Remembering reading this book as an important literary event during my high school years, I finally made it back to Dr. Zhivago to see if it was as great as it seemed back then. And it was. There's that grand sweep of a classic Russian novel, the vast cast of characters who keep miraculously reappearing, the romantic dilemma of a good man trapped by a tragic fate, plus all the details of the confusion during and after the Russian revolution.
As a teenager, I was enchanted by the love story, and couldn't really follow (or understand) the politics. Now, so many decades later, I appreciated the emotional and moral tensions. I still didn't understand all the ins and out of politics. I found myself a bit impatient with the lengthy philosophical discussions, and the numerous extraneous characters. However, the majesty of Pasternak's language entranced me all the way through. Here's one passage from where Zhivago is being swept away writing poetry:
"His work took possession of him and he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind which he is trying to express, but with language. his instrument of expression. Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow."
"An old Russian folk song is like water in a weir. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice-gates and its stillness is an illusion."
This next one is lovely -- Zhivago describing Lara. But I doubt that it would be get past an editor today (might be seen as sappy):
"How well he loved her, and how lovable she was, in exactly the way he had always thought and dreamed and needed. Yet what was it that made her so lovely?.. She was lovely by virtue of the matchlessly simple and swift line which the Creator at a single stroke had drawn round her, and in this divine outline she had been handed over, like a child tightly wound up in a sweet after its bath, into the keeping of his soul."
This is a long book. By the end, I felt like I'd spent about thirty years in Russia.
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Reviews with images
Profoundly Boring Film!
DR. ZHIVAGO sets the (low) bar for what was once called a "prestige picture". David Lean's direction screams, "This is such an important piece, it MUST be three hours long!" The faults of the film stem in large part to the faults of the novel (which I was reading when I watched the movie): young people meet during the Russian Revolution and then, coincidentally, keep running into one another over the next five years of revolution and civil war. I don't really have a quarrel with screenwriter Robert Bolt's adaptation--the novel is equally boring if slightly more coherent--except that if he was going to reduce one of the three major characters (Antipov AKA Strelnikoff) to an aside in the final act ("Oh, yeah, he died."), Bolt might as well have eliminated him altogether. People may make fun of THE SOUND OF MUSIC, but the film well deserved the Oscar for Best Picture over this 3-hour documentary about snow.
Top reviews from other countries
Steve E
If You Loved the Movie, You Will Likely Be Surprised by the Novel
Reviewed in Canada on March 13, 2023
Dianne
Suberb. Precious. Do yourself a favour.
Reviewed in Australia on January 6, 2018