(lido em Abril de 2017)

In 1957, Boris Pasternak published «Doctor Zhivago», his most famous work, with which he won the Nobel Prize the following year. The Soviets gathered to condemn this anti-revolutionary work, and their speeches began like this: «I haven't read this work, but…».

How to explain so much in just a few words? It is a novel about Russia, agitated by war and the Bolshevik revolution: a time of rebellions, distrust, and transition, when theory had not yet adjusted to practice.

It is a tragic and tearful happiness, as Zhivago concludes in his reflections. It is a period in which the vast majority of people are forced into a constant duplicity established in the system. The psychological analyses, the landscape descriptions, and the train journeys are all extraordinary.

The Russian revolution is also the setting for love. Tonia, Zhivago's wife, «his fault, his eternal remorse», and Lara, his great love, a passionate love story.

Excerpt:«He [Zhivago] thought of several existences that unfold side by side and move parallel, with different rhythms. He asked himself at what moment the destiny of one overtakes that of the other. He envisioned something like a principle of relativity applied to the journey of life...»

What this book seems to lack is a good editor. Given the circumstances in which it was published, that is not surprising. It was published in translation rather than in the Russian language, and the author was not available to discuss any edits or changes. However, it is not a bad book at all.

The writing is awesome frequently (though not frequently enough), especially the poems at the end. But it has a bunch of issues. There are some boring parts, repetitiveness, an annoyingly large number of coincidences (like in Dickens), and confusion about names. This is not only because of the Russian three-name system but also because the writer doesn't make any effort at clarification. Often, Russian writers stick to one name for their characters even if the characters may use other names for each other. Pasternak does no such thing, which will probably confuse a Russian reader too. The Soviet government was an idiot to create so much noise about the book. If it wasn't for them, it probably would never have got popularity.

If Zhivago was a real-life person, he would never have set outside his place. Something keeps happening to disturb his journey. His vehicle goes the wrong way, his train has to stop midway for days, his vehicle malfunctions and has to be repaired frequently, he gets kidnapped, etc. That, annoying as it was for me (and probably for Zhivago too), seems to be intentional on the part of the author - a motif to represent the disturbance that had become a part of life in Russia.

This must be especially annoying for intellectuals, and Zhivago was one - a writer. Often, we find him having a sort of spiritual or mystic or some other kind of experience, and it would make me believe that he is going to have an epiphany of some sort. But the epiphany never comes because he is disturbed by one thing or another.

Similarly, he is repeatedly forced to abandon his writings due to one misfortune or another. And when he returns to them, he discovers that he is not able to resume them. Some of the best of the writings are written in a particularly excited state of mind (what Ishiguru calls "crash") when the writer only wants to write and do nothing else. As once the excited state is gone, we find we are no longer the same person.

There is quite a bit of philosophy too. Zhivago's philosophy changes over time and it loses its robust revolutionary spirit to take a fatalistic turn over the years.

And of course, Moscow. Towards the end, the city is compared to the heroine of a tragic novel who has suffered a lot, and that is exactly the case. Throughout the novel, we see it being ruined revolution by revolution.

The book is truly far superior to the movie. It's astonishing how much more depth and detail the written word can convey. Even without the presence of a notable actor like Omar Sherif, the book manages to captivate and engage the reader on a whole different level.

When we read a book, we have the freedom to imagine the characters and the scenes in our own unique way. Our minds can paint a vivid picture that is often more detailed and personal than what a movie can show. The book allows us to explore the thoughts and emotions of the characters more deeply, getting inside their heads and understanding their motivations.

In contrast, a movie is limited by its runtime and the director's vision. It can only show us a fraction of what the book contains. Many important details and subplots may be omitted or simplified in the movie adaptation.

So, while a movie can be an entertaining and visually appealing experience, it simply cannot match the power and beauty of a well-written book. The book is a world of its own, waiting to be discovered and explored by the reader.

UPDATE, Cântecul Larei: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AkBo...

The novel offers a state of anxiety that words fail to describe. It introduces us to the Russian atmosphere at the beginning of the tragic 20th century, a time of two wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Stalinism. Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, a semi-aristocrat turned doctor, is also a dilettante in poetry. It's true, as criticized, that Pasternak includes the names of even the most insignificant characters, often confusing the reader.

