To anyone interested. If you know me, you know of my fondness for Eastern Europe and especially Ukraine and Russia. I have been in love with that part of the world since seeing the original Dr. Zhivago movie back in the late 60's.
I'm posting this syopsis, mainly for my own archives in case I can't ever find it again online.
It's probably the best review of Boris Pasternak's story I've ever read. If you're reading this, perhaps you too would be interested enough from the review to read the book. It is, at times, a laborious reading because Pasternak takes so much time to show us the backgrounds of some many different characters. But in the end, it's a beautiful story of a man torn between two loves. And really that struggle is a picture of the love Pasternak himself had for his own country.
At the very least, read this, and watch the original movie with Omar Sharif as Zhivago.
Despite its undisputed importance as a social document chronicling a crucial
period in Russian and world history,
Doctor Zhivago continues to divide
critics at the most basic level of how it works, its affinity to the novel
tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and even the genre to which
it belongs. Describe as both one of the greatest political novels and one of the
literature’s great love stories,
Doctor Zhivago has also been called “a
fairy tale,” “a kind of morality play,” “an apocalyptic poem in the form of a
novel,” “one of the most original works of modern times,” and “a
nineteenth-century novel by a twentieth-century poet.” Compared to predecessors
like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the great nineteenth-century Russian realistic
novel tradition, Pasternak has been found wanting in his failure to provide
believable, rounded characters. Compared to modernist innovators like Joyce,
Woolf, and Faulkner, he has been viewed as old-fashioned and out-moded. To
appreciate fully Pasternak’s achievement in
Doctor Zhivago it is
necessary to recognize that its nonconformity extends beyond its unorthodox and
unsanctioned ideas to its formal challenges to established narrative
assumptions.
Doctor Zhivago is neither a failed nineteenth-century nor
a disappointing modernist novel, but a radical synthesis of both traditions in a
daringly original construct.
Aspects of Pasternak’s life and career provide crucial contexts for his
single novel published three years before his death. Born in Moscow in 1890,
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was the eldest child of painter Leonid Pasternak and
concert pianist Rosa Kaufman and was raised in the midst of Moscow’s
intellectual and artistic community. Tolstoy was a household visitor, and the
distinguished composer Alexander Scarabin encouraged the fourteen-year-old
Pasternak in his study of music. Convinced that he lacked the necessary
technical skills, at age nineteen, Pasternak abandoned music for poetry and
philosophy, eventually enrolling in Germany’s prestigious Marburg University
until 1912 when he returned to Russia and committed himself exclusively to
poetry. Associated with the Russian symbolist and futurist movements, Pasternak
began to gain a reputation as a leading figure of a new generation of Russian
poets who sought a greater freedom of poetic subjects and expression, more
closely tied to actual experience and colloquial language.
Boris Pasternak
Declared exempt from military service during World War I because of a
childhood leg injury, Pasternak managed a draft board in the Urals. When the
revolution came, Pasternak was largely sympathetic, embracing the promise of
needed social reform and liberation of the spirit that his poetry advocated. As
the new Soviet regime grew increasingly conservative in cultural matters and
repressive in silencing dissent, Pasternak, throughout the 1930s, published
little, perfecting the delicate art of survival under Stalin, of maintaining
core principles while avoiding the fate of fellow writers and artistic
colleagues who faced death sentences and banishment to labor camps.
Convinced that the Soviet state had betrayed the ideals of the revolution and
that the drive for collectivism in Soviet society violated essential imperatives
of human nature, sometime during the 1930s, Pasternak decided to turn from
poetry to prose to tell the story of his generation and its historical fate
under the tsar, during the Great War, and through the revolution and the
establishment of the communist state, in part as an expression of survivor’s
guilt. Writing in 1948, Pasternak admitted, “I am guilty before everyone. But
what can I do? So here in the novel—it is part of this debt, proof that at least
I tried.” Drawing on his earlier interests in musical composition, philosophy,
and a career devoted to poetry, Pasternak conceived a novel capacious enough to
contain his “views on art, the Gospels, human life in history and many other
things.” Rejecting the “idiotic clichés” of socialist realism and an edited,
sanitized view of the revolution and its aftermath, Pasternak embraced the role
as truth teller in which “Everything is untangled, everything is named, simple,
transparent, sad. Once again, afresh, in a new way, the most precious and
important things, the earth and the sky, great warm feeling, the spirit of
creation, life and death, have been delineated.”
Doctor Zhivago began to take final shape during the late 1940s as
Pasternak faced increasing government hostility for his “anti-Soviet” views. To
punish him indirectly, Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaia, was
arrested in 1949 and sentenced to five years in a hard-labor camp “for close
contact with persons suspected of espionage.” Pasternak would later confess that
Olga was the Lara of his novel, which was finally completed in early 1956.
Pasternak’s comments about his work in his letters reveal key points about
his intentions and methods for
Doctor Zhivago. Throughout his
correspondence, Pasternak refers to his “novel in prose,” a nod to Pushkin’s
“novel in verse,” Eugene Onegin, and a connection to Pasternak’s following the
same literary trajectory of Russia’s literary fountainhead, Pushkin, from poetry
to prose. Regarding his poetry as preparatory work and incapable of supporting
his historical and philosophical aspirations, Pasternak claimed, “a poem is to
prose as a sketch is to a painting.” Yet at the core of
Doctor Zhivago
is Pasternak’s insistent lyricism in which narrative elements are joined through
imagery, counterpoint, and symbolism. Pasternak’s poetic method explains why
Doctor
Zhivago, measured against the standard of the realistic novel
often falls short. Characters rather than appearing distinct and original tend
to merge together, expressing shared preoccupations and feelings.
