Word: doctorate
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bury the Living. In strictly literary terms. Doctor Zhivago is an extraordinary novel, but it is not a great one. It is riddled by implausible coincidences, cluttered with distracting minor characters, shamelessly melodramatic. With the exception of Dr. Zhivago, none of the major characters are developed much beyond the point of abstraction. Even the doctor exists more as a luminous conscience than a physical presence; all the reader is ever told of his appearance is that he is tall and has "a snub nose and an unremarkable face." As for the novel's structure, it is like an endless...
...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?'-'Zhivago,' they were told.-'Oh, I see. That's what it is.'-'It isn't him. It's his wife...
...seemingly perished at the front. Their grand love affair begins, but Pasternak treats it with a circumspection that Russians have dubbed "the Turgenev approach" after the Russian Victorian novelist. Though they spend years intermittently living together in adultery, Yurii and Lara never even kiss in the pages of Doctor Zhivago...
...sorrows and misfortunes of mankind." But Zhivago soon sickens of "the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter." Moscow is like a looted city, its empty windowpanes stare blindly at Zhivago; it is another one of the 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...
...husband Antipov, now called Strelnikov, "The Shooter." His task is to destroy recalcitrant peasant villages for the Bolsheviks in the civil war that has broken out between the Whites and Reds. Emphasizing yet again Zhivago's inner quest for the truth of his own being, Pasternak settles the doctor in a town that is his symbolic namesake, Yuriatin. Inevitably, Lara is there; and despite his remorse, Yurii is once more unfaithful to his wife. On a horseback ride back from Lara's. Physician Zhivago is kidnaped by a band of Red partisans, and for the next couple...