The novel mainly surprises with scenes from the Bolshevik Revolution, showing no inclination towards either the White or the Red side, both camps being equally criticized and having blood on their hands. However, Pasternak also introduces something special, a poet in the midst of war, which differentiates his writing. And of course, it's not just him, as the circle of characters has an immeasurable radius.

There are only noble characters, but with different orientations. Among them, one character fascinates me - Pasha Antipov, who later becomes General Strelnikov. He stands out not only for not finding his place in the world but also for his hostility towards it and his revolt against all of humanity and its history.

As for Yuri Zhivago, the most poignant thing is his downfall. He loved but couldn't love just one woman; he accepted history but couldn't make peace with it in the end. And like in any novel that captures a period of ideological turmoil, there is the inevitable dialectic.

The novel also tells the story of its own publication. Pasternak chose to stay in communist Russia even though his family emigrated to Germany in 1920. He came from an aristocratic family, with his father being a university professor and his mother a pianist of European reputation. The Pasternak family received visits from Leo Tolstoy, Rachmaninoff, and Rilke, who influenced and strengthened his artistic orientation.

Boris Pasternak suffered greatly because of this novel. It was labeled as political and "educated" in a spirit not conforming to the Party. The novel was published in Italy without the author's consent and later in Russian in the Netherlands. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize, but he was forced to refuse it and was expelled from the USSR. The novel was published three decades later, finally reaching the Russian public it was dedicated to.

God! If I could, I would read only Russian literature my whole life, because - I don't know if it's just in my case - it has heaps of tragedy even in the fragments of romanticism. I also recommend the film, which simplifies the multitude of names and offers a fleeting image of the action, making you focus on the description when reading the book. And Pasternak is a master of description. The film is from 1965, directed by David Lean and starring Omar Sharif.

1. Religious inclinations and their roots: "Lara was not a religious nature. She didn't believe in rituals. Yet, sometimes, to be able to bear this life, she needed the accompaniment of a certain inner music. She couldn't compose this music alone each time. This music was the Word of God about life, and Lara went to church to weep at the end of this word."

2. Fragments from a speech given by Zhivago to a dying person: "You will ask if it will hurt, if the tissues will feel decomposition. That is, you will ask what will happen to your consciousness. But what is consciousness? Let's see. To want to fall asleep consciously means sure insomnia, to want to feel the functioning of one's own digestion means to destroy its inertia. Consciousness is a poison, a means of self-intoxication for the subject who truly appeals to it. It is the light that radiates outside, it lights our way so we don't stumble. It is the lighthouse that burns in front of the locomotive. By turning its light inward, we cause a catastrophe."

3. About the non-existence of the moment of death (or is this inconceivable for human reason?!): "There will be no death, says John the Theologian. Listen to how simple his argumentation is. There will be no death because what has been has passed."

4. "Man no longer holds the initiative, nor does his state of mind seek an expression, but language arrogates to itself the main role and the one in which it wants to express it."

5. "Works speak in many ways: through themes, situations, subjects, heroes. But most of all, they speak through the presence of art contained in them. The presence of art on the pages of the novel Crime and Punishment trembles more deeply than Raskolnikov's crime."

Andrei Tamaş,
18 October 2015

A Story from the Marvels of Russian Literature by Boris Pasternak - I once watched a film about it in the 1970s and of course forgot most of the events of the film which starred Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin and Rod Steiger.

When you hold the book in your hands and read the author's words as he painstakingly writes the story of Doctor Zhivago, you breathe in the essence of Russia and experience the cruel war, you feel the extent of the Russians' suffering in their lives and their fear of deportation and executions, and the desperate and chaotic human situation that the Russians lived in during that historical period, the confusion and hesitation that afflicted many and changed the course of their lives.

Doctor Zhivago's novel is considered one of the most beautiful and greatest novels ever written in Russian literature. We can touch it in the character of the protagonist, Doctor Zhivago, in one of the most beautiful stories of romantic love. When he met the nurse Lara, he fell in love with her despite being married to Tonya, who also had his love and respect. She was the mother of his son Sasha, who did not succeed in seeing his birth because he joined the army. Then he left his beloved Lara to return to his wife and son, and then met Lara again only to part again because of the circumstances of the war. Then he married Marina without formalizing it in the church or the civil marriage office because his wife Tonya was still alive and living in France with her children.

