Doutor Jivago

Dr. Zhivago is far more renowned for the film version directed by the magnificent British director David Lean. It is so romantic that it has attracted countless millions of viewers, captivating their eyes.

However, the book by Boris Pasternak is very different. It is more of a tour of the brutal, epic journey in the destruction and resurrection of Mother Russia from 1902 to the 1950s. Revisiting a painful chapter, the characters involved are well sketched, and many people in the background are real. It is a historical fiction that reveals how the largest nation on Earth suffered and still does. Its people are great, but its governments aren't.

The good doctor Yuri Andreievich Zhivago, with a mouthful of a name as Russian names often are, was the son of Andrei, a millionaire drunkard who was frequently absent from his family for years. Rumors circulated that he had a second family. Poor mother Maria Nikolaievna, with a bad heart, ended her brief life, soon followed by her husband. The boy's half-brother, the enigmatic Evgraf Andreievich Zhivago, a product of an illicit affair, helped his orphaned sibling, raised him, and gave Yuri a good education.

Zhivago, as a youth, meets the love of his life, Larisa Feodorovna Guishar. She doesn't initially catch his attention, but an unfortunate incident makes a mark. Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky, Yuri's late father's corrupt lawyer, becomes both Lara's mother Amalia's and later the daughter's lover. Then Lara causes turmoil at a fabulous party in Moscow but keeps quiet. These events, perhaps today, are shadows on the wall, but their consequences still resonate in Russia and the world.

Notwithstanding all the politics and tragedies, the center of the novel is the attraction between Yuri and Lara, which the film highlights to tremendous effect. The two marry others yet never lose hope. Their passion continues and reignites, even though the high tides of revolution and civil war frequently separate them and take them to unknown regions, like the waves of the ocean. Still, their feelings remain unchanged. An idyllic small house in Siberia, in the middle of nowhere, proves this.

Most people may not care about the conflicts, and the resulting butchery can make for a difficult story to read. Yet, the lives of the couple give magic to the concept that living could be the same way. If you desire a narrative that both entertains and informs about the dark days in a nation's struggle for salvation that was never achieved, this book, written by a man who witnessed unimaginable scenes that turn the stomach of modern humans, is a must-read. Regardless, this history must never be forgotten.

This is going to be a rather challenging review to pen down as I have developed a genuine love-hate relationship with this book.

It is an epic narrative revolving around a man who is meant to be this tragic hero, torn apart from the woman he loved by the harsh times of revolution and civil war. If you were to ask me, he was just a cad.

I suppose we can view the entire storyline as a metaphor for that particular period of Russian history. In that context, it all makes a certain degree of sense, but it still doesn't quite live up to being "one of the greatest love stories ever told" as boldly宣称 on the cover.

The initial hundred pages of the book are dedicated to an in-depth introduction of dozens of characters. You find yourself struggling to remember their numerous names, surnames, patronymics, nicknames, and their relationships with one another, only to discover later that they never resurface in the novel.

I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of that was, especially when significant events in the lives of the main characters are subsequently summarized in just a few sentences or omitted entirely.

On top of all that, we have a plethora of completely improbable coincidences. Let's bear in mind that Russia is the largest country in the world, yet people keep bumping into each other every other page as if they all resided in a tiny village.

Even the average romance writer would likely think twice before attempting such a feat, deeming it a bit excessive.

We've dealt with the storyline, so now let's shift our focus to the style. One thing is certain, dialogue is definitely not Pasternak's strong suit. His characters don't engage in normal conversations; they deliver orations.

The author clearly had his own agenda, so the poor characters had to randomly launch into two-page-long speeches to convey what Pasternak desired to tell us.

Actually, I'll let one of the characters speak for me at this point. At a certain juncture, Lara said:

"Instead of being natural and spontaneous as we had always been, we began to be idiotically pompous with each other. Something showy, artificial, forced, crept into our conversation - you felt you had to be clever in a certain way about certain world-important themes."

Touche, Lara, touche. Another interesting thing she said (actually, this book would be significantly better if it were titled Larissa Fyodorovna instead of Doctor Zhivago) was her perspective on philosophy:

"I am not fond of philosophical essays. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of spice, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as feeding on nothing but pickles."

