Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak, 1958 ★★

Forbidden Fruit Is Not Always Sweet

Does declaring a novel forbidden also somehow make it great? It’s a question I am left with after reading Doctor Zhivago, the novel that won its author a Nobel Prize which he couldn’t collect because he was under house arrest for writing Doctor Zhivago.

I can’t think of a better recommendation for a book than that; alas, making the right kind of enemy may be by far the best thing Doctor Zhivago has going for it.

Simply put, the novel proved for me a pokey struggle, with long chapters in which nothing really happened, characters who kept disappearing and reappearing without altering the plot, and a protagonist whose passivity and shape-shifting makes him hard to root for even when he isn’t making time with women other than his wife.

When we first meet Yurii Andreievich Zhivago, he is a young boy attending his mother’s funeral in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The world is a strange and scary place for little Yura, more so than he realizes at times. His dissolute father, who abandoned him long ago, kills himself aboard a train while it just happens to be passing a country estate where Yura is being cared for. It’s a pretty striking coincidence that I didn’t mind so much this one time, before it became rote from repetition.

“Only real greatness can be so unconcerned with timing and opportunity,” Zhivago declares.

By this point in the novel, halfway through Chapter 6, Zhivago is beginning to question the major historical undercurrent of the novel, the Russian Revolution and its immediate aftermath. A product of the upper middle class, Zhivago starts out supportive of Lenin’s wholesale reinvention of his nation but becomes disillusioned after the hardships go on and on with no sign of abatement.

“Marxism is too uncertain of its ground to be a science,” Zhivago observes later on. “Sciences are more balanced, more objective. I don’t know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism.”

A tension between the Marxist ideal of perfect human equality and the Soviet reality of deprivation and random murder comes to define the novel’s second half. By this time, Zhivago has been abducted by a band of Bolshevik partisans, separated from his wife and family, and eventually comes to rest in abject poverty in a village along the Ural Mountains, far from his native Moscow.

There is a compensation, though, in the form of Larisa Feodorovna Guishar, also known as Lara, a woman Yuri encountered glancingly as a youth and first became acquainted with when she was a nurse and he was a medic on the Eastern Front during World War I. Lara will be the great love of Yuri’s life, but not until the pair undergo a false start and a long separation.

You could not communicate with life and existence, but she was their representative, their expression, in her the inarticulate principle of existence became sensitive and capable of speech…Everything about her was perfect, flawless.

Julie Christie as Lara and Omar Sharif as Yuri in the 1965 film adaptation directed by David Lean, which remains more than a half-century later the most famous representation of Pasternak's novel. It has the same fixation on the above two characters as the novel does, but at three-plus hours feels like a time bargain by comparison to this often-leaden book. Image from https://screengoblin.com/2016/09/09/doctor-zhivago/

There is a strong, unspoken connection in the novel between Lara and Russia itself, a sense of a love so great that any return of affection is like an undeserved bonus. I get the feeling for many people, the Lara-Yuri story is something that makes everything else in Doctor Zhivago, however convoluted, seem worthwhile.

Never mind the fact Zhivago’s love for Lara is what causes his doom, pushing him from mere refugee to dissident on the run. Lara herself doesn’t really emerge much better from the experience, in a story that emphasizes fatalism and fate at every turn.

For all the lyricism with which Pasternak writes of their union, there is a sense less of destiny than of fallback, of calling upon a deep passion rather than go through the more grueling effort of communicating in deeds how these two wind up choosing each other. For me, this was a big problem.

Whether in love or life, things have a way of happening to Yuri without him taking an active role. Whether it’s being assigned his first wife, Tonia; or taking up with Lara; or giving up Lara to the same dissolute character who once robbed her of her virginity; or any one of a number of other things, Yuri is like flotsam in history’s wake.

The theme of history being some vast, impersonal force is a recurring one in Doctor Zhivago, from its beginning to the end.

“Now what is history?” we hear Yuri’s philosopher-uncle Nikolai Vedeniapin explaining in the first pages of the book. “It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death…Man does not die in a ditch like a dog – but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; he dies sharing in this work.”

It is this lack of humility in the face of a higher calling that sets Yuri against Soviet communism later on: “Reshaping life!” he fumes. “People who can say that have never understood a thing about life.”

In Lara he finds something to connect him with that sense of history; in letting her go, he achieves acceptance of fate: No single man makes history, the narrative concludes. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing.

The thing with Doctor Zhivago is it reads like grass growing after a while. The chapters plod along, transcribing long philosophical conversations about beauty and God, only to throw us forward into a completely different situation without warning, like when Zhivago is waylaid by those Bolshevik partisans, who are led by a coked-up warlord.

Okay, I thought, maybe this will kick things up a notch. No. All it did was create another forum for conversation about what it all means, this time between the Bolshevik leader and Zhivago, who is stuck sharing his tent and only wants to sleep.

At one point, when Zhivago manages to sneak off and grab some sleep in a clearing, he overhears “a soft, muffled conversation” among some of the more desperate partisans, who like Zhivago have had enough of their crazy leader. Will he be discovered by them? Will he join them? Will their plot succeed and free him from his captivity?

No to all of that. The plot unravels without Zhivago doing anything other than just lying there in his default setting. Eventually, after months of being held with this band against his will, Zhivago just ups and leaves, and the romance with Lara resumes.

The interconnections of the various characters in Doctor Zhivago is something else I found annoying. Basically, there are a dozen or so characters who keep popping up, sometimes with different identities. Lara’s husband, for example, is lost in action on the Eastern Front in World War I, only to reemerge as Strelnikov, a particularly brutal Bolshevik who still loves Lara but never reconnects with her.

Strelnikov’s opposite number, leading the anti-Lenin White Russian forces, is Galiullin, who grew up with Strelnikov when both of them knew Lara. It gets like the Star Wars saga with all the inbreeding.

The pleasure of reading long, descriptive passages about Russian winters in all their rugged beauty, or the coming of spring where “dawnglows and evenglows congeal on fences” (as Pasternak puts it in “Earth,” one of the poems included in my edition) makes me want to shut up and just try to enjoy the novel on its own terms. But the more I read, the more difficult it became. Communism stinks, sure, but I don’t need Pasternak to tell me that.