It is not just a love story, nor an historical account and still less an anti-Soviet diatribe. How to understand Pasternak’s enigmatic masterpiece?
`Doctor Zhivago` can be found on the shelves of more people than there are who have read it. A weighty work without a clear plot and set in a time and place few know much about, its readership tends to be restricted to aficionados of Russian literature or history.
The two main associations that the novel evokes are that it played a symbolic role in the Cold War and the other is that it spawned one of the top grossing films of all time – David Lean’s glitzy blockbuster from 1965.
Related to that last one is that the novel is sold as `One of the greatest love stories ever told` (from the Daily Mail) – an epigram which seems designed to disappoint legions of readers.
A fresh look.
Ploughing through `Doctor Zhivago` for the third time has been rewarding. It helped that I used the definitive translation to date. Produced in 2010 this is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, a married couple whose translations of Dostoevsky have won them awards. Their work supplants the previous Hayward-Harari variant which is infamous for having been done in haste.
Superstar Swansong.
Pasternak, a Jewish Muscovite from a rarefied background, was already a celebrity poet before he embarked on the ten-year slog it took to produce his first and only novel.
When social upheavals threatened the Pasternak dynasty most of them upped and fled for Europe (indeed, a large part of the Pasternak family still reside in Oxford to this day). Boris was the one who chose not to follow them.
After the revolution Pasternak became a member of the prestigious Writer’s Union. This fact afforded him many privileges not available to the average Soviet citizen. He could fly to Georgia on a regular basis – a land that he loved – and had a dacha in leafy Peredelkino, just outside his beloved Moscow.
During the Second World War the government kept him safe. Along with other writers considered important for the war effort, he was moved away from where any fighting might be expected to Chistopol in the Tartastan region.
Meanwhile Pasternak’s bread and butter came through translation work. His best hope for getting his magnus opus published in full lay with Noviy Mir a publication with a reputation for being willing to try new things. They, however, sent his manuscript back with a lengthy explanation as to why (also published in the press). This centred on Pasternak’s non-partisan account of the role of the Bolsheviks during the civil war and revolution in Russia.
Subsequent mythology suggests that the novel went to print in the West in spite of aghast opposition from Communists. The real story is that `Doctor Zhivago` first saw light in Italy following interventions by two members of the Italian Communist Party.
Renegade reds to the rescue.
Sergeo D’Angelo, an Italian journalist who had been working for Radio Moscow for a year by 1957, was a fluent Russian speaker as well as a member of the Italian Communist Party of some twelve years standing. He heard about `Doctor Zhivago` from a Soviet radio report. He then arranged to meet Pasternak in Peredelkino. There the author gave his manuscript to the journalist who arranged to have it squirrelled out of the country. The USSR authorities were not too impressed by this deed and sent D’Angelo packing (Komsomolskaya Pravda, March 4th 2023).
In Italy the masterpiece fell into the hands of the larger-than-life Giangiacomo Feltrinell – another Communist who had served in the Italian resistance in Mussolini’s time, set up his own paramilitary organization in 1969 and founded a library dedicated to labour and socialist movements. It would be him who organized the novel’s translation and put it on the market – which earned him expulsion from the Italian Communist Party (Iatlia Magazine, April 4th 2021).
It is sometimes assumed that the subsequent winning of their Nobel Prize for Literature by Pasternak in 1958 was a political statement on the part of Western Europe. This, however, fails to explain the fact that Mikhail Sholokov got the same prize seven years later for And Quiet Flows the Don (1940) which was approved enough in the Soviet Union to have the Stalin prize bestowed on it in 1941.
What is true though, is that having this prize conferred on it cemented the novel’s reputation as being anti-Soviet. Pasternak was free to pick up the prize but only if he left the Soviet Union for good (which he had no intention of doing). Meanwhile, the state newspaper Pravda had this to say of the `literary weed`:
`…in actuality he is a petty bourgeoise proprietor, disguising his fetal interests with a pompous array of old-fashioned verbiage` (Pravda, 26th October 1958).
