Word: pasternaks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Omar Sharif in the title role and Julie Christie as his Lara head an impressive cast in Director David Lean's thoroughly romantic version of Boris Pasternak's epochal bestseller...
...gloomy afternoon in 1934, a Russian poet named Osip Mandelstam made the worst mistake of his life. He dropped in on Boris Pasternak at his Moscow apartment. Pasternak he knew he could trust, but there were four other Russian writers in the room. But Mandelstam was too wrought up to be wary. He passionately recited an "epigram" he had written about Stalin...
...days later, the Georgian tribesman in the Kremlin, who was known to like raspberries, put a ripe one in his mouth. Betrayed by one of the writers in Pasternak's parlor, Mandelstam was arrested on Stalin's personal order and banished to Siberia. His poetry was suppressed and is still almost entirely unknown in the Soviet Union, while in the West his reputation has been obscured by trite translations...
...Pasternak's novel, the love story of Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and his Lara (Julie Christie) was part of a vast canvas of war, revolution and social upheaval. Scenarist Robert Bolt has condensed much of this story through a narrator, Yuri's Bolshevik brother (Alec Guinness). The device seems awkward at times, but the flashbacks spring vividly to life on their own. The couple's first wordless encounter takes place aboard a tramcar in Moscow, and the headlong rush of their interwoven destinies is a subtle, unifying symbol of Zhivago. Trains wail along outside the house where...
...star of Doctor Zhivago is Director Lean himself, who has effectively captured on film the essence of Pasternak's belief that men are priceless as individuals, not as cogs in a superstate. Lean speaks for humanity in a language of unspeakably beautiful images: the desolate ritual of a funeral on a windswept Russian heath; a band of running, white-shirted schoolboys suddenly massacred in a field of golden wheat; or simply the timeless, kaleidoscopic, never-ceasing cycle of the seasons. His sentimental Zhivago is perhaps warm and rewarding entertainment rather than great art; yet it reaches that level...