'Dr Zhivago'

    

   ‘Dr Zhivago' is a book I have been intending to read for years - inspired by David Lean's cinematic adaptation - but never got round to until this year.  It was the cover, I have to confess, of this Fontana Books edition of 1969 that I found in a second-hand bookshop that finally galvanised me into action.

     I really don't want to dwell here on Lean’s film of 1965.  It, after all, deserves a blogpost all to itself, but I will say that at times the film differs markedly from the book.  That is inevitable in any film adaptation and perhaps it's best to think of the film as a riff on Pasternak's novel.  I don't think those changes matter too much, however I have to register a disappointment that the book does not contain the line 'The personal life is dead in Russia.  History has killed it.'  It appears the screenwriter Robert Bolt has to be thanked for that.

      Like Shostakovich's 13th Symphony, 'Dr Zhivago' is a product of the so-called 'Khrushchev Thaw' - a time in the Soviet Union, post WWII, post Stalin, when there was a loosening of the state’s control of the arts (amongst other things).  Both the symphony and the novel challenged the limits of that 'thaw'.  The premiere of the symphony, December 18th 1962, took place against a background of intimidation by the authorities. Six years earlier when Boris Pasternak (1890-1970) had submitted the manuscript of Dr Zhivago to the literary journal 'Novy Mir' for publication it was rejected. It was just too critical of the Soviet regime. For a while it was circulated between Pasternak’s friends and then in 1957 it was smuggled out to the West, where its publication caused a sensation, and some literary critics were driven to hyperbole.  These two examples are taken from the back cover of my Fontana edition:

     ‘Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.’   Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker

     ‘The first work of genius to come out of the Russia since the Revolution.’  V S Prichett in The New Statesman.

     With exception of the Epilogue, ‘Dr Zhivago’ is set during the first quarter of the 20^th century in Russia, opening when Yuri Zhivago is a child of 10 and concluding with his death at the age 0f approximately 35.  The majority of the novel is, however, concerned with the nine years of conflict between 1914, where Russia entered WWI, and the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922/23.  With Revolution of 1917 the external enemy is replaced with the internal, as Russia went to war with herself.  The Civil War that followed alone claimed between 5-7 million lives, mainly civilians.
     Against this almost apocalyptic historical process Zhivago attempts to find space to form a stable family life, first with Tonya and then Lara.  To insulate themselves from the titanic events grinding away like tectonic plates beneath them.  (The third attempt, which happens later in Moscow, is given a much briefer account.)  Their happiness is fleeting, and Yuri is defeated in each attempt. He loses everything each time and in that process of erosion is reduced to a husk of a man.  A man destroyed. The personal life was, indeed, dead in Russia.  Towards the end of the novel are two extraordinary passages when this broken man, still grasping at life, makes two epic journeys on foot through a decimated land, almost bereft of another living being.  Quite haunting, if not disturbing - one can almost feel as sense of evil abroad.  This is a strongly evocative book that seems to gather in strangeness as it progresses, and the everyday is shredded by conflict and the new authorities.  Though in the Realist tradition of the 19^th century, there is a deep sense of the other particularly when we leave the city and venture out deep into the Russian countryside.
     I can’t help feel that the influence of Dostoevsky is close at hand – though as my knowledge of Russian literature is somewhat limited I may be wrong, but it seems to be there in the way the characters talk and interact and those philosophic discursions that pepper the book.  Tolstoy too in the vast scale and ambition.  Pasternak is attempting to convey the entirety of Russia – hence, I suppose the vast geographical and historical scope of the novel, one that suggests some sort of metaphysical intent.  Hence also the great number of named minor characters, which can be confusing.
     Much is made in the film adaptation of Yuri’s adulterous relationship with Larissa (Lara) Antipova, and the critic Stuart Hampshire reviewing the book in ‘Encounter’ called it ‘One of the most profound descriptions of Love in the whole range of modern literature.’ Yes, what unfolds is a love story.  And perhaps it is a strand of this novel that is most easy to pick up on in a novel that one critic rightly called 'elusive'. Dr Zhivago is, however, much more than that.  It is the story of a nation, a people, descending into madness and barbarism. Whole communities were wiped off the face of the earth. There were biblical scale plagues of vermin, and famine, and there were the 'Besprizorniki' (translated on wiki as 'The Unattended') - millions of abandoned children whose lives were lived on the streets, surviving by begging, stealing and prostitution.  It could be that some of those who were forced by circumstance into the latter were under the age of ten.¹  It is beyond comprehension.

1 They were the children of those killed in WWI, the Civil War, the famines and the purges.