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<\/i> by Boris Pasternak. Zhivago<\/i>, 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 It could not be published in Russia because the Soviet authorities disapproved, particularly in its portrayal of the Revolution.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.<\/p>\n
I have not been disappointed. Zhivago<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}