Word: pasternak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Sacrifice begins for Zhivago when World War I wrenches him from his wife Tonia and his infant son. He is wounded, and cared for by Lara, who has become a nurse, while her husband has 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...
...Lara's 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...
...other than Pasternak's Communist critics, have noted his unfeigned and unwavering sympathies for the educated middle class in which he was reared. In this section, Pasternak takes pains to make his protagonist's loyalties unmistakable. The partisan commander is a cocaine-sniffing hophead whom Dr. Zhivago loathes, as much for his boring platitudes as for his cruelty. By contrast, when a band of teen-age White soldiers storms the Red positions, the doctor admires their gallantry. He feels that he must shoot in self-defense, but he cannot bring himself to aim at the boys who "were...
Weather of the Heart. An oldtime literary colleague of Pasternak's and a party-liner, who has managed to survive Moscow's murderous political traffic by carefully watching the Kremlin lights, ventured (before the Nobel Prize fracas) to praise Doctor Zhivago. Said 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...