Doctor Zhivago: Introdcution by John Bayley

SPOILER WARNING.Notoriously, Vladimir Nabokov hated this novel, while admiring Pasternak the poet, and it's not hard to see why. The plot is based on an endless series of chance meetings (implausible in the vastness of Russia); the love story between Yuri and Lara at the heart of the novel is rather conventional and sentimental (something which was exaggerated to breaking point in the film version); the "hero" Yuri is rather a Hamlet-like figure (indecisive, always over-intellectualising and constantly running away from where the action is); the female characters are unconvincing (Tonya is one-dimensional, while Lara is too idealised to be plausible, an almost Biblical suffering woman). Frankly I didn't understand why Lara was interested in a liaison with Yuri at all, given his rather insipid personality and the fact that she loved her husband and knew that he was alive. The one big decision Yuri takes (to let Lara go with Komarovski) is unexplained: why does he go back to Moscow, knowing that his family is in exile and there is nothing for him there? The use of Yuri as a mouthpiece for Pasternak's views on literature at various places is annoying and breaks up the flow of the story. The worst thing for me is the ending, not because it is an unhappy ending (a happy ending would be ridiculous in Soviet Russia, and totally inappropriate), but because the decline and death of Yuri is anticlimactic (like Pasternak himself, Yuri is not important enough to be sent to a prison camp), and Lara is unceremoniously jettisoned from the book once Yuri is gone, as if Pasternak couldn't be bothered to write out a detailed end story for her.However, however, however, having said all this, the novel sweeps the reader along in its epic story with its beautful prose (of which most of the beauty is lost in translation). The real hero of the novel is not Yuri but Russia, its big and small cities, its forests and villages, its peasants and traditions, all of which is under threat of being annihilated by the tidal wave unleashed by the Revolution, a remedy to the flaws of Tsarist Russia which often seems likely to kill the patient. This possibly explains the underwhelming ending: Pasternak could easily have written a dramatically tragic Romeo and Juliet type of ending, but he doesn't want the love story to dominate everything, nor does he want to write a story focussed on a strong heroic leading man. The characters are a way of showing the effects of war and revolution on Russia, not at the Winter Palace or the Kremlin, but in the regions and countryside, in small towns and working districts of Moscow. That's why David Lean's film, brilliant in its own way, rather misses the point. This novel is not the tragedy of Yuri and Lara but the tragedy of Russia.The very last scene of the book is important: long after the deaths of Yuri and Lara, after the second world war, two friends of Yuri's who collaborated and conformed with the Communist regime (and whom Yuri looked down on for that reason), are looking forward hopefully to a liberalisation in Russia and a thaw in the regime. The book thus foresees Gorbachev (but the thaw took decades more than Pasternak hoped). The collection of poems at the end of the book is integral and essential; presented as Zhivago's poems, they include some of Pasternak's best poems.This is a novel by a poet, with flaws that a career novelist might have avoided. But read it as a love poem to Russia and the flaws pale into insignificance. Lara is mother Russia in a way, abused and mistreated by some, adored and worshipped by others, but just trying to survive and bring up children in the hope that life will be better in the next generation.

Reading this for the first time, I bought both the old Max Hayward translation and the new Paver/Volokhonsky translation in Vintage Classics. The Hayward one is much more natural-sounding. Peaver and Volokhonsky were highly praised by The New York Times and many other critics for their Russian translations, but as with their War and Peace, I find them very clunky, even though they crib mercilessly from earlier translations. Compare. PV --"He considered art unsuitable as a calling, in the same sense that innate gaiety or an inclination to melancholy could not be a profession." MH: "He considered that art was no more a vocation than innate cheerfulness or melancholy were professions." PV: "...there are riddles, friend Horatio, before which science folds." MH: " 'there were more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...'" Now why on earth wouldn't PV go back to the Shakespearean original there? The one thing I find better in PV is the end notes, but the MH has easier to access footnotes which, if less ample, are more than enough. And MH also gives a helpful list of characters at the beginning!