Among the threads of the novel, the author weaves the character of Doctor Yuri's half-brother, Efim Zyva

Antipov and Lara, this is the true love story of the novel, friends.

Besides the drawbacks, I had expected it to be very different. The magnificent, vivid images of the poet Pasternak, fragments of a lost Russia and a surviving Russia. The mute who speaks, the white soldier killed in a barrel, seven hundred passengers of the train who shovel snow from the tracks of a burned station, white firs, the taiga, the house of statues. At the narrative level, however, this dispersion is heavy, artificial and creates an unforgivable detachment from the protagonists (how many are there? who are they? wins a medal who manages to use less than thirty pages to understand each time to whom the author is referring). The Individual against History. A progressive doctor who comes to terms with the blind force of a cyclopean event like the Revolution, the flood that has swept away a world, his world. This is the idea of the novel which, however, is often too exposed by the author, too cumbersome, so much so as not to leave space and breath to the characters, crushed and deprived of agency. Yes, this atmosphere is part of the greatness of the novel. The mortal mantle of snow that flutters over this Atlantis that is about to be submerged. The storm that drags the protagonists from one place to another, refugees, strangers to their own land. The novel is precisely centered on this sense of uprooting, unjust but imperative. Brief happy parentheses, like candle stubs, only announce the inevitable end. I don't know why it is sold as an epic love story. There is very little epic, in fact, Zivago is properly an antihero, indecisive, scattered. The ending then is the anti-epic par excellence. The love for the woman and for nature, then, rather than passions are consolations. The best character in fact is Antipov who is much closer to the frenzied ones of Dostoevsky. A sad and dark novel and precisely for this it could very well have entered among my favorite books and yet it was not so. Yes, I know that as described it is wonderful and it is indeed but it is more beautiful to talk about it than to read it. Reading it instead is a great effort. Too many time jumps, too many artificial coincidences (yes, I know that this is not the point, I know that I can overlook it but in the meantime I wrinkled my nose, what can I do?). And yet, I will reread it. Maybe not in July. This is a book for January, my friends.

❄️ I, like many others, truly relished the iconic movie

Doctor Zhivago is the account of the disturbing relationship between man and tragedy, between the self and history. It is the testimony of a continuous and persistent uprising of the individual against power. Where power attempts to annihilate the self, lo and behold – as if in reaction – it is reaffirmed with even greater force. The tragedy itself seems to become, in the novel, almost the privileged occasion for the characters, suddenly faced with their own freedom, to be forced to choose, to take a stand, and in such a gesture to rediscover themselves as men. Defeated men – it is possible, indeed probable – but men. Like the fierce (and desperate) Strelnikov, the symbol of the man to whom “nothing scared”, of the man who is “what he wants to be”. Of him, Pasternak writes:

“His intelligence lacked the gift of the accidental, the force that, with unforeseen discoveries, violates the sterile harmony of the predictable. In the same way, to do good, his coherence of principles lacked the incoherence of the heart, which knows no general cases, but only the particular, and is great because it acts in the sphere of the small”.

Doctor Zhivago is the journey of a man (a poet) who cannot give up being such even in the face of an exciting and fierce historical moment that seems to swallow up individual destinies. This is Zhivago's great rebellion: not to give up his creative self (to see, to feel, to write).

Love during the Revolution is nothing more than a fragment in a much vaster story, which is neither romantic, nor political, nor social, but universal. A masterpiece.

Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago" is a remarkable work that can be likened to a Russian song. Just as a song seems to hold back the flow of content, this novel restrains and masters itself, personifying anguish and nullifying deliberations. The prose is both lyrical and philosophically prophetic, and the novel's unique composition and character-driven story make it a captivating read.

The story follows Dr. Zhivago, an orphaned boy who grows up to be a doctor and a writer. Along the way, he experiences love, marriage, romance, and an affair that ends sadly. The character of Lara is particularly memorable, with her troubling story that draws the reader in. The novel is also influenced by Pasternak's own experiences in the Bolshevik Revolution and the years of communism that followed, making it a visceral and enlightening portrayal of a tumultuous time.

Despite some criticism of its lack of a traditional plot and confused chronology, "Dr. Zhivago" remains a classic work of literature. Its unique composition and beautiful language make it a novel that is both agreeable and eluding, one that readers will always remember having read.

