Doctor Zhivago

This blog gets a little too “happy” from time to time. Unrealistic fairy tale love stories, people who work their problems out, utopian societies, good triumphing over evil, holocaust/apocalyptic worthy diseases being solved by scientists, the Land of Do-As-You-Please and those annoying, unrealistic happy endings.

Well I thought I’d go Russian, again, for a chance to get my feet settled back on familiar hard ground. Hard, unapologising, unrelenting and completely unforgiving ground. Doctor Zhivago is a tale of…love? No that’s not quite right. War? Famine? Revolution? Journeys through the dark, lonely unknown to discover that ultimately nothing in life can bring you happiness? It is all of those things, but even more.

One of the most incredible books I have ever read, and I don’t always say that even about books I like. I have never come across a character so conflicted, from so many different facets of a life full of despair and unfair disadvantages. Even second chances are cruel to the antagonist.

I have read of characters that have perhaps more severe conflicts and sources of torture: Orson Scott Card’s Ender Wiggin, Frank Herbert’s Paul Atreides, Nabokov’s Edgar H. Humbert, Dumas’s Edmund Dantes, and so on. But no one has so many converging ideals and changes of belief, changes of heart from warring sides than Doctor Yury Zhivago.

Raised without a father – who committed suicide after losing his wealth and being misled by a conniving laywer – Yury rises through a dangerous Moscow to eventually become a member of the bourgeois class after attaining a medical degree. He sympathises with the working class’s ideals, however, being very much in touch with the heart of Moscow and realizing how unfair the current system can be.

But after traveling to the front lines of World War I, his ideals begin to shift. He no longer thinks violence should be used to convey a message, and that there are no ideals strong enough to warrant the taking of innocent lives.  And when he returns, he is appalled by the violence of the October Revolution and flees with his family and father-in-law to a small town in the Urals. Did I mention the Mother-in-law didn’t make the trip because she dies a miserable death early on, tortured so much by her past with the yet-unconnected but exact same conniving lawyer who has influenced Yury’s life? Well despair overtakes her and she tries killing herself with lots of poisons, but Yury saves her life and gives her a few more dark, depressing years.

Now that the remaining happy family has survived World War I, the February and October revolutions, they make their way out of Moscow to live on their own in the Urals. Along the journey Yury meets and deals with desperate people on the run, similar to him, as well as soldiers fighting for causes some feel passionately enough to kill for and others aren’t so sure, and become deserters even at the threat of the death penalty for these actions. Once in the Urals Yury rekindles an old flame with Lara Fyodorovna, wife of a Pavel Antipov and neighbor/acquaintance of Yury’s growing up Moscow as well as a nurse he came to know and admire and, secretly, love during their time together in hospitals near the frontline in WWI. Lara had tried to pursue her run-away husband who left her because he felt he didn’t deserve her and sought to gain renown as an infantryman, fighting gallantly to defend, and in the near future help reform Russia.

The plot thickens as Yury develops an affair with Lara, and before he comes to terms with admitting to his wife Tonya what has been going on, he’s captured by the “Forest Brotherhood,” a guerilla fighting force led by a cocaine-addict that is actually a separate entity from the Red Army, but still fighting viciously against the Whites. Forced to treat people fighting for a cause he doesn’t support, Yury begins to lose taste for his profession, especially after being pinned down by White Army cadets (which is a nice way of saying teenagers with guns fighting for the cause he does support) and forced to take action and shoot at them in order to escape. He begins to contemplate leaving the Forest Brotherhood, which is risking his own life, because of the conflicts he feels being a medic for a Red-sympathising guerilla force.

But of course, these mixed emotions about the ongoing conflict just aren’t complicated enough. So the Whites throw in an extra element when they torture a man by removing one arm and one leg and force him to crawl through the forest back to the Brotherhood’s camp. There he tells them of the unimaginable horrors in store for them all as the Whites begin to close in on their region.

Strelnikov, a displaced Pavel Antipov who is now a former POW with a new name and blood lust for White Army soldiers, ends up breaking through and the Reds move on to victory after Yury escapes from the Brotherhood. He’s no safer in public now, however, and must keep a low profile, abandoning a force fighting against the Whites in time of war is reason to face the firing squads in this time, and after he learns that the Soviet government now looks unfavourably upon the Forest Brotherhood, likely for being too independent, he has no one he can trust. Even Strelnikov falls out of favour with the Soviets (as his mysterious and charismatic nature gained him loyal followers, he also gained the attention of the Communist Party as a potential threat moving forward) and is on the move, all alone, much like Yury.

The two of them meet, whilst both in hiding, and after Yury tells Strelnikov that Lara is as inaccessible to him as his estranged wife Tonya (now living in exile in Paris with their kids and her father), Strelnikov shoots himself. Of course he does. Yury winds up making an attempt to salvage his life as a poet and translator in Moscow, living the slums, taking a wife, having children and then leaving her too and eventually suffering a heart attack on the streets. Lara makes it to his funeral and is later arrested and put into a Gulag, a sort of concentration camp in Siberia Stalin was very fond of using.

The story ends with Zhivago’s friends, Dudorov and Gordon, talking about how they survived the Gulag’s to become WWII servicemen, as well as talk of a young girl named Tonya who very much resembles Yury and Lara and the physical/personality traits by which these two came to associate them.

Needless to say, Boris Pasternak was in deep shit with the Soviet Union, Stalin, the KGB and Writer’s Soviet when the book leaked out of the USSR and was printed in several other languages before the USSR ever authorized its publication in Pasternak’s homeland. He was also “encouraged” by the KGB to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature he won that year.

I think people of my parent’s generation are much more familiar with this story, as the movie was a huge hit when it came out and everyone at the time was a big Omar Sharif fan. But for my generation, I think this book goes largely unnoticed. And I can’t see why. There are probably too many lists out there of the top 100 novels, or top 100 modern novels, or any essential book collection, and Doctor Zhivago doesn’t seem to be prevalent enough on those lists. There is no reason it should ever be placed outside of the top 25 on most of these lists. But, we do live in America, and most people can’t handle this much conflict.