Boris Pasternak’s classic novel accords with the tradition of great Russian literature in its reflection and interpretation of the period in which it was written, despite the fact that Dr. Zhivago was not published until 1956. Pasternak’s tale unfolds amid massive social and political upheaval, in which alliances and loyalties shifted along with the tides of revolutionary change. Yuri Zhivago, the story’s protagonist, is a sensitive, starry-eyed idealist caught up in the violence and treachery of the times. His powerlessness leaves him profoundly vulnerable to the whims of fortune and challenged to maintain his individuality. Ultimately, Dr. Zhivago is a story of individualism, love and survival in a world that has no moral center, where the individual has no power over his own fate.
The Russian Revolution serves as a symbol for the modern world, with all of its power to dehumanize and degrade. The new world order in which Yuri finds himself makes demands of him that threaten his individuality. A doctor, Yuri is committed both professionally and morally to the preservation of human life and to a belief in human dignity, but he is unable to maintain
his principles. In one memorable passage, Yuri is forced to shoot at a company of Whites in spite of his aversion to killing (Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky, p. 396-97). Yuri finds himself morally conflicted, but the “morality” of the moment takes control of him, and he submits to “the laws of what was playing out before and around him. It was against the rules to remain indifferent to it. He had to do what the others were doing. A battle was going on. He
and his comrades were being shot at. It was necessary to shoot back” (Ibid). .
The Revolution forces Yuri to take up arms, to surrender his will and conscience to the exigencies and extremism of the situation. The Revolution is uncompromising; it enforces tyrannies of individual conscience that are as damaging and dangerous as any ideological despotism. It was conscience that motivated Boris Pasternak to stand against the ideological tyranny of the Soviet regime, one of the very first of the great Russian literary figures to take a stance against Stalin and the censorship of his novel (Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky, p. xiii). For Pasternak, the promise of the Revolution had been betrayed by opportunists and power-seekers. Its product, the Communist Soviet state, was the physical manifestation of that which threatened Yuri’s individuality. Pasternak, as Yuri’s alter-ego, found himself confronted by oppression as surely as did the poet-doctor of his creation.
The tragedy of the situation lies in the emotional, psychological and physical toll of Yuri’s efforts to “live with” the Revolution, to accommodate it so that he may continue to exist as an individual of conscience. But the harder he tries, the more he finds himself surrendering his individuality. For Yuri, the prototypical sensitive soul, this is tantamount to a slow death. The battle with the White faction is a jarring experience, one that forces Yuri to question himself and whether he truly possesses the courage of his own convictions. His faith is under constant
pressure. His passionate but doomed relationship with Lara tests him, causes him to question himself as severely as do the great events unfolding around him. As he seeks a semblance of happiness with Lara, he is wracked by a nagging guilt that won’t go away. “The closer this woman and her daughter became to himthe stricter was the control imposed on his thoughts by his duty to his own family and the pain of his broken faith” (Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky, p. 406). The rift created between his sense of duty and his love for Lara torments him like a “frequently reopened wound” (Ibid).
One sees in Yuri the embodiment of a Russia torn by violent revolution much as the young doctor is morally fragmented by the conflict between his desires and his principles. Pasternak characterizes love as a source of both torment and revelation, a typically Russian contradiction of the soul which confronted the entire country in the form of the Revolution. For Yuri, Lara is an ideal of happiness that he knows can never truly be realized. It is as if Pasternak has conceded that the Revolution represents an unwanted compromise, another accommodation, the best that can be hoped for in an imperfect world. Like Yuri, just as the Russian people begin to feel that they may have found happiness and security, events conspire to prove them wrong yet again.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Dr. Zhivago is the sense that one is reading a firsthand account of the way things actually were during the Revolution. Yuri spends many happy hours discussing politics with his friends, a popular pastime among Russian intellectuals and artists. As a member of this society before the Revolution, Yuri passed through life in an academic environment relatively safe from the dangers that drove his more ideologically ambitious countrymen to foment a cataclysmic revolution. In truth, Dr. Zhivago is an intensely
personal account of Pasternak’s experiences over three decades of life in his native Russia, one that reads at times almost like a memoir. Indeed, the parallels between Yuri and Pasternak are unmistakable, as are the struggles that both endured. In defending his principles, Pasternak risked banishment and imprisonment at the hands of the Communists, as Yuri was forced to risk his moral essence.