And Pasternak definitely has a penchant for his pickles.

Now that we've addressed the bad and the ugly, let me share what was good about this book. It contains some of the most captivating descriptions I've encountered in literature.

This is where Pasternak's true genius shines through. I had no idea one could describe snow in so many different and beautiful ways.

Even though I'm aware that most of it was probably lost in translation, what I've read was sufficient to salvage this book from the two-star rating.

It might have even propelled it into the four-star category if I had been in a more favorable mood.

Firește, contextul lecturii poate avea o influență semnificativă asupra importanței și semnificației unei cărți. În cazul meu, am citit romanul lui Pasternak, Doctor Jivago, mai întâi în engleză, în 1989. Un prieten a tradus cîteva zeci de pagini pentru Opinia studențească, iar abia atunci am aflat despre împrejurările publicării acestui roman. Trecerea manuscrisului peste graniță, tipărirea la editura italiană Feltrinelli, premiul Nobel din 1958 și scandalul care a urmat...
Cînd citești o carte prohibită, nu poți judeca limpede. Toți am fost de acord, atunci, că Doctor Jivago este o capodoperă a subversiunii. Justificam această apreciere superlativă invocînd, în primul rînd, latura lui social-politică. Vedeam în carte o critică a revoluției bolșevice și a crimelor comise în numele ei de către fanatici ca Strelnikov. Cu toate acestea, aspectul pur estetic ne interesa prea puțin. Astăzi, însă, e ușor de sesizat că am interpretat greșit romanul lui Pasternak.
În fond, doctorul și poetul Iuri Andreevici Jivago, protagonistul cărții, privește tot ceea ce se întîmplă în jur cu un ochi mai degrabă apatic și neînțelegător. El suportă fără să condamne și îndură fără să se revolte. Viața lui e dominată brusc de hazard. Îl pierde pe Lara și apoi o regăsește, doar pentru a o pierde din nou. Îl pierde și pe Tonia, soția lui, care fugi mai tîrziu la Paris. În timpul războiului civil, e răpit de partizani și constrîns să îi îngrijească pe răniți. Cînd poate, pornește pe jos către Moscova.
Mulți au găsit defecte de construcție în roman. Vladimir Nabokov, de exemplu, a spus că „romanul e o melodramă informă”. Cu toate acestea, cine poate uita episodul iubirii dintre doctor și fascinanta Lara? În schimb, resemnarea doctorului Jivago m-a intrigat. La început, am nedumit pasivitatea lui, dar cu timpul am început s-o înțeleg. Și poeziile din final nu mi-au plăcut, probabil că sună mai bine în rusește.

"Doctor Zhivago" presents the trajectory of a cultivated man, a poet, and a sensitive soul, emerging from the liberal intelligentsia. It takes us through the tumultuous times of Russia from 1905 until the tragic consequences of the 1917 revolution.

Here lies a classic novel within the Russian tradition of the 19th century. It features multiple characters contending with the harsh historical reality. There seems to be little that is truly original, giving the impression that it is a 19th-century novelist at the helm, perhaps a Tolstoy lost in the 20th century. The plot is overly reliant on chance to be entirely plausible. These men and women who meet, get lost, and find themselves by chance in this vast country. This aspect is rather unbelievable. The characters' psychology is somewhat sketchy, and the style can often be heavy.

Nonetheless, the images from David Lean's film adorn the beautiful pages. So, a big thank you to Omar Sharif, and especially the captivating Julie Christie, who made it easier for me to turn the pages.

There was no possible way for me to evade reading Doctor Zhivago. After all, I am a proud daughter of a literature teacher. This book won the Nobel Prize for Boris Pasternak and has been staring at me from the top of my to-read pile for years with a quiet accusation.

And so, dear reader, I finally read it.