The story focuses on the love story between Doctor Yuri Zhivago and two women; his wife and mother of his children Tonya, and Larissa Fyodorovna (Lara), a young woman who he has been destined to meet throughout the novel. Set in Russia during the turbulent First World War and throughout the Russian Revolution, it is a comment on the society he lives in as much as a potted history of the Revolution. The novel went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature and it is not hard to see why. It is truly epic.Throughout the book, there is a real feeling of links, lives are intertwined and people met in passing pop up much later in the novel to steer Yuri and Lara on a new path. The cast of characters feels immense, but the closeness in the way the novel has been written, makes you feel as if there were only 20 people living in Russia at that time. These invisible ties to to people made me believe that Lara and Yuri were always destined to meet. Yuri spots a light burning in a window as a young man and it is Lara's light; Yuri administers to Lara's cruel 'uncle' who Lara has shot and the pair go onto meet much later in the novel.This is a novel, ultimately, about Yuri and Lara and the people who loved them. Tonya and Antipov, adore their respective husband and wife. None of them are bad people or morally wrong and you genuinely believe that Yuri faces true agonies because he loves two women. Tonya, Yuri's wife, is incredibly strong, supporting Yuri and undergoing the harshest of journeys to provide the best life she can for her family. All the while, she remains uncomplaining about the ghostly Lara and the love Yuri has for this woman.It is a tough, brutal, interesting and cruel read. The story of Lara and Yuri is breathtaking, especially when set against the dramatic backdrop of Russia throughout the seasons. The novel feels sweeping and provides a commentary of a country at war with itself. It feels important and I hope that somewhere Boris Pasternak knows how important the novel has become.

I bought this book because I thought that the film was one of the best films ever. Maybe the intellectuals think the same about the book, and maybe they are right. I have read Natasha's Dance and also War and Peace, but I found this book very hard work. Possibly the sheer number of names of people, not initially connected, does not help. Possibly the number of strands which are, initially, not connected, defeated me (but yes, I did finish the book). A friend recommended reading it again now that I have a better understanding of how it integrates, but I cannot face it !

This is a most fascinating epic novel set in the turbulent times in Russia in the early twentieth century. Doctor Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is apolitical at the time of the October Revolution and the subsequent civil war. But, forced to work as a doctor for the partisans (Bolsheviks), he witnesses brutality and inhumanity committed by both sides. He reflects: "This time justified the old saying: Man is a wolf to man.... The human laws of civilisation ended. Those of beasts were in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the caveman."The relationship between Zhivago and Lara is, of course, the central theme. Their lives get tragically torn apart by the brutal forces beyond their control. When one realises that millions of Russians suffered the similar fate like Zhivago and Lara during the Revolution and civil war and under the totalitarian Soviet regime, the fate of these characters becomes poignant. The author's view on politics in Soviet Russia affecting ordinary citizens is an important theme. Pasternak writes: "Revolutions are produced by men of action, one-sided fanatics, geniuses of self-limitation. In a few hours or days they overturn the old order. The upheavals last for weeks, for years at the most, and then for decades, for centuries, people bow down to the spirit of limitation that led to the upheavals as to something sacred."He also writes later on: "It was precisely the conformity, the transparency of their (Soviet officials') hypocrisy that exasperated Yuri Andreevich. The unfree man always idealises his slavery. So it was in the Middle Ages; it was on this that the Jesuits always played. Yuri Andreevich could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was its highest achievement, or, as they would have said then, the spiritual ceiling of the epoch." These are very brave comments to make about the political system during the repressive Soviet era.It is easy to understand the reasons why the publication of this book in Soviet Union was banned by its authorities and Pasternak was forced by the Communist Party to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.Pasternak's vivid and poetic descriptions of nature are very good indeed. The reader will realise that he was a great poet (as he is apparently known in Russia more than as a novelist) and a religious man.I find the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (an experienced husband-and-wife team) excellent. I have not read other translations, but with this present version I feel the reader will be able to fully appreciate the beauty of the writing. Finally, with detailed notes by the translators, it's possible to follow military and political developments during the civil war and the subsequent period as well as understand some of Orthodox Church customs.