Abbey of Gethsemani
Trappist P.O.

O

Septol,l958o

Dear Helen Wolff:

RobertMacgregor oi‘ New Directions wrote and told me that he had asked
you to send me a copy of DR ZHIVAGO, and now it has arrived and I am well into
it. I am very glad indeed that he asked you to seni me the book, I had heard
about M1 and had been wanting to get it for a long time. I am deeply grateful.
I have no hesitation in telling you how deeply impressed I an, since for a long
tine now I have been under the spell of Pasternak (in translations I have
cone across here and there in various languages).

Real-y, to my xnind, the appearance of DR ZHIVAGO is the most prodigious
event in twenty five years of American publishing. So many books are hailed as
"great" on all sides that it has become almost meaningless to acclaim a new novel
as a masterpiece. Yet myone who opens this book will irmediately see that
this time he is face to face with agerdus of towering proportions, a writer
of the stature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Comparisons are odious, but it seems
to me that mny of the most important novelists of the west-— Proust for instance-«-
are dwarfed by Pasternak. His dimensions are not those merely of a great
writer: he speaks with the ovemhehming authority of a prophet: est in the sense
of one who foretells the fliture so much as of one who speaks out definitively
and f.’oroeft:til.13r to dealers, in watery, the great realities of his sge.It is this
prophetic charster that sets him apart even from the greatest and met signifi-
cant miters of the west. The "religious" content of his work has rightly been
emphasized. His Christianity is oi‘ the Russian tradition, but it bursts out of
all conventional limitations and does not pemit itseH to be fitted easily into
a category. Corwentional minds will look to him perhaps vainly for a definite
sign that Russia is waiting to embrace our western ideas about religion. But
that is not the significance one must expect to see in Pasternak, and one met
mt approach him asking for such a "sign". All he asks us is to ppen our eyes
and see, as he sees, the dazzling and terrible presence of Christ in the history
of our time. This is the religious reality that is actually the most urgent
for us , and the one which we seem to excel in forgettirg.

I ww especially grateful and agreeably surprised to find the mm
fine poem at the end of the volume— those which I presume he has been unable
to publish in Soviet Russia. Than}: you again for sending me this marvelous
13ka

Very sincerely yours in Christ