Doctor Zhivago is an interesting novel. It is very character-centered but is absolutely not character-driven. It is an epochal novel that focuses on the particularly turbulent, violent, and uncertain yet future-defining era in Russian history - the time around the Russian Revolution and the following years of brutality and confusion in the Russian Civil War. The driving forces of the story are the frequently senseless and almost always cruel historical events. Against this greater force, the efforts, intentions, and agency of the characters are pathetically, frustratingly helpless and futile. It is truly a story of individual fates trampled under the relentlessly rolling forward bulldozer of history.

What may surprise some people who, via the phenomenon of 'cultural osmosis', may know of this story as one of the greatest stories of forbidden and doomed love ever written (or something similar, perhaps a misunderstanding perpetuated by the 1960s screen adaptation of this book), is that the love story is a quite small part of the overall plot. Don't read it for the pangs of unrequited love or the tension of the love triangle - the disappointment is sure to come if those are your expectations.

Boris Pasternak, with the bravery not encouraged in the Soviet Union, seemed to be not only acutely aware of the historical forces relentlessly driving the lives of his compatriots but also - which was definitely unacceptable and a few years prior to the completion of the novel, under the ever-increasing paranoia of Josef Stalin's rule, would have been in the best-case scenario punished by quite a few years in GULAG concentration camps in the depths of Siberia - recognized the absolute senselessness of so much of what had happened. His courage in expressing such views paid off in the form of the Nobel Prize that he was successfully pressured to reject back in 1958. The Nobel Prize was given, as we know now, not just for the merits of the novel itself but for what it represented - a daring slap in the face of the Soviet system both despised and feared in the Western world.

While I'm at it, I'd like to make sure I get across that while being quite skeptical about the October Socialist Revolution and its consequences, Pasternak was definitely not even close to being starry-eyed or wearing rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia when it came to the old way of living in Russia, the world shattered by the events of the revolution. He never leaves a doubt that the old world order needed to be changed, that the change was both necessary and organically expected. But the direction the change took was painfully brutal and, perhaps, less than ideal, and those who have suffered from such a radical change were perhaps the best people Russia had at that time - but their value has not made them any less vulnerable to the unrelenting march of time and dictatorship of the proletariat.

Yes, Pasternak clearly had strong views on what has happened and continued to happen. No surprise he used his novel to express them. Therefore, you do get pages and pages of beautifully expressed opinions in the form of passionate speeches. These pages are both wonderful since they are so insightful and interesting and full of understanding of the internal and external conflicts that go into the formation of these opinions - as well as actually detrimental to the novel in the way we usually think of novels, since there is little dialog as such, most of it replaced by passionate oration. These speeches hinder the narrative flow and introduce early on the feeling of artificialness, never allowing you to forget that this novel is a construction that serves the author's purpose rather than being an organic story.

The character development also suffers from the focus on the greater external events. I could never shake off the feeling that the characters were present as merely the vehicles for driving the story to where the author wanted it to go. They never developed into real people for me, instead remaining the illustrations of Pasternak's points and the mouthpieces for his ideas. In short, to me, even 600 pages in, they remained little but obedient marionettes. Besides, what I found a bit distracting and ringing of contrivance was the sheer amount of coincidences and unbelievable run-ins into each other that all his characters experienced in the vast reaches of the Russian empire with more frequency than one would expect from neighbors in a tiny village. The web of destiny with these improbable consequences tends to disintegrate into the strings holding up puppets, and that's unfortunate in such a monumental book.

And Pasternak's prose - it left me torn. On one hand, his descriptions are apt and beautiful, making scenes come to life with exceptional vividness. On the other hand, his descriptors and sentences frequently tend to clash, marring otherwise beautiful pictures. The reason these occurrences stand out so much to me is perhaps the knowledge of Pasternak's absolute brilliance as a poet, so easily seen in the collection of poems accompanying this novel. It's amazing to me to see the level of mastery he shows in his verse - the poem 'A Winter Night' colloquially known as simply \"The Candle Burned\" after its famous refrain is one of the best poems I know, and \"Hamlet\" is made of pure perfection - and therefore a bit disappointing to see it not always repeated in his prose.

And yet, despite the imperfections and the unevenness, there is still something in this novel that reflects the genius talent that created it. There is still something that did not let me put this book aside even when I realized I did not love it as much as I had hoped. The greatness is still there, despite the flaws, and it remains something to be admired.