The C.I.A were prompt in finding ways to circulate microfiche copies of the novel throughout countries behind the Iron Curtain (Lit Hub, April 12th 2019).
A Singular work.
Pasternak’s prose is not all that complex. He aims at `states of mind translated into drama` (as quoted by Nekrasov in his 1990 film about Pasternak). So, we get a rich broth of descriptive prose, vignettes, anecdotes, reportage, dream sequences, aphorisms, and all served up served up in an historical romance – of sorts. It confounds those who approach it as a naturalistic novel. The closest comparison to any other novel I can think of is to Louis- Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932).
The novel meanders through the life and times of Zhivago the poet turned physician and his acquaintances from the intelligentsia, from the early Twentieth Century to the late twenties – and beyond.
About a quarter of the novel is taken up with the extramarital affair between Zhivago and Lara, a wild woman of great allure. There are also prolonged sequences set on train journeys – calling to mind such novels as The Lady Vanishes and Murder on the Orient Express.
The story continues beyond the early death of Zhivago from heart failure and takes us to the Fifties in post-Stalin times where it closes on an optimistic note as old friends of his remember him.
Again, those who come to all this expecting an historical testimony may find themselves exasperated. The plot is held together by a bewildering array of coincidental chance encounters pointing to the subjective nature of the narrative.
I would be hard pressed to tell people what `Doctor Zhivago` is about. Apart from all the historical stuff it also muses on the natural world, the intelligentsia, philosophy and religion, antisemitism, love, psychology and well…life itself. (The name `Zhivago` contains echoes of the word `life` in Russian).
With this in mind it is hard to see an anti-Soviet or anti-Communist message in the novel. True enough, `Doctor Zhivago` defies Socialist Realism, the accepted propagandistic style of writing in the Stalin years, but nor is there a clear conservative agenda at work.
The Bolshevik firebrand Strelnikov, for example, is portrayed with dignity and a little sympathy and shown to be multifaceted. On the other hand, the closest person the novel has to a villain is the lawyer Komarovsky. He is a self-serving representative of bourgeoise and the kind who rises to the top in any scene, including Soviet society.
Self-indulgence?
I feel old enough to levy some criticisms of the novel. Some of the dialogue has a stilted and unnatural aspect and I am not sure if the blame for this rests with the translators.
Then there are some passages where I feel that Pasternak may be indulging himself a bit. Some of the theological musings seem as extraneous as they are obscure. Some of the expressions of love for Lara are a bit sickly-sweet. Then we have the verse. Supposed to be the poems of Zhivago these are all parked at the end of the novel. They might have been more effective if they had been interspersed within the action.
The tragic error.
The publication of `Doctor Zhivago` in the West – and more so the flawed screen version which followed – reminded people in the West, at a time when the cold War was at its height, that Russians were human too. The Soviet Union’s refusal to accept and honour the novel counts as a singular example of their petty-mindedness. Furthermore, it was a case of the `Barbara Streisand effect` writ large. None other than Nikita Kruschev himself seemed to have gathered this in the autumn of his years. Writing in his diary he said:
`We shouldn’t have banned it. I should have read it myself. There is nothing anti-Soviet in it` (Taubman, 2003, p-628).
A word to the reader.
For those donning their helmets and clutching pick axes ready to climb mount `Doctor Zhivago` here are my own bits of advice:
*To be up-t-date read the Pevear/Volokhonsky version.
* Pace yourself. There is no hurry to finish it. This is a novel you should live alongside.
* Read some of the footnotes provided in the Vintage Classics version. Some of these give valuable background information.
* Do watch some of the television adaptations. If your Russian is up to it try to find Oleg Menshikov’s 2005 attempt or check out Andrew Davies 2002 serialisation. These have inevitable faults but do help put some shape into what you are reading.
* Above all, let the novel speak for itself instead of projecting your own expectations onto it.
The version referred to is: Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage Classics, 2011)
The lead image is Oleg Menshikov as Zhivago in a 2005 Russian TV adaptation directed by Menshikov himself.