Defending himself against charges of “not sufficient tracing of characters,”
Pasternak insisted that “more than to delineate them I tried to efface them.” To
the charge of the novel’s many violations of probability with coincidence,
Pasternak claimed, “Realism of genre and language doesn’t interest me. That’s
not what I value. In the novel there is a grandeur of another kind.” Underlying
the novel’s blending of elements from poetry and prose and a manipulation of
events that lends a fairy tale or providential aura to the book is Pasternak’s
contention that “existence was more original, extraordinary and inexplicable
than any of its separate astonishing incidents and facts. I was attracted by the
unusualness of the usual.”
Pasternak’s subjective, poeticized perspective aligns
Doctor Zhivago
in certain ways with magic realists like Márquez as much as with Tolstoy in his
pursuit of “the atmosphere of being,” which he described as “the whole sequence
of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a
developing, passing by, rolling and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself
had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless variants and
versions.”
Pasternak’s “moving entireness” in
Doctor Zhivago begins with the
ten-year-old Yury Zhivago attending his mother’s funeral in a driving snow
storm, imagistically uniting human destiny and the vitality and power of nature
that threatens to engulf and overwhelm the individual. This theme of the
survival of the individual will be orchestrated throughout the novel, embedded
even in the title character’s family name, an older Russian form of the word
“alive.” It is the first of many scenes in which Zhivago’s isolation and
vulnerability to both natural forces and human events aligned against his
aspirations toward selfhood will be emphasized. The novel relies on several
traditional structural principles including the novel of development and
education of the artist as well as the quest novel in which the artist Zhivago
eventually emerges after a succession of tests. Yet
Doctor Zhivago is a
tragically-conceived modern
Odyssey in which not home but isolation and
separation from virtually every sustaining relationship and external consolation
are his destination. Ultimately, Zhivago’s only reward or redemption is his art
and the affirmation of the mystery and majesty of existence that his poems
assert.
The first portion of the novel dramatizes the last decade of tsarist rule and
the events leading up to World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Following the
suicide death of his father over the loss of his fortune, Yury is raised in the
professorial home of Alexander and Anna Gromeko and their daughter Tonya. The
novel’s catalyst and moral touchstone is the “Girl from a Different World,” Lara
Guishar, the teenaged daughter of a Belgian hatmaker, whose story connects the
comfortable bourgeois world of the Gromekos with Moscow’s labor class and
incipient revolutionaries. Her seduction by the rich lawyer, Komarovksy,
establishes a connection with Yury who is on hand after Lara’s mother’s failed
suicide attempt and at the Christmas party where Lara tries and fails to shoot
her lover. They next meet at the front during World War I where Yury, having
married Tonya, is serving as a doctor and Lara is working as a nurse, having
gone to the front in search of her husband, Pasha Antipov, who has abandoned her
and their child, unable to reconcile himself to his wife’s past with Komarovsky.
As Yury and Lara’s attachment grows, news of the revolution reaches them, and
both return to their respective homes—Yury to Moscow, and Lara to Yuryatin in
Siberia.
Having experienced the dehumanizing conditions of war, Yury returns to
similar conditions in Moscow under the Bolsheviks where his family’s privileged
existence has been transformed to a struggle for survival in which Yury’s
integrity, individualism, and artistic sensibility are not just valueless but
dangerously subversive. Seeking relief, the family travels east to Tonya’s
former family estate in Siberia, near Yuryatin, Lara’s home. The train journey
is one of the triumphs of the novel in which the immense Russian landscape is
brilliantly evoked and a rich collection of the various classes of Russian
society displaced by the revolution are brought together during the dangerous
and lawless days of the Civil War. Yury barely avoids execution in an encounter
with the merciless revolutionary leader, Strelnikov, Lara’s renamed husband
Antipov. Settling at the Varykino estate and subsisting off the land, the family
thrives for a year before a chance reunion between Yury and Lara leads to their
love affair. Guilt ridden and determined to reconcile with Tonya, Yury is
kidnapped on his way home by Bolshevik partisan fighters in need of a doctor.
Serving with them for over a year and experiencing the horrific violence and
human debasement of the Civil War, Yury finally escapes back to Yuryatin where
he is nursed back to health by Lara and learns that Tonya, her father, and their
children have returned to Moscow before being deporting to the West.
The reunited lovers are interrupted by the appearance of Komarovsky who warns
Lara of her danger as the wife of the now condemned Strelnikov. They respond by
leaving Yuryatin for Varykino and two weeks of happiness in which Yury resumes
his poetry, inspired by Lara. Komarovsky offers Lara and her child safe passage
to the east, and Yury, to convince her to take it, lies that he will join them.
Left alone, Yury is visited by the hunted Strelnikov who, in despair over the
failure of his revolutionary ideals and his betrayal of Lara’s love, shoots
himself. The novel concludes with Yury’s life in Moscow, having been stripped of
everything he had formerly relied on to sustain him—his wife, family, and lover.
Resuming his medical career and his writing, Yury finally dies of a heart
attack, ultimately vindicated by the poems that close the book, testimony of
both his heroic resistance to the forces of death and despair and affirmation of
the value of life, embodied by the essential human qualities of his muse, Lara.
She arrives in Moscow in time for the funeral before disappearing: “She must
have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she
died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as nameless number on a list which later
was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in
the north.”
In the fates of both Lara and Yuri the reader feels an overwhelming sense of
human waste, having been instructed by the author in the value their lives and
living has, set beside the necessities of history and ideology that has
diminished both.
Doctor Zhivago attempts to redress the balance,
translating the “nameless number on a list” into memorable human terms that
never neglects the “unusualness of the usual.”
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Dr. Daniel S. Burt is a writer and college professor who
teaches graduate literature courses at Wesleyan University in Middletown,
Connecticut, where he was a dean for nine years.
