Word: booked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...primacy of the individual and his private life in defiance of superstates, of groupthink, of social and ideological regimentation. If this is a devastating indictment of the essence of Communism, it is by implication equally critical of much that is currently lodged in Western habits of thought; for the book flatly pits the individual against "adjustment to the group," the soul's need against economic need, the organic against the mechanical...
...like an endless railway journey in which the reader sometimes waits yawningly for the next station of the plot. Yet these defects mask virtues. Coincidence is the logic of destiny, and Dr. Zhivago has a strong sense of his destiny. The massed characters and episodes help to give the book panoramic scope. And the torrents of talk on art, religion, and life usually flow with incisive force, in what one critic calls Western Europe's "great tradition of full statement"-a tradition that has nearly disappeared in the West's contemporary fragmented, endlessly detailed and programed writing...
What raises Zhivago above technically better-made novels is that it is charged with moral passion. On the very first page, Pasternak evokes an old Russian ballad that sets the tone of the novel and suggests the elaborate symbolic substructure he has given his book. The ballad, dating from the period when being buried alive was a commonly felt terror, contains the line "Who are they burying? The living! Not him, but her." Thus in the second paragraph of Doctor Zhivago, a funeral procession is described: "Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried...
Life as Sacrifice. Zhivago's Uncle Kolia, a kind of fellow traveler of Christianity, enunciates one of the book's major themes: "What you don't understand is that . . . history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ's Gospel is its foundation. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies . . . The two basic ideals of modern man -without them...
...living whom the Revolution has buried. Typhus and near-starvation force the doctor to pack himself and family off to the Urals-but the old life is still so near that they go into exile with a nursemaid for the children. This train journey is one of the book's great set pieces, with matchless descriptions of sky, snow and forest, and a haunting image of all Russia, restless, uprooted and on the move...