El Doctor Givago (1957)

Very different than I thought it would be simply based on the 1965 movie. I typically read the book first and then harshly judge the movie, but that wasn't possible in this case since I have watched the movie for years before reading the book. And I love the movie. But there is still much to love about the book as well. At first I was busy comparing the two versions and then I started to enjoy the original twists and turns of the book's storyline. Well worth checking out the original.
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A good Classic to knock over. Reasonable portrayal of the Russian state of affairs either side of the revolution. ( )

La novela pese a transcurrir en medio de transcendentales acontecimientos políticos, lo fundamental, la sustancia dentro dela que viven y mueren sus actores, tiene que ver, más que con la actualidad social y el acontecer político, con la espiritualidad humana, la soberanía individual, la creación artística, el amor y la misteriosa geografía de los destinos particulares. ( )

What a weird book, man. I can say with 100% certainty that I've never read anything that's been written quite like this, so before we get to what's good and bad, let's talk about the strange.

If you're aiming to enjoy Doctor Zhivago, you'll have to get over a few big things. Firstly, you'll need to forget how gigantic Russia is and how bizarre it is that the whole country seems to be inhabited by nine or so people that keep running into each other all the time. Walking along some random ass railroad tracks? You'll see a guy you know. Traversing a firebombed village? You'll run into a kid you know. That's just how it works.

Secondly, you'll need to adjust your understanding of what a conversation is. These people NEVER talk to each other. One person will stand next to another and then soliloquize off into the distance while the other occasionally says something like, "You speak so well!"

Finally, don't be surprised if you don't have a clue which characters are relevant to the narrative and which aren't until the end of the novel. You get swamped with names in the first 50 pages, some of which are vital, some of which disappear entirely (damn you, Voskoboinikov!). I've read a ton of Russian lit and have never struggled with names the way I did with Doctor Zhivago.

What makes this book particularly strange to me, though, is the way Pasternak actually acknowledges these oddities in several encounters throughout the novel. In reference to the incredible chance encounters that Yuri Zhivago has with his half-brother, Pasternak writes: "As usual, he dropped from the sky... As always before, the riddle of his power remained unexplained. Yuri Andreevich did not even try to penetrate the mystery." To me, that says, "Yeah, I know it's weird that people keep running into each other all the time, but sometimes, that's just how things go. Don't worry about it."

In terms of the conversations that aren't quite conversations, the interaction between Zhivago and his uncle Nikolai upon returning home from the war is described by Pasternak thusly: "The two men constantly exclaimed and rushed about the room, clutching their heads from the faultlessness of each other's conjectures, or went to the window and silently drummed on the glass with their fingers, amazed at the proofs of mutual understanding."That is EVERY CONVERSATION. We aren't privy to the words of this particular one, but we can easily picture good old Uncle Kolya dropping five paragraphs as Yuri bangs his head on the wall yelling, "Good God, this is brilliant!" Is it a weakness in Pasternak's writing that every conversation he describes, even one without the words, is the exact same? After reflecting more on Yuri and Nikolai's conversation, I think it's a deliberate attempt to illustrate one of the novel's most important themes.

Yuri Zhivago's greatest "failure" as a Russian during the October Revolution is his individuality. Dissent of any kind, be it armed resistance or just speech, was quickly and violently quashed, to the point where, in Pasternak's view, interaction and discussion of ideas became nothing more than groupthink that would rapidly veer in a radical direction. Look at every conversation that takes place in the novel after the abdication of the tsar, and keep track of what happens to those with a dissenting voice. Resistance to ideas in Doctor Zhivago is just as dangerous as resisting the Red Army, albeit in a different way. Intellectual disagreement quickly becomes ancient history.

Unfortunately, this leads me to my one big beef with the book. One of my favorite "conversations" occurs between Zhivago and his friend Misha Gordon about the Jewish people, who at the time (like most times in their history) were suffering through a great period of persecution in Russia. Gordon makes the point that, despite his own Jewish heritage and distaste for religious persecution, much of the suffering of the Jews is due to their collective identity. He argues that their refusal to individualize and their continued struggle to remain a united Jewish community is a bizarre and unnecessary sacrifice, given the fact that their identity as Jews limits both their ideological and economic development.

Could this point be made about the Soviet Union as a whole? Of course it could. But for some reason, in a process not described in the book, after the February Revolution, Misha Gordon becomes boring and uninspired. Here's how it's justified in the book: Apparently, [Zhivago] had overestimated [his friends] earlier. As long as the order of things had allowed the well-to-do to be whimsical and eccentric at the expense of the deprived, how easy it had been to mistake for a real face and originality that whimsicality and the right to idleness which the minority enjoyed while the majority suffered!
But as soon as the lower strata arose and the privileges of the upper strata were abolished, how quickly everyone faded, how unregretfully they parted with independent thinking, which none of them, evidently, had ever had!What a load of garbage that is. In a book full of insanely lucky coincidences, this is as contrived as it gets.

So now that Misha is out of the running, we can at least count on Zhivago to make the point that Gordon no longer could: that the forced collective identity of the Revolution hindered thought and progress. Except we can't.

About 200 pages after Gordon's talk, Larissa Antipova, the best character in the novel, makes an incredibly similar point about Jews to Zhivago. Here's where my mouth waters. "Good!" I say. "Zhivago's going to finally break it all down." But no. Larissa asks Zhivago if he agrees with her, and here's his response: "I haven't thought about it. I have a friend, a certain Gordon, who is of the same opinion."WHAT? This is a punt to end all punts, as the topic never comes up again, and it absolutely baffles me. I'm willing to believe quite a bit, especially when it comes to fiction. I refuse to believe that after the most interesting dialogue in the book, one of the men involved becomes dumb, and the other never thinks about it again, which is even worse. It might sound strange that I want a point of view that I came up with independently to be elucidated by a fictional character, but to me, having Zhivago not make this argument is wildly inconsistent from who he is throughout the rest of the novel. I'd like to believe this was intentional, like some of the other things that feel weird about the book, but I just don't think so.

That all being said, I can't forget to mention how good the good parts are. The last 10 pages (excluding the utterly useless epilogue) are as heart-wrenching as it gets. Anything involving Larissa is wonderful, and I wish more of the book had been written from her perspective.

I also would have liked more of Uncle Nikolai, specifically because of his arc. He's the best part of the book's first 50 pages. He's intelligent and incredibly influential, especially on Zhivago and Misha Gordon. His belief in the power and importance of the individual carries Zhivago throughout his life. So why in the world does he ally himself with the Bolsheviks? A case is never made, and this is a problem for me. The Bolshevik cause is never defended enough to give people like Nikolai and Gordon any reason to join it. I get that this is an anti-Soviet work (which probably led to Pasternak's Nobel Prize), but in a novel that largely shied away from politics, this seemed too much of a good vs. evil dynamic to justify good, intelligent people throwing their support behind Lenin.

I still don't know what I think about any of this. I guess losing the privileges of the upper strata has really hindered my individuality. ( )

Russian, fiction ( )