Life of a Russian doctor/poet who, although married, falls for a political activist's wife and experiences hardships during the Bolshevik Revolution.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A superb, highly coincidental Russian novel suitable for the everyman,
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This review is from: Doctor Zhivago (Paperback)
Pasternak's novel of the October Revolution is brilliant. It begins with ten-year-old Zhivago attending his mother's funeral. Then in one of many significant incidents that happen outside the limits of knowledge of the one who would most want to know, his father, who left the family years before and started a new life with another family, throws himself from the train. Zhivago eventually decides to become a doctor and after the requisite years of education, does. He meets and marries a young woman named Antonia. Meanwhile, Lara, future love interest, romantically involved with her mother's lover and former attorney of Zhivago's father also marries. The two meet and form a friendship at a hospital as the war rages, and later become romantically involved. Zhivago encounters a military man rumored to be Lara's husband (who is thought to be dead). The families of Zhivago and Lara are finally forced to flee and he is conscripted by the military as a doctor. Unsurprisingly, they are reunited. The lawyer reappears and tries to weasel his way back into Lara's life. Zhivago's life situation takes a downturn. Then a whole bunch of highly coincidental interesting stuff happens that would ruin the plot if shared. His repeated contact with most of the relatively few characters makes anticipating upcoming encounters likely. Doctor Zhivago, peppered with proverbs, is a relatively easy read with something of interest for most: history, politics, religion, philosophy, romance and drama. Also good: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Execution by Hunger by Miron Dolot and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Love and Revolution,
By
This review is from: Doctor Zhivago (Paperback)
"Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak, © 1957, 1958, 1958
Quite the love story. It is sad, and a lot is made of the Russian Revolution, as is right. The times were in turmoil and it affected everyone. It is to be noted that the same events are happening in Iraq today: factions fighting factions; injustice and terrorism are treated as if just and right because the perpetrators are a part of some group that thinks so; etc. This is really a soap opera. People live their lives and have troubles, solve problems, create heartache and what not, just like we do in real life. The story does not deal in psychology, so a few times the choices of the characters are truly left to your own intuition and understanding of human nature. Some of the philosophy spouted by these people gets a bit esoteric and convoluted, by and large, it is understandable, just a bit odd to read in a literary story. As I read the book, I began to feel as if, if I tried, I could see Lara as a microcosm for Russian peasants. They were violated young, treated all right for a time, left to their own resources, on and on, up through the Russian Revolution. Maybe that is the quality of this book that so many people were enthralled to read it. It could also have been the history told through personal toil that was what people of the West were really interested in. I am not a real fan of that sort of literature. I did not enjoy reading Galsworthy, "The Forsthye Saga" either. They are just too mundane It is interesting that this is a story of a philander. Yuri marries his childhood sweetheart, then finds another sweet and gentle soul to enjoy. The marriage falls apart due to social conditions and Yuri's inability to do anything for his family. At one point, he realizes he has not been much of a father to his children. It makes him sad, but there is little he can do to undo or make things better for any of them. I guess that, in the sense that a philander goes outside of his marriage to have sex for the heightened libido or something, Yuri is not like that. He truly loves his wife and Lara, seemingly equally as much. They both have the sun shining out of their root charka, as far as he is concerned. As for his last lover, there he is just trying to still be human, but his mental state is such that he fails at that and in the end abandons her.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"War and Peace" for the 20th Century,
By Mike (Arlington, VA. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Doctor Zhivago (Paperback)
When Boris Pasternak wrote "Doctor Zhivago" at a writer's community in Russia, where he could be among literary people, he kept it under cover, knowing that the Soviet Union would never let it be published in Russia.
After a friend smuggled the manuscript out, it was first published in Italy and became a world-wide sensation by 1956. Eleven years later, I was a young lad in my first year of high school, tired of comic books and ready to spread my wings into the world of literature. Daunted by the sheer size of "War and Peace", I saw the movie "Doctor Zhivago" and decided to check out the original book. What a feast! Yuri Zhivago is the son of a wealthy businessman who died of alcohol. His mother dies when Yuri is only a boy. Raised by his aunt and uncle, Yuri becomes a doctor and poet, marries his cousin, Tonia Gromeko and settles in Moscow to practice medicine and write poetry. But, his world is turned upside down by World War I and the Russian Revolution. While in the army, Yuri meets and later falls in love with Lara Antipov, whose husband is a White Revolutionary and is presumed killed in action. Yuri is captured by counter-revolutionaries and escapes, walking for miles, half-frozen and seeking Lara. Lara has been abused as a young woman by Victor Komarovsky, a corrupt lawyer who is "in touch" with Yuri's half-brother, a Red officer who had helped Yuri's family flee Moscow during the Stalinist purges. And so it goes on, with enough sub-plots and back-stories to make a very sprawling read. "Zhivago" enjoyed a revival during the Sizties, after David Lean's film was released, and I do remember finding a strange "analysis" book at my local library, written by two Russians living here, who insisted that Pasternak's characters were "symbols" - Lara represented Russia in its purity before the Revolution, Yuri as the middle class, Komarovsky as the corrupt citizens who wanted to keep the status quo, and so on. And so Pasternak set these "symbols" and metaphors into a very realistically written novel. Another aspect of this novel is where Pasternak has his characters "linked" to others by certain events, relationships, and so on. Which goes to show how much art mirrors life. Even with nothing to connect people but - other people. Forget David Lean's film: the "soap opera" element that Robert Bolt wrote into it just doesn't do justice to this rich and magnificent story, comparable in sweep to "Gone With The Wind" and "War and Peace".
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