“Doctor Zhivago”, by Boris Pasternak

 

495 pages, Reader’s Digest, ISBN-13: 978-0895773425

Admit it: the instant you read the title Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, the Maurice Jarre theme popped into your head quite on its own. Naturally, like many (most?) people, my only exposure to this work was through David Lean’s 1965 epic historical romance (I would add tragedy to that mix), with its sweeping vistas, earth-shaking events, personal catastrophes and moving soundtrack. But of course, without Pasternak’s novel of revolution and forlorn loves, none of that would have happened, so thanks, Boris, for giving Hollywood access to one of the most romantic and tragic (but then I repeat myself) stories of them all.

Speaking of which, some background: Doctor Zhivago was first published in Italy in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – the Italian publisher, businessman and left-wing political activist – after he was shown the manuscript by an Italian journalist (and after being told by his Slavist advisor that not to publish it would “constitute a crime against culture”; well done, sir. Well done). While parts were written in the 1910s and 20s, it was completed in 1955 and submitted to the literary journal Novy Mir (New World) the next year. Perhaps Boris had faith that the Commies would recognize great work when they saw it or, just perhaps, he was naïve.

For the Soviets refused to publish Doctor Zhivago because Pasternak’s concern for individuals over society and, by extension, of the Soviet state as a whole was obvious to anyone who read his novel (his subtle criticisms of Stalinism, Collectivization, the Great Purge, the Gulag and Socialist Realism didn’t help, either). Not that it helped to deflect the novel’s popularity in the West, especially after Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature for his role in “continuing the great Russian epic tradition”, to which Pasternak responded that he was “[i]nfinitely grateful, touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed”.

Fat lot of good it did him, for the KGB surrounded Pasternak’s dacha in Peredelkino and not only threatened him with arrest but also vowed to send his mistress Olga Ivinskaya back to the gulag, where she had been imprisoned under Stalin; it was further hinted that, should Pasternak travel to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Medal, he would be refused re-entry to the Soviet Union. As a result, Pasternak officially declined his Nobel Prize, to which the committee responded in turn that “[t]his refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place”.

Despite his decision to decline the award, the Soviet Union of Writers continued to denounce Pasternak in the Soviet press; furthermore, he was threatened at the very least with formal exile to the West. In response, Pasternak wrote directly to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, saying “Leaving the motherland will mean equal death for me. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and work” (after being ousted from power in 1964, Khrushchev at last read the novel and felt great regret for having banned the book at all).  As a result of this and the intercession of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Pasternak was not expelled from Russia, where he ultimately died of lung cancer in his dacha in Peredelkino on May 30^th, 1960.

And all this for writing a book – but, man oh man, what a book, a book the Soviets were right to be concerned over, seeing as, through subtle descriptions and in-depth characterizations, Pasternak upheld the dignity of the individual against the privations of the State, whether Czarist or Soviet. This is a message that can and did resonate with the people of the Soviet Union and their never-ending struggles merely to live normal lives underneath an oppressive regime that was determined to allow them to do anything but. For during the misbegotten lifespan of the Soviet Union, it was the State and its inhuman ideology that were of paramount importance, not the person.

As to Doctor Zhivago’s appeal outside of the USSR, that should come as no surprise, for this self-same message serves to inspire any and all who seek personal freedom from the hands of any all-controlling apparatus, be it communist regime, socialist state, fascist nation, religious autocracy – hell, even a democratic republic; for any and all forms of controlling authority seeks to ever-expand its own power at the expense of the individual, even if said expansion is seen by the Powers That Be as being for the individual’s own good and even if – ESPECIALLY if – the individual in question sees no need for this “help”.

Doctor Zhivago is, ostensibly, a romance, being the tale of one man and his struggle between his wife Tonya, the woman he has pledged his honor to, and his mistress Lara, the woman to whom he has given his heart. But it is so much more than that, as it describes the fall of one society and the rise of another, of the destruction of an old culture and the creation of a new, and especially of all of the people caught and, too often, destroyed during the whole – people like Yuri Zhivago and all of those connected to him; “small” people for whom the sweep of history has no interest and yet exist all the same, asking only to live and be free. People like you and me.