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A historic and poetic love epic Apr 1, 2006 (30 of 31 found this helpful)
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is quite remarkably a poet's novel: the writer was a poet, and hence each page is full of beautiful imagery, metaphors and word play. The protagonist is a poet, the novel revolves around his love and life in the first half of twentieth century Russia. The reader, by association, has to be a poet to really relish the saga.
It is one of those novels from last century that everyone must read. The ghosts of socialism and Marxism, the excesses that occured in name of revolution, the transformation of the largest country of the world from ceturies old system into a failed ideal: the novel has enough historical significance. Last century was guided, molded, scarred, decorated and defined by the events and ideas that crop up as part of Doctor Zhivago's life. The literary underpinnings are gigantic: a love story with the Russian Revolution as background score: a Nobel was the least he could have got.
Besides the historical perspective, the story itself is a delightful one. The homely Tonya, Dr Zhivago's wife and first love and mother of his children, the sensuous Lara who weaves into and out of Yuri (Dr Zhivago's) life, her husband Pasha Antipov, who at every junction of his life must fight against ghosts and demons of his wife's past and present and in attempt outclass himself, the Uncle Koyla, the intellectual: the list is unending. Characters are crafted from all sections of society, making this novel a representation of whole society at that time. Like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the novel provides four or five chief characters, who are immense in their own potrayal, parting with their thoughts, ideas, ideals and philosophies, and possessing unique well-defined characteristics, the novel has another string of about twenty characters who are unforgettable for whatever roles they are assigned.
The harshness of winter, the beauty of forests and fields, the man divided in his love for wife Tonya and lover Lara, the poet in exile, the idealists seeking to change the world, Russian history and customs: such ideas find Pasternak displaying hs poetic prowess. Many passages in the book are sheer poetry, and I am amazed at seeing how powerful they are in translated language: I wish I knew Russian to find out how delightful the original must have been.
It is a long novel, with graphic pleasant and unpleasant sequences and a writing style where its apparent that either because it is a translation or ther writer was a poet attempting prose, the writing is not a easy read. Requires lot of time and effort and most people prefer the movie that was made in 1965 or so. I think reading Doctor Zhivago is an experience in itself, and in this post cold war era, it contains the perspective and historical lessons that we all must know and understand.
An excerpt that presents a preview of all the things this novel incorporates into the love saga of Yuri, where his heart is in strife in his love for two women as is it in strife witnesses changes that challenge every aspect of his being and thinking:
"Even more than what they had in common, they were united by what separated them from the rest of the world. They were both repelled by what was tragically typical of the modern man, his shrill textbook admirations, his forced enthusiam, and the deadly stillness coldly preached and practiced by the countless workers in the field of art and science in order that the genius must remain extremely rare.
They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing there is anything remarkable about it.
To them- and this made them unusual- the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessnesses were moments of revelation, of ever greater understanding of life and of themselves."
Loved it. Highly recommended.
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The flaws are much of what makes it so great. Jan 5, 2007 (39 of 43 found this helpful)
I read Zhivago for the first time in high school. I loved it, but didn't pick it up again for 20 years. I was surprised to find it rough going at the beginning. When I had first read the book, it had been precisely the first 100 or so pages that had enchanted me and pulled me into the novel. This time around, it was the complex and often frustrating last half of the book that really moved me. I guess this is a measure of how the book grows with the reader.
Doctor Zhivago is a complicated book that seems to me largely about how people get involved with circumstances (politics, love affairs) that do not interest them, simply because life leaves them vulnerable. That makes for a strange reading experience, because it is not a message that wraps itself up neatly. The texture of the novel is in part about ends-- loose ends, dead ends, character cul-de-sacs. A more experienced author wouldn't have tried to work this theme out in prose using the same methods that Pasternak employed. The book rolls from melodrama to nearly documentary realism. He uses diary form, letters, even poetry to complete the work. I guess it was his lack of experience that allowed him to (very nearly) achieve the impossible. The feeling of the book is an awful lot like life.
There are certainly more polished and perfect novels and novelists out there. Doctor Zhivago would not have profited from their example. As the title of this review says, Zhivago is great precisely because it isn't perfect. It is a great sprawling messy wonderful world of a book.
Recommended for readers of all ages.
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The epic of independent thought in censorship hell Feb 14, 2001 (23 of 25 found this helpful)
This is the epic of Zhivago (and later, Pasternak himself)over the background of Russia's transition from Czarist rule to Bolshevism, passing through the First World War and the Civil War. The novel tells the intercrossing stories of Dr. Yuri Zhivago and Lara, whose lives meet several times during their childhood and adolescence, without getting to know each other. Zhivago grows up in Moscow, with the Gromeko family, whose child Tonya becomes his wife. Lara gets married to Pavel Antipov, who goes to war. When he is missing in action, Lara becomes a military nurse, in order to look for him. Zhivago also has to go to war, and there he meets Lara. After the war, he and his family move to a rural estate near the city of Yuriatin. There he meets Lara again. She lives alone with her daughter, since her husband has become the terrible revolutionary known as Strelnikov. They fall in love immediately and absolutely, and they start an affair which torments Zhivago, since he feels bad about being unfaithful to his wife. One day, he is kidnapped by the Partisans (revolutionaries), who keep him in prison during the Civil War. Eventually he escapes, to proceed his life. Many things more happen, but let's not spoil the plot.
This book is a vast landscape of Russia, but it's not a political or social novel. It is basically a story of love and Fate, but it is also possible to interpret it as a symbol of what war, politics and especially totalitarianism can do to the individual. But I don't agree with the reviewer who says that every character is a specific symbol or prototype, since I found them to be full personalities, tragic figures with a whole life depicted in the book. This book is to be suffered, for it is very emotional and sad. "Rich" is perhaps the best word to describe it.
