Why Read the Classics? (1999)
“Pasternak and the Revolution* Halfway through the twentieth century the great Russian nineteenth-century novel has come back to haunt us, like King Hamlet’s ghost. That is the feeling that Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957) arouses in us, his first European readers. The reaction is a literary one, then, not a political one. Yet the term ‘literary’ is still not adequate. It is in the relationship between the reader and the book that something really happens: we fling ou...rselves into reading with the hunger for questions that typified our early reading, in fact just like when we first tackled the Russian classics, and we were not looking for this or that type of ‘literature’, but an explicit and general discussion of life, capable of putting the particular in direct relation to the universal, and of containing the future in its portrayal of the past. In the hope that it can tell us something about the future we rush towards this novel which has come back from the grave, but the shade of Hamlet’s father, as we know, wants to intervene in today’s problems, though always wanting to relate them back to the time when he was alive, to what happened before, to the past.MoreLess
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