Given a theme of romance for
February, the month of Valentine’s Day, my mind immediately raced to this
story. I saw the movie in the 1960s when it was first released, and was
completely enthralled by the scope of the story, the wonderful chemistry
between Omar Sharif, Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin: not only their
physical beauty but their powerful acting through the ranges of intense love
and joy to utter tragedy against the background of WWI and the early days of
the Russian Revolution in all the blind, misguided cruelty that demanded
loyalty or death of a long-repressed people.
The author, Boris Pasternak
(1890-1960), poet, translator, and philosopher, suffered all of the repression
that the Lenin/Stalin regimes used on non-conformist academics. ‘Dr. Zhivago’
was one of only two novels he wrote, but he had a large body of poetry,
translation of classics and general academic literature, and was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, much to the fury of the Soviet government.
The book, smuggled out and published first in Italy
in 1958, was banned in Russia
until the late 1980s.
I was warned that the movie is a
lot better than the book; I would argue that the movie is a lot easier to
digest! It seems that in this book as in other Russian writing I’ve read, the
story is so multi-layered, so detailed and with so many political and social
issues explored, that there is no such thing as a simple Russian story. I spent
some time backtracking to trace characters and events that resurface
throughout, so it is a challenging read.
That said, I loved its scope and
incredibly rich descriptive language. Zhivago, a middle-class academic and
medical doctor by profession, is a kind, thoughtful, distractable man, happily
married to his childhood sweetheart Tonya, a teacher of similar background,
sweet, devoted and politically naïve. Lara, a nurse, from a working-class
background but well-educated and as pragmatic as she is beautiful. As a
schoolgirl she was seduced by a middle-aged, amoral wealthy lawyer, Komarovsky,
who is obsessed with her and re-enters her life throughout the book.
Interestingly, while the movie depicted Lara as the victim of this affair, the
book makes it clear that she was quite ambivalent about him; hating his
superior power but at the same time, albeit reluctantly: “Kamarovsky’s philandering in a
carriage …or in an opera box in full view of the audience pleased and
challenged her by its mixture of secrecy and daring.”
Even when Lara in desperation tried to murder
him, it was Komarovsky’s intervention that spared her from arrest. Pasternak
shows real insight into the nature of an exploitive sexual relationship not
often discussed in the 1960s. Years later, she blurts out to Zhivago: “…I discovered life much too early, I was made
to discover it…from the very worst side – a cheap, distorted version of it –
through the eyes of …one of those useless, self-satisfied egoists who took
advantage of everything and allowed themselves whatever they fancied.”
Lara married Pasha Antipov, a shy
and intense fellow graduate who worshipped her, and they moved to the
provincial Urals to teach; she loved their idyllic life and adored their baby
daughter, but he felt constrained by her devotion and domesticity despite his
love for her, and joined the army in the face of her frantic pleas.
All of the main characters in
their own way are initially captivated and excited by the early signs of
revolutionary thought and bold, hitherto unheard-of protest actions against the
repression of Tsarist Russia and the futile destruction of WWI: “…Mother Russia is on the
move…The revolution broke out willy-nilly, like a breath that’s been held too
long…socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private,
individual revolutions are flowing into it - the sea of life, of life in its
own right.”
However, as they go about their
lives, each of them comes to the tragic realisation that the ‘temporary
discomforts and hardships’ inherent in radical change, have become cemented
into an unrelenting and often fatal struggle for mere survival; that they have
exchanged the pitiless repression of tsarism for the ruthless, paranoid machine
of communism. Pasternak’s bleak, unsparing writing brings stark focus to the
human misery and degradation of a population as countless thousands suffer and
die by deliberate murder, hopeless mismanagement, starvation and exposure.
Family members just disappear without any hope of tracing their fate.
Against this background, the love
story of Zhivago and Lara survives as they are thrown together first in a
wartime hospital, after which he returns by means of a tortuous train journey
to his adoring wife and son in Moscow .
Zhivago has longed for “…this coming home to your family, to yourself, this
renewal of life” but becomes depressed with the relentless grind of scrounging
to survive Moscow’s bitter winter, the endless arguing between tsarists and
pro-revolutionaries who have seen nothing beyond their own relatively untouched
city, and his attempts to be an effective doctor while disease becomes rampant.
After almost dying of typhus, he takes his family to live hundreds of miles
away in an old family home in Yuryatin in the Ural
mountains . The description of their journey in a freight truck,
and Zhivago’s unwitting confrontation with Lara’s husband (now named
Strelnikov, a high-ranking revolutionary soldier) is like an extreme story of
your worst journey. When they finally disembark, to “…the silence, emptiness
and tidiness of the station…not to be surrounded by a milling, cursing throng
“, the long-suffering Tonya sees the greenery and flowers of a birch forest,
cries out ‘How lovely’ and breaks down in tears.
The family settles happily in to
their home with all the hard work and help from neighbours and old
acquaintances recorded in Zhivago’s diary; he has renounced medicine and is
writing to his heart’s content, Tonya falls pregnant. Then, on a trip to
Yuryatin’s library he meets Lara again and finds she is living in the town.
This is where they both recognise their mutual love. Zhivago, torn with guilt
at his adultery and resolving to end the affair forever, rides to see her – he
is kidnapped on the road by a band of revolutionary soldiers and taken away to
‘serve the proletariat’ by treating their endless casualties. His family never
sees him again.
Years later Zhivago and Lara are
reunited and spend some time together just being lovers, happy together in the
middle of the unending danger and privation of Soviet rule as the civil war
against the so-called counter-revolutionary ‘White Russians’ grinds on. I think
their love story is moving, both in its intensity and their honest insight into
their relationship and their continuing emotional ties to their marriage
partners.
Ultimately there is no happy
romantic ending to the story, and all the main characters are separated into
their separate tragedies – a sad but realistic result in the context of the
historical context. To me though, it is still a powerful love story. Overall, I
love this book as a gripping work of history with a very human, very moving
interpretation that probably could only have been written by a contemporary
Russian academic. He was there.
Helen
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