In Yuri, and in the sense of loss that imbues so much of the novel, Pasternak created a living elegy for the Russia of his youth, a place of old-world charm and refinement in spite of the grinding poverty in which so much of the country suffered under the Tsars. “I wanted to record the past and to honor in Dr. Zhivago the beautiful and sensitive aspects of the Russia of those years,” Pasternak once told an interviewer. “There will be no return of those days, or of those of our fathers and forefathers, but in the blossoming of the future I foresee their values will revive” (Carlisle). It is in that spirit that Pasternak could envision a hopefulness which Dr. Zhivago may not, on its surface, have reflected but to which it alluded in a much deeper sense, as if from an inexhaustible, aesthetic well of remembrance.
For Pasternak, the Revolution had done much more than obliterate what was “beautiful and sensitive” in Russia, it had drained away hope for the future. The characters who struggle to survive in the new order cling to each other, like people in danger of being lost forever in a great flood. Russia was a place where “everything changed; the familiar (was) in ruins; a new order brutally established and suddenly knocked apart again; endless factional war; murder; destruction” (LeGuin, 2008). Yuri had enjoyed debating the need for reform in Russia with friends and family, though his position was as a humanist, not a revolutionary firebrand seeking to purge the country of every vestige of the old order. But it doesn’t take long for Yuri to realize
that the Revolution has turned on itself, and that those who profess to understand the ramifications of revolution are simply mouthing concepts they have heard from others.
Yuri finds himself annoyed at the “imperturbable tone of an oracle” that the youth Pogorevshikh takes in confidently predicting that “ruinous shocks” awaited the country in the near future (Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky, p. 191). Yuri, counseling patience, counters that what the country really needs is a period of calm and reflection, a belief that Pogorevshikh dismisses. “destruction is a natural and preliminary part of a vaster constructive project. Society has not yet broken down enough. It must fall apart completely, and then the real revolutionary power will piece it back together on totally different principles” (Ibid). Though essentially correct, Pogorevshikh has unwittingly predicted the downfall of a society that would even permit such debate. What he is promoting is little more than revolution for its own sake, an exercise in violence aimed at restoring order. The sweep of revolution in Dr. Zhivago simply favors the violent, and the Russian Revolution that emerges proves a corrupt and corrupting phenomenon.
Pasternak’s view of revolution as a means for achieving needed social change is not entirely negative. Yuri’s idealism initially inclines him toward reform as a way to improve the lot of all Russians. But it is after his conversation on the train with Pogorevshikh that he has a revelation as the train carries him home, “which was intact and still existed in the world, and where every little stone was dear to him. This was what life wascoming to your dear ones, returning to yourself, the renewing of existence” (Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky, p. 191). Yuri’s disillusionment with institutionalized violence reminds that human beings are, fundamentally, rational and capable of common-sense interpretations.
But it is Yuri’s humanity, his reason and common sense that ensure he will not survive what is happening around him. He is intrinsically incapable of adopting the cynical survivalist posture of those for whom the Revolution was a chance to grab power. As such, Pasternak offers him up for sacrifice. “(Pasternak) presented Zhivago’s inability to influence his own fate not as a fault, but as a sign that he was destined to become an artistic witness to the tragedy of his age. The author closely identified Zhivago’s predicament with that of the suffering Christ” (PBS.org, 2011). In this, Pasternak used Yuri as a “mouthpiece for his own philosophical and religious beliefs” (Ibid).
One may reasonably conclude that in Yuri, Pasternak had perceived a figure that would symbolically bear the sins of his country and pay for them, and perhaps for his own transgressions as a lover of Lara and a man who does not truly love his wife. If, as Pasternak professed, he could foresee a time when the values of Russia’s forefathers would return, then it Pasternak’s protagonist struggles with the same ethical dilemmas that make life difficult in any country, in any age, and he is as susceptible to sin as any. One feels that given the impossible circumstances of the Revolution, Yuri is capable of giving in to expediency and descending to the same moral depths as others. And as with any other human being, all he has to rely on is a vague idea of faith and a commitment to preserving life. “I think we must be faithful to immortality, that other, slightly stronger name for life,” Nikolai assures him. “We must keep faith in immortality, we must be faithful to Christ!” (Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky, p. 10).