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Zhivago is life and art Jul 17, 1999 (21 of 23 found this helpful)
Before anyone should decide whether or not Doctor Zhivago is a good book, they must look into themselves and see what it is they are about, what they love, and what affects them. As with any book, there are going to be those who feel that Zhivago is horrible because famous and illustrious novelists (like Mr. Nabokov) did not agree with the approach Pasternak took to writing his novel (but Nabokov also criticized Dostoevsky's books for quite the same reasons, so does this mean that Crime and Punishment and The Idiot and Karamazov are not artistic novels?). Before anyone decides to defer to Nabokov's opinion, he should realize why Nabokov said those things. Reading a Nabokovian book is so much different from Doctor Zhivago. Nabokov's novels are well planned out, with biblical, Shakespearean, and Poe-etical imagery aplenty. His language in general, in every novel, short story, and poem, is spectacular and to be worshipped. His themes dealt with extraordinary events in common life. Nabokov is an artist in the sense of a Renaissance painter.
But Pasternak is not that way, almost quite the opposite. He set out to write a great novel, and I suppose he has done so in many circles of readers. And of those, I am sure that many think the book is great because of the epic events (the revolution), the epic characteristics (the journey), and the eternal themes (love and war, death and separation). But what great book by Tolstoy doesn't have those? What I see with Doctor Zhivago is the way Pasternak treats everyday, common place events. This is the best book, the only book, I have read to take normal events, ones which I see myself going through everyday, and put them into words that are poetic, flowing, and so representative of the truth. The characters may not rival those of Dickens, or the plot may have loopholes and deadends which scream at you HORRIBLE, but those are not the only, or even the most important, characteristics of a novel which defines its greatness.
For this book to be considered art, it shouldn't be looked at with a mathematician's eye, quantifying how many cardboard characters there are, how often Pasternak expounds his own philosophy in similar ways with different characters, or how many times a chapter pops up which is totally different in style and format to the rest of the book and detracts from the novel's flow. Art is not an additive process, but something that occurs inside of the reader, viewer, or listener. And for a book in the last half of the 20th century to create that makes it special, and something to be respected. At least for me. This book has done more inside of me than any other. Not because of its flimsy characters or loose plot arrangement, but because of how it describes life with the poet's simplicity, and creates art from such a simple life.
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An Unconventional Romance Nov 9, 2007 (12 of 12 found this helpful)
Doctor Zhivago has, in the years since its secret publication in Italy, been called a timeless love story. However, even though this may be true, it does not follow the usual type of a love story which begins with the meeting of two lovers and then ends happily with their marriage or a comparable event. Instead the author, Russian poet Boris Pasternak, writes the love story between Yury Zhivago and Lara Antipova, two characters who were already married to others. In this, Doctor Zhivago is a palpable commentary on marital infidelity. This has, in the past, lead this beautifully worked novel to be shunned as controversial or immoral. However, despite the fact that Pasternak chooses such a difficult theme to work with in his novel, he validates and creates sympathy for Yury, Lara, and their affair with his usage of characterization, symbolism, and appeals to pathos.
Pasternak's characterizations of the two principle female characters play a huge role in winning the audience's sympathy for Lara and her plight. Yury's wife Tonya is, essentially, a flat character; throughout the book she remains devoted to Yury and her children; she conforms to the social norms both before and after the revolution takes place where Pasternak's more dynamic characters all experience a change because of it. Additionally, Pasternak makes it difficult to connect to Tonya by keeping her essentially out of sight throughout the novel; the only time the audience reads of her feelings is in a letter, and consequently, is indirect. In fact, all of the audience's experience of Tonya is indirect; we see her through Zhivago's descriptions or conversations about her, but never as just herself. This distance from Tonya is furthered by Yury's lack of identification with Tonya; he always feels spiritually apart from his wife. A sharp contrast is Lara, whose poignant thoughts and feelings can be read from nearly the beginning of the story, and who, despite having extremely nonconformist tendencies like political activeness, maintenance of a job even into her married years, and an insistence to assist in the WWI war effort, is portrayed more warmly than any of the other characters in the novel. She is given the endearing Tonya-like qualities of devotion to family (it is the emergence of her husband Pasha as the merciless revolutionary Strelnikov that leads to their separation) and the nonconformist attributes which make her such a fascinating character. The audience is also made to see Lara as a character worthy of the kind of love she has with Yury because of the tragic nature of her previous intimate relationship as a teenager with the aging lawyer Komarovsky, which can be described as nothing less than parasitic. As Lara later says to Yury, "There is something broken in my whole life. I discovered life much too early, I was made to discover it, and I was made to see it from the very worse side--a cheap, distorted version of it--through the eyes of a self-assured, elderly parasite, who took advantage of everything and allowed himself whatever he fancied" (13:398). This clearly exhibits the disillusionment she felt as a result of her affair, and is not only presented here but also throughout the text. Pasternak uses Lara's disillusionment to create sympathy and hope for something better for this extremely likable character; as she loves Yury Zhivago, their love affair is the culmination of our hopes.
Another way in which Pasternak validates Yury and Lara's affair is his use of religious symbolism, particularly in reference to who would have been the "fallen woman" of the affair, Lara. In Pasternak's time, it was the woman who suffered more from an affair; however, in one particular scene, Lara appears as an iconic image of the Virgin Mary. "Like a huge banner stretching across a city street, there hung before him in the air, from one side of the forest glade to the other, a blurred, greatly magnified image of a single, astonishing, idolize