  A Russian song is like water in a mill pond. It seems stopped and unmoving. But in its depths it constantly flows...By all possible means, by repetitions, by parallelisms, it holds back the course of the graudally developing content...Restraining itself, mastering itself, an anguished force...it is a mad attempt to stop time with words.

Here, Pasternak's character was describing a song, but I do believe Pasternak was defining his novel. Or maybe I just want to believe it, for this book is indeed a Russian song. Get into step with the beat and you get the novel.

The prose is lyrical in some places, philosophically prophetic in others, but what this novel does well is personify anguish, nullify deliberations, form a debate around ideology, and discuss war from a situational, not a story context.

I'm glad that I chose to read-along with the "Around The World" Good Reads book club this month.

This is an unusual book. One of those books whose meandering complexities is agreeable, yet eluding. Like, One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance. One of those books you read and will always remember you've read it. Though at first glance it is baffling once you realize that you have to chart your way through characters, having intermittent moments of murmuring aloud like a fool: Ok, remember, Dr. Zhivago is also called Yuri Andreevich, or Yura; Larissa Fyodorovna is also Antipova, or simply Lara; Strelnikov is also called Pashenka Antipov; Antonina Alexandrovna is also Tonya; Viktor Ippolitovich is not another character, he's Komarovsky. Phew.

Get past the characters with quite a few names and you get to language:

Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of external, audible sounds, but in terms of the swiftness and power of its inner flow.

Get past language and you see professions of divinity:

"Lord...How have You allowed me to approach You, how have You let me wander onto Your priceless earth, under Your stars, to the feet of this reckless, luckless, unmurmuring, beloved woman?"

Get to fascinating character descriptions like this one: "...Ivan Ivanovich, a thin, towheaded, mercurial man, with a malicious little beard that made him look like an American of Lincoln's time (he kept gathering it in his hand and catching the tip of it in his lips)."

Yet don't wait for an iteration of the bearded man with the weird habit because there is the issue of plot.

"Critics found that there was no real plot to the novel," the editors said, "that its chronology was confused. These perplexities are understandable, but they come from a failure to pay attention to the specific composition of the novel..." While I don't agree that the duty is only on the readers to "pay attention"--seems a bit coarse, as the author really owes much more to the reader than vice versa--I do agree with the composition aspect. It is rare.

The story is about Dr. Zhivago, an orphaned boy at the beginning of the novel, a doctor and very distraught man at the end. Nonetheless, Zhivago, or Yuri, appears as if performing in a stage play. It is character-driven and the composition and transitioning that you expect from most novels, seems to happen on its own term. Again I say, it is a song. Here, there is even poetry in the middle of prose because Zhivago was also a writer. There is love and marriage and romance. There is an affair that ends sadly. There is Lara, one of my favorite chaacters who reels you in towards the beginning because hers is a troubling story: Let's just say, think, Lolita.

The novel is visceral and noxious and enlightening, influenced by its author's experience in the Bolshevik Revolution, and the years of communism, hunger, confusion, family separation, and more. An author who was also a poet. One who was silenced as a writer until after Stalin's death, who was not even allowed to accept the esteemed Nobel Prize in Literature that he had been honored with.

This is a very personal and amateur review, and it might mess up the story, but it helps you not to be a prisoner of Doctor Zhivago!

Dear friends, the main character of this novel is "Doctor Zhivago" who has fallen in love with "Lara" and the story revolves around the central theme of their love for each other...

In this story, the way the dictatorial and oppressive government treats the people is clearly shown.

Doctor Zhivago is sent to the battlefield (World War I) as a doctor in 1914 and is forced to leave his wife "Tonia" and his young son alone.

On the other hand, a girl named "Lara" is from a poor family. Her family friend and her mother's protector, Mr. "Komarovsky", has fallen in love with her. Lara marries a man named "Pavel" in order to escape from him and has a child with him. But Pavel goes to war in 1914 and disappears after a while. Lara and her little daughter "Katya" are left alone.... Lara decides to go to war and take care of the soldiers, where she meets Doctor Zhivago.