It is a simple exhortation, but one that’s all the more commendable for its simplicity. The vicissitudes of history are transitory and relatively unimportant in the greater context of humanity. With patience, and faith, it is possible to imagine a better day. And by holding on to
hope, a man such as Yuri, who “ever stands forth his own inexorable self,” in Melville’s memorable phrase, provides by his very existence a moral counterpoint to those things that bear human beings away from their humanity (Melville, p. 46). Most critiques of Dr. Zhivago interpret it as a grey, condemnatory account of the Revolution and its depredations, and of the worst predilections of human nature. However, it is a mistake to overlook the hopeful aspects of the story, particularly in light of Yuri’s character and the greater meaning of the role in which Pasternak placed him.
An important aspect of this role is Yuri’s quest for meaningful companionship, for love and the renewing power of interpersonal sharing. The vast expanses of Russia serve to illustrate the loneliness against which the story’s main characters struggle. For Yuri, loneliness is a familiar companion. Having lost his parents at an early age, he spends his life looking for a substitute to help fill this terrible emotional gap. Tonia is a woman he admires greatly, but his fondness for her is without passion, indicating that for Yuri marriage is a physical manifestation of his need for motherly affection. He finds passionate love with Lara, but it can never be made permanent, illustrating that the course of events renders utterly helpless the characters who are subject to them. The time and the setting are never quite right for the story’s characters to find lasting happiness.
All of which raises the question, if the Revolution is intended to improve the lives of all Russians, then its legitimacy and usefulness are compromised by the fact that the people who need reform the most suffer most. Only the power-hungry, it seems, are happy and then only in an empty, unredeeming sense. The overarching point that Pasternak seems to make here is that revolution simply replaces tyranny with tyranny, and at the cost of untold numbers of deaths and
ruined lives. A world turned upside down simply means that those who once held power are simply replaced by those who always wanted power. True happiness is one quality that has no place in either side of the equation, and it finds inhospitable ground in the lives of the characters in Dr. Zhivago.
As previously mentioned, Pasternak’s timeless story is characteristically Russian in that it is a “period piece,” a story that is inseparable from the events it chronicles. As such, it is a worthy successor to the literature of Count Tolstoy and other giants of the Russian literary canon.
The qualities that make Dr. Zhivago timeless are the experiences, longings and miseries in which all humanity shares. In this sense, Dr. Zhivago may be said to be a truly worldly novel, which probably accounts for its enduring worldwide popularity. It was published at the height of the Cold War, when people, particularly in the West, were only too anxious to read uncomplimentary accounts of Soviet history. The controversy over Pasternak’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Soviet regime’s attempt to prevent Dr. Zhivago’s publication only added to the mystique and allure of the novel. Prestigious international names like Jawaharlal Nehru and William Faulkner commended the book and facilitated its international dissemination. All of this is true, but does not quite explain why it continues to receive popular and critical praise.
It is a love story, a war story, a story about character and a story about human nature. As such, its themes are universal and instantly relatable for readers of any nationality, gender or political ideology. From a literary standpoint, its spirit is singularly Russian. Pasternak’s characters are remarkably sympathetic or reprehensible; Yuri, in particular, is a compelling protagonist whose sufferings, wanderings and loss creates a powerful sense of pathos, which translated especially well to David Lean’s film version. Ultimately, Dr. Zhivago is a story about the human condition; the futility of the quest to both amass and defy power; and the persistence of hope through it all.
Works Cited
Carlisle, Olga. “Boris Pasternak, The Art of Fiction No. 25.” The Paris Review, 2012. Web.
http://www.theparisreview.org.
“From Lyric Poet to Epic Novelist: Boris Pasternak (1890-1960).” Doctor Zhivago. PBS.org.
Web. http://www.pbs.org.
LeGuin, Urusula. “Pain, Betrayal and Love in Old Russia.” NPR Books. 6 June 2008.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Forgotten Books. Web. http://www.forgottenbooks.com.
Pasternak, Boris, Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa. Dr. Zhivago. New York: Random
House International, 2011.
