Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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That meaning is manifold. Zhivago is a historical novel of "Russia's terrible years," bearing witness to the sufferings of the Russian people. It is also a novel of Christian humanism that opposes the materialism of both East and West, affirms the sanctity of every man's soul under God. It is a novel in praise of the continuity of life, which for Pasternak means resurrection. It is, finally, a novel dedicated to the primacy of the individual and his private life in defiance of superstates, of groupthink, of social and ideological regimentation. If this is a devastating...
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...
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...
...Ilya (The Thaw) Ehrenburg: "The description of those days is excellent. Pasternak and I belong to the same generation, so I can pass judgment on this." But the editors of the Moscow magazine Novy Mir, to whom Pasternak submitted the manuscript in 1956, stated the Communist case against the novel. Apart from Pasternak's sympathy for bourgeois characters, they cited 1) his failure to distinguish between the several wings of the revolutionary movement and even between the February (Democratic) and the October (Bolshevik) revolutions; 2) the unheroic desire of his characters to stay alive. From the editors' point...
...Horse's Mouth (British). Alec Guinness is hilarious as a mildewed Michelangelo. But the cinemadaption of Joyce Gary's magnificent novel of rant does not come straight from, seems rather to whicker out of the side of, the horse's mouth...