Noted Russian poet Boris Pasternak is ironically best known for a novel, Doctor Zhivago , first published in 1957 in Italy, translated into many languages and made into a memorable film in 1965. It was published in his homeland for the first time in 1988. A series of chance encounters and partings, of love and loss and the innate loneliness of being, it is a “book of impressions of life” in all its extremes, set between 1901 and World War II.
It is the story of Yuri Zhivago, son of a rich pre-revolutionary Russian industrialist who had abandoned his wife and child.
Sticks of dynamite
Yuri is a brilliant doctor but studies philosophy and literature and has an individualistic streak that he wants to protect. He wants to write a book in which he will conceal “like sticks of dynamite, the most striking things he had seen so far.” Pasternak belonged to a generation of Russians who had seen a lot — two World Wars, civil war, revolutions, famine, purges — and the writer speaks through Yuri.
At the heart of the narrative is a tragic love story between Yuri and Larisa or Lara. “And why is it...that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?” Lara says at the beginning of the book. After several serendipitous meetings and farewells, Yuri and Lara have an affair — and a child who is lost.
They are both married, attached to their families, but “they loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the ‘blaze of passion’ often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.”
In his introduction to the English edition, John Bayley writes, “Tossed about like corks in the tumult, people are thrown up against each other, in all sorts of unexpected ways and places.”
But as Yuri observes, “...you must live, you cannot always be making preparations for living.”
Breaking form
Yuri who welcomes the Russian revolution because of its promise of universal justice cannot accept talk of conformity: “Everything had changed suddenly — the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to.”
He rebels and leaves Moscow for a tiny village, Varyniko, beyond the Urals. Yuri wants to write, and frequently visits the library at the nearby town of Yuriatin, till the civil war between the Reds and the Whites catch up with him, and he is cut off from family. A schoolboy captured by the Red soldiers has a head wound and yet he adjusts his cap on his bandaged head to keep up with form and appearances. Yuri wants to yell out to him that, “...salvation lay not in loyalty to forms but in throwing them off...”
The leading Soviet magazine, Novy Mir , declined to publish it, saying the book was about “non-acceptance of the socialist revolution”. To the chagrin of Soviet authorities — politics swirls around it — Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an award he first accepted, then declined because he didn’t want to ruffle more feathers.
The story goes that Pasternak escaped the purges of the 30s because Stalin reportedly wrote against his name — “Don’t touch this cloud dweller.”
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
