As the nights grow longer and temperatures begin to drop, atmospheric conditions become right for reading some Russian literature, with its deep snows, howling wolves, tragic lovers, wars and revolutions. Given their lengthiness, if you’re stuck at home with nowhere to go, a classic Russian novel will keep you occupied for a good long time. Plus, if the unthinkable happens on November 8th, it’s not a half bad idea to be on cultural speaking terms with our new overlords. CBR8’s recent survey of classic novels and their film iterations got me to thinking of Doctor Zhivago. When I was a teenager in the ’80s I first saw the 1965 film, starring the most gorgeous on-screen couple of all time — Julie Christie and Omar Sharif. I was already cultivating an interest in all things Russian when this beautiful David Lean film came on TV and knocked me for a loop. It’s just so terribly romantic and tragic! I highly recommend it if you’ve never seen it. Anyway, fast forward about 12 years and I finally got around to reading the novel. I was in graduate school working on a PhD in Russian/Soviet history (of course) and decided to read it for fun. I remember being very disappointed, but since I can’t remember why (it’s been over 20 years since I read it), I decided to give it another go.
Doctor Zhivago is set during the tumultuous period of Russian history encompassing World War I, the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war. Yuri Zhivago is a physician and poet. He is known as a superb diagnostician who can intuit the cause of a malady with astounding accuracy and who is especially skilled at dealing with eye-related illness. Yuri is also a man of deep introspection, often pondering the power and beauty of nature and the significance of each individual within it. He reminds me of my high school biology teacher whose most famous quote to us was, “Life! Wow!” [Incidentally, in Russian the root “zhiv-” means “life” or “living”] Although his parents died when he was young, Yuri has been surrounded by loving family. His uncle Kolya is a former priest and respected political philosopher whose ideas revolve around the notion that “the beast in man” is not restrained by threats, but by beauty and truth. This is a philosophy that Yuri fully embraces and that will cause him a lot of trouble down the road.
The Zhivago family, despite Yuri’s father having squandered the family fortune and abandoning them for another before dying, is clearly among the “haves” in pre-war and pre-revolutionary Russia. Yuri, an educated man with a bright future, lives with Moscow relatives, attends society events, and is engaged to his cousin Tonya. It is at one such event that his life will begin to change. A wealthy and influential attorney named Komarovsky sends for a noted physician in a crisis. This doctor is at an event with Zhivago and invites the young doctor to attend the patient with him. And this is when Yuri Zhivago will meet the beautiful Lara for the first time. The reader knows Lara’s background: her father is dead, her mother owns a dress shop, and Komarovsky is the “friend” of her father who taken an interest in the family. They live in a working class neighborhood, where neighbors know each other and watch out for each other. Lara’s mother has tried to kill herself, and it might be because she knows that Komarovsky has been having an inappropriate relationship with Lara. Lara hates Komarovsky; she feels enslaved to him and knows he will ruin her and her mother if she resists. Zhivago can see from the way Lara and Komarovsky interact that there is something going on between them. The next time he sees Lara will be at a Christmas party that Lara crashes in order to shoot Komarovsky. He’s superficially wounded and insists that Lara be released. Lara, in order to make a break of it and try to have a better sort of life, marries a young working class man she has known all her life, Pasha Antipov, and the two move to the Urals to work as teachers there.
So far, Pasternak has set up a narrative where two characters, whose lives might not have ever intersected again due to their class differences, are progressing in expected ways. Yuri’s life is one of success and privilege. Lara’s life involves struggle and abuse at the hands of the powerful but she has carved out something good for herself. Into this intrudes World War I. Yuri, now married and a new father, is conscripted into the Russian army as a doctor. Lara’s husband Pasha volunteers and goes missing, presumed dead, at the front. Lara becomes a nurse in order to find Pasha and while at the front, she and Zhivago again meet. Working together, they get to know one another a bit, but when the war is over they separate. Yet, revolution and civil war will bring them together. Due to hunger and growing terror in Moscow, Yuri and his family decide to evacuate to the Urals where Tonya’s relatives once owned a property called Varykino. As it happens, Lara lives close by in the town Yuriatin. Lara and Zhivago begin an affair, but while riding home one afternoon, he is captured by Bolshevik partisans, whose leader Strelnikov (the shooter) is known for his brutal suppression of enemies. They force him to become their doctor in their war against the “White” forces who oppose the revolution. After two miserable years, Zhivago escapes, but when he returns to Yuriatin, he learns that his family evacuated to Moscow and has been deported to Paris. Lara is there for Zhivago, but thanks to a visit from Komarovsky, the pair learn that their days are numbered. They will soon be arrested unless they do as Komarovsky says and join him moving to the far east. Lara and Zhivago refuse and hide at Varykino. For a short while they live together but soon events intrude and they are separated again. Yuri eventually makes his way back to Moscow a broken man. The worst of the terror is over and a period of rebuilding known as NEP has begun. Yuri takes up with another woman and has two more children, but he is unhappy. His old friends depress him; they have assimilated and have become an unthinking part of the herd. Zhivago sees nothing but mediocrity all around him. Moreover, he suffers from sclerosis of the heart, which makes the walls of his heart weak and which will eventually kill him.
