Doctor Zhivago (Hardcover)

Most of us are only familiar with Doctor Zhivago from the epic David Lean film version (indeed this is one of the books I come across most frequently at book sales, almost always unread). The movie is beautiful but strangely inert, has a somewhat disjointed narrative and conveys no clear philosophical message--flaws which I always assumed were a function of the difficulty of converting a Russian novel to film and the inexplicable casting of two really awful actors (Omar Sharif & Julie Christie) in the lead roles. But now, having reread the novel, it seems to me that these weaknesses are inherent in the novel. Just as Lean seemed most interested in the story as a vehicle for presenting cinematic images, the real life in Pasternak comes less from the narrative itself than from the poetry that Zhivago produces. And the message of the novel, assuming that there is one, is presented awfully subtly.

Zhivago himself, the name means "life" in Russian, is a pretty docile leading man. The story follows him as he is buffeted by the winds of change in Russia from 1903 to his death sometime after WWII. We can take at least a twofold message from the novel. Pasternak seems first of all to be speaking out, however obliquely, against a system which denies life and destroys artists, as the Soviet regime had. However, he also seems to be saying that the artist is relatively helpless against the tides of history. It is ironic in light of this that Pasternak became such a cause celebre. A good deal of this novel's reputation surely rests on the Western reaction to Soviet efforts to quash it. Perhaps I've simply lost the ability to read between the lines of samizdat, but I thought the condemnation of Communist Russia in the book was exceedingly mild, almost too much so. And there is one section in particular, right at the end of the book, where Pasternak waxes optimistically over how the nation may be entering a period of renewed freedom now that the war has been won. This kind of wishful thinking comes across as incredibly naive. I guess I too will have to fall back on the reaction that the novel provoked and assumed that even such feathery criticism as the book contains was important in crystallizing opposition to the regime.

But Doctor Zhivago is understood to be semi autobiographical and to the extent that Zhivago is acted upon rather than acting himself, perhaps he is intended to convey Pasternak's own ambivalence about the role he had played by remaining in Soviet Union and continuing to work. Indeed, there is a really poignant moment in Isaiah Berlin's piece on the author, where Pasternak, near desperation, seeks to solicit Berlin's opinion on whether people believe that he has collaborated with the government because he remained in the USSR or whether they instead accept that he felt compelled to stay. In fairness to Pasternak, it should not be necessary to leave a country (as did Solzhenitsyn) or be disappeared (as was Isaac Babel) or be imprisoned (as were countless others) in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of your opposition to an evil government.

To be honest, the subtlety of Pasternak's message and our increasing distance from the time when even such subtleties could prove incendiary, served to deaden the effect of a novel which already suffers from being a tad too episodic. In the final analysis, I guess I respected the book more than enjoyed it and found it more interesting as a key artifact of an age that is quickly receding from memory than compelling as a novel.

GRADE: B-

Pasternak was, first and foremost, a very talented and gifted poet, but it's painfully obvious that he didn't have an equal talent for prose. Maybe if he had written other novels his ability in that genre might have improved, but it remains quite obviously a first and only novel. Some of the metaphors, similes, and descriptions he uses are lovely, reflecting his talent as a poet, but some just sound and look laughable and embarrassing when in the form of prose. Some other mistakes are the ones other reviewers have also pointed out-way too much background information on minor characters, no real development of the supposed love story between Yuriy and Lara, let alone on why they got together, no closure of anything at the end, a mostly dead-end and pointless Epilogue and Conclusion (where interesting events begin to be developed but then peter off into nothingness since it's so close to the end there's no time to see them through to their conclusions), characters who disappear for hundreds of pages, too much telling and not enough showing, and way too many coincidences. It's embarrassing how many times Yuriy or someone else bumps back into someone whom we last saw hundreds of pages ago, a truly minor character in most cases, and that chance meeting years later contributes nothing to the plotline.

When they finally get together properly, Yuriy spends more time writing poetry after Lara has fallen asleep than in bed with her, this woman he keeps running into for longer and more significant periods of time, whom he realised he was in love with right before he was kidnapped by the partisans who needed a doctor. I get absolutely no sense whatsoever of why these two fall in love, no sense of why they get together, no sense of them being in love period when they're finally a couple. Why do so many writers insist on having the characters fall into one another's arms with barely a word of explaining their feeling or motivations? There are no love scenes, sex scenes, sweet nothings, nothing that would clearly show them as being a couple madly in love and fated to have gotten together years after having first met.

The book should have properly ended at the end of Chapter 15, sparing us the pointless Epilogue and Conclusion. Then I wouldn't have felt like "That's it?" at the real end of the book. We don't even find out what happens to Lara's daughter Katya, and for a man who was heartbroken while watching Lara and Katya's sleigh pass his field of vision twice in the night, knowing he'd never see them again, he sure doesn't act like it once he goes home. He doesn't go after his family in Paris, he doesn't try to find Lara, he enters a relationship with his childhood friend Marina! What is that all about?

The best part of the book is when Yuriy, Lara, and their friends are all growing up, showing the two different worlds they came from, how Russia was before the Revolution. I still admire Pasternak both as a writer and a human being, but this book remains a nice story that could have been so much more realistic and convincing had it been written by someone with more experience at writing prose.