Doctor Zhivago [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness,--melt itself Into the sea! "
King Henry IV, Part 2, Act III. Scene I

Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago takes us back to a time when fate took Russia through a perfect storm of revolution, war, revolution, and civil war. This was a time that did not just level mountains and melt a continent but also melted and cruelly leveled the lives and fates of untold numbers who were caught in these turbulent waters. Josef Stalin is reported to have said that "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic." What Pasternak has done so masterfully in telling this story is to paint a picture on a huge canvas that stretches from Moscow to Siberia while at the same time telling an intimate story that allows the reader to maintain that feeling of tragedy.

I've had a copy of Dr. Zhivago sitting on my shelf for decades, one of the books I inherited from my father's collection. I never bothered to pick it up. I'd seen David Lean's classic film and wrongfully decided that there was no need to invest any time in reading an epic novel about the tragic romance of Yuri Andreevich Zhivago and Larissa Fyodorovna Antipova. When I saw that Pevear and Volokhonsky had done a new translation I decided to give Zhivago a shot. What a revelation. As good as the movie was it didn't begin to plumb the depths of the book. The movie focused, understandably enough, on the relationship between Yuri and Lara and it seemed that the Russian Revolution and Civil War was merely the back-story to the relationship. But in Pasternak's hands I think it was close to being the other way around. The first two-thirds of the book takes two separate lives that contain just a few incidental touch-points where those lives intersected.

The emotional heart of the story for me was elsewhere. It was a story of the dissolution of Russian life in the years between the 1905 Revolution and WWI where the decadence and debauchery of a life lived in fancy clothes and salons played out against the turmoil bubbling beneath the surface. It was a story of the disruption and destitution set in motion by WWI and the October revolution. It was a story of the story of hunger and desperation brought on by a vicious Civil War in which the phrase "man is wolf to man" comes to the fore and the fragile web that keeps a society civilized is swept away in a sea of inhumanity. It is into a world that has already been rent asunder that the relationship of Yuri and Lara comes into bloom. The story of Yuri and Lara almost seemed to me to be the back story, the context that illuminated the age of unreason that Pasternak wrote about.

One passage set this out for me in stark terms: "This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver." The passage concludes that people denounced themselves, "drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped." This struck me immediately as Pasternak's version of Yeats' "Second Coming" where the centre cannot hold and where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It was one of the many touch-points in the book that were immensely moving to me.

The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has said, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that a "translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful." My high-school level Russian does not permit me to speak to this translation's faithfulness but I can certainly attest to its beauty. Pasternak's prose, as rendered by the team of Pevear and Volokhonsky, flows beautifully. As I read through the book I did not feel I was reading a translation. Any time I read a piece in translation and feel compelled to underline or highlight particularly noteworthy passage I think of the translation as one that does justice to the book. Time after time I found myself highlighting passages that I wanted to remember. This strikes me as being my own testimony not just to the beauty of the translation but what also must be its faithfulness.

Dr. Zhivago is not, as I imagined, a eulogy for a pair of tragic Russian lovers but an elegy for an age in a specific time and place. It is a beautiful, moving story that was a pleasure to read.

L. Fleisig

Boris Pasternak's most famous novel, and the source for one of the biggest (both in box office and scope) films in cinematic history, arrives in stores once again, translated for the 21st century. As already noted by the product description, "Doctor Zhivago" was an international sensation on its initial publication in 1957 - smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published first in Italy due to the censorship of the Communist government, it was rapidly translated into English (and other languages). Max Hayward's work was of good quality, particularly given the time constraints under which he laboured - good enough to make the novel a bestseller and probably the most famous work of Russian literature published in the 20th century. It earned its author the Nobel Prize in Literature, though political considerations interfered even then to block his acceptance.

Nevertheless, the theory and practice of translation has evolved considerably in the last half-century (and probably will continue to); works are continually retranslated, sometimes with minor variations in style, sometimes with bigger ones. Now comes the turn of "Doctor Zhivago". And as any fan of Russian literature could tell you, there could be no better team on hand to handle it than Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This husband-and-wife team has become the gold standard in Russian-to-English translation over the last quarter century, having produced a truly astonishing volume of work: the major works of Dostoevsky, Count Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Gogol, and Chekhov (Pevear has also translated Dumas' "The Three Musketeers" from French by himself, I guess for a change of pace). Now they've turned their hand to Pasternak's magnum opus. The resulting translation is up to their usual standards.

One won't get too far into story summary, given how famous this is, but in brief it is a semi-autobiographical account by the author of the tumultuous history of Russia in the early 20th century. Beginning with the fall of the Tsarist despotism, the brief and doomed interlude of attempted democracy under Kerensky, and the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks, with ensuing civil war, we follow Dr. Yuri Zhivago. Something of an idealist, like Pasternak (or Pasternak's self image, anywyay), Zhivago struggles with his love for Lara, and the conflict it creates with his family. That's the part everybody remembers, anyway, almost invariably. David Lean's famous film, as big as it was, could only tell a condensed version of Pasternak's story, which is larger still on the page; but that is true with all the great novels. Pasternak weaves an epic account of one of the greatest political earthquakes in history, which claimed millions of lives, and is comparatively little-remembered in the contemporary West.

Recommended. And one hopes that Pevear and Volokhonsky can make time for Sholokhov.

This epic love story between Dr. Yuri Zhivago and nurse Lara, set against the backdrop of Russian revolution and civil war, earned Pasternak the Nobel Prize. This semi-autobiographical work chronicles the deplorable conditions during the struggle for control of the country that culminated in the arrival of Soviet power. The novel seeks to explore the ultimate questions of human existence--the nature of man, the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of life, and the riddle of death.

Yuri struggles between his devotion to Tonya, his wife and childhood friend, and Lara, the nurse he met in a war-time hospital and the woman with which his passions lie. Yuri is constantly torn between what his heart wants and what he knows is right for those he loves. He seeks to turn the tragedy in his life to poetry. As Yuri says of art, "it constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life."

Having read and loved Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations of War and Peace (Vintage Classics) and The Idiot, I knew I wanted their translation of this Russian masterpiece. This one was more of a challenge. At first, all the imagery provided by masterful descriptions of landscapes brought the book to life. After a while, however, the descriptions of trees, hills, rivers, fog, snow, rain, birds, etc became rather redundant and began to really slow the story. The sentence structure also forced me to re-read many sentences to fully grasp their intent. But this should not discourage potential readers from this version. Pevear and Volokhonsky take extreme effort to capture the original author's style and give English readers a chance to truly experience the work in its originality as much as possible.

It is a beautiful story of love, loss, and one's devotion to principles at all costs. Among the many memorable scenes is Yuri Zhivago's consoling words to the dying Anna Ivanovna, something that one cannot soon forget. This book is absolutely worth the effort.

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