In 1917, after the Soviet revolution, Zhivago returns to Moscow and goes with his wife and son to the city of "Yuratal" to live in peace and escape from the hardships. After a while, Lara also moves to that city and suddenly meets Doctor Zhivago again, and the story of their love is repeated... Zhivago and Lara learn that Lara's husband, who was missing in the war, is alive and lives as a cruel commissar of the party under his new name "Strelnikov". At the same time, the partisans ask Zhivago to treat their wounded and sick in the war.

Dear friends, it is better for you to read this sad story yourself and learn about the tragic ending and the strange love story.

I hope this review is sufficient and useful for getting to know this book.

"Be victorious and be Iranian."

Fischia il vento e soffia la buffera...♬ ♪ ♩

Dietro le quinte:

«Le idee non nascono per venire nascoste o soffocate sul nascere, ma per essere comunicate agli altri. »

Pasternak wrote this in one of his letters to the publisher Feltrinelli. This correspondence is the fulcrum of a story that is first editorial and then political, and which has rightly been defined as a novel within a novel. The Soviet authorities threatened the author and opposed in every way the publication of a work considered derogatory. However, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli managed to achieve his intention and the book was published in Italy on 23 November 1957. In October 1958, he was awarded the Nobel Prize: it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Forced to refuse, he began to be persecuted and lived in a state of continuous siege. The correspondence with Feltrinelli became increasingly tearful, creating misunderstandings and misinterpretations that were the basis of long legal cases that would drag on long after his death. A book that many people desire. Just think that in Italy there were 24 reprints in just one year!! Only the author would not benefit from the earnings: he died in poverty on 30 May 1960.

Si apre la scena. Juri, ovvero l'uomo che non si piega.

It is a funeral that announces the tragic work. A death that is both an end and a beginning, because from the very beginning in this novel, the air of continuous changes and evolutions is felt. The history of a nation - from the turmoil of 1905 and the birth of the soviets to the great revolution and civil war of 1917, the transition phase and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship - holds and contains the story of the Moscow doctor Juri, around whom destinies revolve that unconsciously touch.

The revolution broke out almost against his will, like a sigh held for too long. Everyone has come back to life, has been reborn; everywhere there are transformations, upheavals. It could be said that in each person two revolutions have taken place: one's own, individual, and the other general.

Juri is the eye that observes the political and social upheavals, but from the very beginning, the particular attention given to Nature stands out: in its form, in its consistency, and also in its tumultuous changes. A human-like Nature, palpitating, alive, and a participant in emotions and feelings. In every respect, it is an important protagonist that represents the one in which one can have faith because, although it is true that Nature also disrupts with its meteorological disturbances or with the harshness of its landscape, it, however, follows certain already written rules. It is of man, instead, that one cannot trust: unfaithful, cowardly, and traitorous. Juri notices from the very beginning how the revolution has transformed the old friends and the whole people. Fundamentally, people begin to abandon their own individuality, their own thought, to adhere to a mass ideology that imitates itself (”I don't know of a current that is more closed in on itself and further from the facts of Marxism.\\").

\\"Only in mediocre books are people divided into two camps and do not come into contact. But, in reality, everything is so intertwined! What an absolute nothingness one must be to support only one part in life, to occupy only one place in society, to always mean the same thing. \\"
Everything is already written. Everything is inevitable and one cannot escape destiny. The dictatorship of the soviets draws an unnatural landscape where the distrust born of terror resides; where \\"The times gave reason to the ancient saying: homo homini lupus .

The cinematic adaptation and its need to manipulate the texts in the name of the box office have erroneously simplified the work as the love story between Juri and Lara. Certainly, they love each other, but it is a particular passion:

\\"Even more than the affinity of their souls, what united them was the abyss that separated them from the rest of the world. Both felt the same aversion for what is fatally typical of today's man, for his artificial exaltation, for his noisy emphasis, for that mortifying inertia of the imagination that countless workers of art and science are concerned with nourishing, so that genius remains an exception. Theirs was a great love. But everyone loves without realizing the extraordinariness of their feeling. For them, instead, and in this they were a rarity, the moments in which, like a breath of eternity, in their condemned human existence the tremor of passion occurred, constituted moments of revelation and of a new deepening of themselves and of life. \\"

But this too is an illusion. While \\"the wind whistles and the blizzard blows\\", the road becomes one-way. Everyone must proceed on their own in the new dawn of the proletariat, and those who do not know or do not want to adapt will remain on the margins and disappear into nothingness.