Word: russianize
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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...
...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...
Russia in Flames. When the Revolution breaks out, almost everyone Dr. Zhivago knows is enraptured by the profoundly Russian messianic dream: "There arose before the eyes of the world the vast figure of Russia bursting into flames like a light of redemption for all the 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...
...injury, but worked in a chemical factory in the Urals. While the '20s brought him success, the late '30s imposed silence. During the Stalinist purges, Pasternak turned to translating Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley-the only work of his by which he is known to a wide Russian public. Save for two wartime books of poetry, no volume of Pasternak's has been published in Russia for a quarter-century, although handwritten copies are privately circulated...
...Spasibo Dorogiye." The tactic of passivity and silence gradually made him a hero with Russian intellectuals and made his rare public appearances S.R.O. affairs. At one such reading, in 1947, a sheet of his manuscript slipped to the floor, and before he could stoop to retrieve it the audience chanted the next stanza of his poem by heart. Eyes brimming with tears, Pasternak choked out "Spasibo Dorogiye" (Thank you. dear ones). At another reading, his listeners yelled "Sixty-six! Sixty-six!", meaning the sixty-sixth sonnet of Shakespeare. The telltale line: "Art made tongue-tied by authority...