Word: pasternaks
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Beyond Politics. Around the world the name of Boris Pasternak, until recently familiar to few except fellow poets and literary specialists, has assumed a kind of magic. In U.S. book stores, Zhivago, the No. 1 bestseller, is periodically out of stock; U.S. sales to this week: 344,000 copies. The publisher (Pantheon) has a new printing of 430,000 copies scheduled, and the Book-of-the-Month Club is rushing Zhivago to its subscribers as an alternate choice. It has been translated into 17 languages: the book without a country will shortly span the globe. At least some clandestine copies...
Much of the West's interest in Zhivago is political. Inevitably, the book has been used as a weapon in the cold war. Inevitably, Moscow's refusal to let Pasternak accept the Nobel Prize and his denunciation by the hired hacks of the Animal Farm ("A black sheep in a good flock," "a pig," "a snake") have alienated intellectuals outside Russia-even India's Nehru protested directly to Khrushchev. But to assess the book primarily in political terms would be making a major error about Doctor Zhivago and about Boris Pasternak. The bitter criticism of Marxism cannot...
...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 indictment of the essence of Communism, it is by implication equally critical of much that...
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...