Doctor Zhivago

Yuri Zhivago and the Russian Revolution

Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago is orphaned young, raised by Moscow intellectuals, educated as a physician, and constituted by temperament and vocation as a man of feeling and attention — a poet who also practices medicine, which is to say a man whose professional life requires him to attend to individual bodies while his inner life compels him to attend to the individual soul. He is precisely the wrong kind of person to survive a revolution that requires its subjects to subordinate the individual to the collective, the particular to the general, the lyric to the ideological.

The historical canvas of Doctor Zhivago is enormous: World War I and Zhivago’s service as a military doctor, the February Revolution of 1917 that ended the Romanov dynasty, the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, the Civil War between the Red Army and the White armies that followed, the famine, the terror, the slow dismantling of every structure of the world Zhivago was born into. Pasternak does not simplify this history: he does not make the Whites heroes or the revolution simply evil. He is interested in what happens to people of good will who are caught between forces whose scale and certainty exceeds their individual capacity to resist.

Zhivago cannot commit to either side. He loves Russia — the physical Russia of its landscapes, its seasons, its particular light — but not any faction’s abstract idea of it. His wife Tonya, his children, the intellectual world of Moscow that nurtured him, are all progressively taken from him not by any single violent act but by the grinding pressure of historical forces that have no category for what he is.

Lara

Larissa Antipova enters the novel as a girl — seen by the young Zhivago in a situation of degradation not of her making — and returns in his adult life in the Urals, where both have been swept by the revolution’s currents. Their love affair is not a retreat from history but something that happens in the middle of it, inseparable from the emergency of survival, from the particular intensity that catastrophe gives to ordinary acts of warmth and attention. At Varykino, the estate where they briefly live as if the revolution could be held at bay, Pasternak writes some of his most beautiful prose: the snow, the wolves at the perimeter, the candles, the poems Zhivago writes for Lara in the hours when she is asleep.

Pasternak’s treatment of love resists the conventional romantic logic that would make it a private refuge from the political world. Love, in Doctor Zhivago, is as ungovernable as the revolution: it exceeds individuals’ capacity to manage it, cannot be organized or suppressed, insists on its own necessity against all reasonable counsel. The parallel is deliberate. Both love and revolution are forces that overwhelm the categories people use to contain them — and both leave people changed, diminished, and in some cases destroyed.

Viktor Komarovsky — the man who exploited Lara’s vulnerability when she was young, who returns repeatedly in the novel at moments of maximum danger — functions as the novel’s cynical realist, the man who survives every political transition because he has no convictions to betray. He understands power and is willing to use it, and his final intervention in Zhivago and Lara’s story is both a rescue and a destruction, offered with the full awareness of what it costs.

The Novel That Nearly Wasn’t Published

Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago over the course of the late Stalin years and completed it in 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s secret speech and the partial thaw. He submitted it to the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir, which rejected it on the grounds that the novel’s individualism and its ambivalence about the revolution made it ideologically unacceptable. Pasternak then gave the manuscript to Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian communist publisher, who published it in Italian translation in 1957. The international sensation that followed — translations into dozens of languages, immediate recognition as a major work of world literature — made the Soviet suppression impossible to ignore.

When Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, Soviet authorities made clear that acceptance would mean exile. He declined, writing to the Swedish Academy that the significance of the award in the society he lived in made acceptance impossible. He died in 1960, under what amounted to a cultural blockade. The novel was published in the Soviet Union only in 1988, under Gorbachev’s glasnost, thirty years after Pasternak had been forced to refuse the Nobel Prize for writing it.

The Zhivago poems appended to the novel — presented as the work that Yuri Zhivago himself wrote — are Pasternak’s argument in concentrated form: a poet’s inner life persists, takes its own form, refuses the ideological demand for abstraction and generality. In a novel about what revolutionary ideology does to individual human beings, the poems are the evidence that it did not entirely succeed.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A novel that argues for the individual soul against the total claims of ideology, written with a lyric intensity that Soviet repression could delay but not extinguish.

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