While author Boris Pasternak is probably best known as a poet amongst Russians, his reputation was made in the west with this novel. It was published in Italy in 1957 after being smuggled out of the Soviet Union, where censors had rejected it. This is not surprising as the novel is critical of the 1917 Revolution, its architects and its aftermath. Unlike the film version, which focuses largely on the Yuri/Lara love affair at the expense of Pasternak’s political and life philosophies, the novel is quite explicit about history and politics. The love affair is a vehicle to express Pasternak’s ideas. For example, in the film, it is hinted early on that Yuri has some sympathy for the revolutionaries. There is a scene that is not in the book where Yuri watches a massacre of peaceful workers right under his window and he tries to help. In the novel, Yuri welcomes the revolution and views it with with great optimism.
Freedom! Real freedom, not just talk about it, freedom dropped out of the sky….
These days I have such a longing to live honestly, to be productive. I so much want to be a part of all this awakening.
It’s unsurprising that the western film made during the Cold War skims over the part where the protagonist was in favor of revolution. It’s also interesting that in the film there is a scene where the death of the tsar is revealed, which greatly disturbs Zhivago’s family. No such scene exists in the novel. Pasternak himself was very much like Zhivago. He could have gotten out of Russia when the revolution began but he wanted to stay. Like his character, he was optimistic about the revolution and later became disillusioned by it. In the novel, after Zhivago’s family has left Moscow for the Urals, Zhivago gets to know a neighbor who tells Yuri that Marxism is a science. Zhivago responds
Sciences are more balanced, more objective. I don’t know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism.
In the same conversation, he goes on to say,
I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.
Pasternak describes Yuri and Lara’s connection as almost a spiritual thing. The two were
…repelled by what was tragically typical of modern man, his textbook admirations, his shrill enthusiasms, and the deadly dullness conscientiously preached and practiced by countless workers in the field of art and science in order that genius should remain a great rarity.
Lara and Zhivago agree that the “root of all evil to come” is the “loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion.”
Back in Moscow, Zhivago tries to explain his heart problem to his friends who have bought into the regime:
It’s a typical modern disease. I think its causes are of a moral order. The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.
This is one hell of a condemnation of the revolution and of Soviet rule. It’s not surprising that the work was repressed and that Pasternak, who received the Nobel prize for literature in 1958, was forced to turn it down. My overall assessment of the novel, however, is that it’s just so-so. So much of it is a slog. It is not the romance/love story of Hollywood; it is an assessment of history and of the meaning of life. You could say that that makes it sort of a typical Russian novel. Certainly, Tolstoy’s novels contain a LOT of historical and philosophical digressions. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy does go on and on about the peasants and the virtues of the mir. In War and Peace, it’s history and Napoleon/”great men” and the free masons, among other things. It can be a bit much. But Tolstoy’s stories are just so incredible, you put up with the philosophical “commercials” or skim over them because you can’t wait to find out what’s going to happen with Prince Andrei and Peter and Natasha. Plus, Tolstoy put in the good stuff: duels, affairs, financial ruin, war, romance, even abortion. Pasternak really lacks the verve of Tolstoy. Perhaps it’s not fair to expect him to perform at such a level, but I felt that he could have been a bit more detailed with some of the actual plot. For example, Yuri has a half-brother Evgraf, who seems to have power, connections and influence and who drops into Yuri’s life at propitious moments. We never learn much about him though, which feels incomplete. And Lara can be a bit of a cardboard character. Both her husband and her lover put her on a pedestal and she sometimes dithers. We don’t get a complete story on her either. And poor Tonya — what happens to her and the kids in Paris?
While I appreciate Pasternak’s bravery in writing this novel when he did, I can’t say I’d recommend it unless you really have a deep abiding interest in early Soviet history. The movie has an edge here over the book. I can, however, wholeheartedly recommend War and Peace — both the novel and the 2016 TV version from the BBC (adapted by Andrew Davies of Pride and Prejudice fame!!). Do yourself a favor this winter and dig into those.