3/5 stars.

When I first read this novel in my early twenties, it immediately entered my top ten favorite novels.

The descriptions of the ravishing snow, the high adventure of the long train journeys through spectacular landscapes, and Yuri and Lara as the romantically bound orphans of the storm were simply irresistible to my young and romantic imagination.

Moreover, as one would expect from a poet, the novel is filled with memorable and piercing images.

This was my third time reading it. While I still loved it, it would no longer make my top ten or even twenty. I began to suspect that it might be a novel that you love less as you get older.

There were moments when I found Pasternak's vision closer to that of an overly romantic young man, a lover, rather than a husband or father.

Nabokov famously called it dreary and conventional. However, for someone as astute as Nabokov, who was always able to come up with the right word, "dreary" seems decidedly off the mark.

Pasternak packs two revolutions, two world wars, and a famine into his novel. In fact, it's hard to think of any country in the history of the world that has gone through such a series of traumatic events in such a short period.

Pasternak does a terrific job of condensing all these events into a theatrical narrative. There are no more characters in this novel than in a play, and as in a play, all the characters continue to interact with each other in a self-contained world.

This, of course, requires a number of far-fetched coincidences, but they are embroidered together with such artistry that I never had a problem suspending my disbelief.

He achieves this by designing a floorplan in which the idea of predestination is the science that holds everything together.

As I was reading this, I was thinking that serious authors no longer tend to write romantic self-portraits of themselves. After Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the trend began to die out.

Perhaps this is because the person we least know in any objective sense is ourselves, and to write about oneself, especially from a romantic perspective, is to risk portraying what most people see as faults as qualities.

This is true of Yuri, who sometimes comes across as pompous and ineffectual, which I'm not sure Pasternak intended.

To be honest, I'm not sure how similar Yuri is to Pasternak, but because they are both poets, there is often the feeling that he is writing about himself.

Fitzgerald, after all, denied that Dick Diver was a self-portrait, when clearly this was a smokescreen. And like Dick Diver, Yuri isn't terribly convincing as a doctor either.

Not convincing, in other words, whenever Pasternak tries to distance him from himself. But this doesn't matter much in either case.

Dr Zhivago could be seen as the most elaborate justification of adultery ever written. I doubt if it's any hard-core feminist's favorite novel.

This time around, I wasn't convinced about his portrayal of women. He seems to idealize women rather than understand them, often putting his own words into their mouths.

Tonya's letter to Yuri when she finds out he's betrayed her is almost comical in its flattering appeal to his vanity and understanding of Lara's advantages over her own.

What woman would tell her man that she makes things simple and acknowledges her rival complicates them? That's like admitting you're duller than your rival. You might fear it, but you would never say it, at least not in the calm, moderated, charming way Tonya does.

This voice of reason on the part of Tonya, while the entire country is a bloodbath of irrational hatred, jars. Pasternak means well when he writes about women, but like many educated men of his generation, he can come across as patronizing.

Pasternak also shows how public life and its etiquette, its conventions, can corrupt personal life. In the old world, his marriage to Tonya is a rational decision – they're from the same class, share a similar education, and have much in common.

And yet, the lower-class Lara is better suited to him. But it takes the revolution for them to meet on equal terms. Ironically, then, for all his criticism of the revolution, he's recognizing that it introduced a broader prospect for love between soulmates, while before, love was principally confined to social equals.

Komarovsky is a key character for understanding what Pasternak thought of the revolution in broad terms. Komarovsky begins the novel as a predatory entrepreneur who enjoys the good life.

After all the passionate idealism, the killing, sacrifice, and starvation, Komarovsky loses not one iota of his power. The unscrupulous mercenary will always come out on top.

And maybe it's this accurate but rather unadventurous idea that runs through the novel that explains why Nabokov found it dreary. On the other hand, maybe he was just being critical of a rival.

Once again, I read the old translation, which has been roundly criticized. I read somewhere that the translator read a page and then set about translating it without looking at it again.

In other words, he went for the gist rather than the rhythm. There's a new translation now that is apparently much better.

