

  4. True, re Nabakov and Dostoyevsky, but not Tolstoy. Tolstoy he loved. His Lectures on Russian Literature spell out both positions passionately and funnily.

  5. Nate, now that you have time for movie watching (according to your most recent post), you should check out David Lean’s film adaptation of Doctor Zhivago. I haven’t read the book, but the film is quite spectacular (I’m a big fan of Lean, though, so take my opinion with that caveat).

  6. Nate, congratulations on reading some fiction! It’s kinda nice, isn’t it.

    If there’s something Hegelian in your soul that likes to construct dichotomies and then claim the middle way, there’s a little birdhouse in mine that likes to insist that the original dichotomy is a false one and thus the whole construct is a little artificial…. so forgive me. I haven’t read Dr. Zhivago, but if Pasternak really is setting “ideology” against “life”—well, then I think he’s just plain wrong. Ideology isn’t something that impinges on life; it’s the medium through which life is experienced as narrative. There’s nothing less ideological about retiring with one’s family to a dacha in the birches than there is about marching one’s feet to the bone in the revolution. Sure, one ideology may serve a set of power relations that are more visible and intrusive than another—but that doesn’t mean that the quiet life isn’t structured by its own set of ideologies and, yes, power relations.

    (By the way, do you pronounce the word “ih-deology” or “eye-deology”? At BYU I was taught to say “eye-deology,” but I picked up the other pronunciation from my advisor in grad school. I prefer “ih-deology” now, and nearly always pronounce it that way, but I feel self-conscious saying the word out loud either way.)

  7. In my heart I want to believe that the risks associated with profound commitment to an “ideology” of faith (at least my faith) are more benign than the risks of “intellectualism cum politics.” I’m not sure that’s an easily defensible position, but I want to believe it. In “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” Isaiah Berlin judges that the quest to identify and attain the greatest goods–ideals, I guess–has been one of the premier follies of history. Bad things always happen, or, as Berlin memorably puts it, in the quest for the perfect omelette eggs are inevitably broken. It’s easy to agree with that judgment when it applies to the horrors of Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism, etc.; my gut reaction, however, is to defend Zion as a benign ideal that doesn’t work by compulsion and whose failure would mean extinguished hopes but not extinguished lives. I could be wrong, though. By pursuing our commitment to Zion are we running exactly the same risks as the ideologies of the past? Do eggs have to get broken for us to enjoy that millennial omelette in the City of Enoch diner?

    A pronunciation question for you, Rosalynde: how do pronounce “research”? “RE-surch” or rə-SURCH”?

  8. Robert: Michael Oakshotte makes a similar point to Berlin in his essay “The Tower of Babel,” which is a retelling of the biblical story as an allegory against what he sees as the over reaching of modernism and liberaliss. There is something very English and Burkean about this attitude. You see the same sort of thing in the agressive nominalism of the common law and the praise of muddling through in English politics.

    I do think that one can overdue the hand ringing about the dangers of Mormon ideology. All the historical evidence is that Mormonism simply isn’t as dangerous as Marxism or the like. I don’t think that there is a real risk of genocide or the like in Mormonism, where as Stalin saw the mass starvation of the kulacks as a necessary step toward realizing the dream of collective agriculture. I do think, however, that there is a certain heartlessness to ideas against which one must guard.

    Rosalynde: In a sense, I agree with you that Pasternack’s dicotomy is false, and I explicitly disclaimed an attempt to find the via media. I think that there is a real danger that we are talking past one another in our use of the word ideology. I am not denying that “life” in the Pasternackian sense is without narrative or structure. However, it seems to me qualitatively different than Marxist drama peopled entirely by vast abstractions like History, Class, the Means of Production, Revolution, etc. The level of abstraction at which one pitches the narrative matters, and while I am as in favor of deconstructing the hidden power structures of everyday life as the next guy, a healthy dose of Foucaultian skepticism ought not to keep us from drawing meaningful and important distinctions.

Comments are closed.