Volume 38, Number 5 · March 7, 1991
Pasternak's Great Fairy Tale
By John Bayley
Occurring on the third page of Doctor Zhivago, that sentence tells the reader a great deal about how the novel works. Gaining or losing money—chiefly losing it—was one of the favorite plot resources of the spacious and classic form of the great nineteenth-century novelists: Balzac and Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Hardy and Henry James. It is important in War and Peace that Pierre, whose role in the novel has something in common with that of Yurii Zhivago, inherits the vast Bezukhov fortune, and hence acquires for the purposes of the novel the freedom of action and movement that money in those days could give. Count Rostov, the other hero of War and Peace, has the same sort of fortune toward the end of the novel when he marries the rich Princess Mary. Dostoevsky's Idiot, Prince Myshkin, is a rich man, and his financial situation sets him apart as much as his spiritual one.
Feature, 4905 words
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