The 1965 David Lean film with the same title is one of my all-time favorite movies. It was thus an inevitability that I would one day, finally, read Boris Pasternak’s novel masterpiece.

Just like James Dickey and Robert Penn Warren, this novel written by a poet leaves the reader with an idea of lyric quality. Nowhere is his identification as a poet more realized than at the end, as the book finishes with a section of poetry. However, there are passages throughout the book that blend seamlessly into an introspective, mystical poetry and then back again to the illustrative narrative. This style stands in stark contrast to the realistic, journalistic prose of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood written just a few years later but across the pond. The frequent references to Russian mysticism and a longing for an older, idyllic time are reminiscent of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

“The air smells of pancakes and vodka.” This is expressionism feigning realism. The great art of Doctor Zhivago lies in its connection with the tragic time and place it documents, the Russian transformation into the Soviet Union. Yuri Andreyivich becomes a personification of the lost Russia. His mother’s funeral and his father’s suicide are further metaphors for a lost innocence, a cutting off and separation from what was, and an isolationist, orphaned stepping into the future. Zhivago’s journey along with his fellow Russians into Soviet communism and his evolving disillusionment is both an allegory of the torture of individuality and a prayer for the undying hope and poetry of human resiliency. Yet Pasternak, and by extension his creation Zhivago, makes allowances for the need for social reform in Russia, and so his later and eventual dissatisfaction with communism has greater weight and credibility.

Besides Yuri Andreyivich, Pasternak describes a triumvirate of Russian characters: Pasha/Strelnikov, Kamerovski, and of course, Lara. Pasha, who transforms himself into the Red Army terrorist Strelnikov (resembling Conrad’s Kurtz), personifies the Russian idealist who is seduced and blinded by power. He begins with well-intentioned plans and dreams but comes to murder, outrage, and a death of moral courage. Kamerovski could be on a short list of the greatest literary villains of the twentieth century. The shameless lawyer, who betrayed Yuri’s parents and ruined Lara, comes to symbolize the debauchery of Czarist Russia, the extravagance and immoral bankruptcy of the times. Lara is Mother Russia, raped by a gilded villain, obligatorily married to an ideal, and in love, hopelessly and tragically, to a poet philosopher with whom togetherness cannot be.

I can understand how someone could call this their favorite work of all time. It was beautifully written and, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was iconoclastically both epic and intimately personal. I did very much enjoy reading it, and Pasternak’s poetic prose gives a magnified appreciation to Lean’s work, which was a fine tribute to the Great Russian novel.

At last, time was kind enough to grant me the opportunity to read this novel that had seemingly been sitting on my shelves for decades. I also watched the film and the recent mini-series (mama, why do you always watch war dramas?). And as if that wasn't already enough, a divinely sent, uncommon week of snow and icy temperatures descended upon these parts, perfectly in tune with large portions of the novel.

Books, cats, and life are good under the blanket, especially when one can read an engrossing novel like this one in ideal circumstances - in winter, without lacking food or heating. For some reason, I was shamefully prejudiced about this novel, considering it an overrated, anti-communist manifesto that was once acclaimed in the west as part of the propaganda wars. However, the book turned out to be by no means a pamphlet. I was surprised by how much space Pasternak devotes to religious contemplation (which reminded me of the chapters on Pontius Pilatus in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita). I wondered if that would have been more problematic for the regime than the depiction of the revolution if they had actually read it before banning it from publication.

Did I enjoy reading it? Absolutely. It is a masterpiece, and there is so much to love about Pasternak’s lyrical and often dreamlike eloquence, the wonderful collection of fascinating characters, the abundance of discussions and ideas, the stunning descriptions of nature, and the radiant scenes that are as atmospheric as they are cinematic, and those magnificent poems as the occluding track. Did it become one of my all-time favorite novels? Not quite, I'm afraid - it didn't enrapture me like Bulgakov’s novel did. Nevertheless, I know I will read it again, hoping that by then I can find the words to express the thoughts that crossed my mind while reading this marvellous novel.

(Illustration: Alexander Mostov, The Rowan Tree)