Word: tolstoys
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...cupolas of the village Orthodox Church, symbol of the Christian faith that enables his hero, Dr. Yurii Zhivago, to endure the torment, humiliations, sins and tragedy of war and revolution. On the walls of his study glow the illustrations that his artist-father drew for Resurrection by the great Tolstoy, whom Boris Pasternak has called "the territory of conscience." On that territory he consecrated Doctor Zhivago...
...never enticed the readership he thought it deserved, it may have been because its nine volumes did not show that he had followed his own editorial creed ("Omit! Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit . . ."). In Author Samuels' view, Adams' philosophy of history parallels Tolstoy's in War and Peace, i.e., history is "a vast irony, a web of paradoxes," and the hero is merely froth on the crest of all great tidal waves of change. What animated the wave, Adams was at a loss to say, but around it he concocted a mystique...
...plot-derived from a 1957 novel, The Big War, by Anton Myrer-it is the usual panoramic, cram-it-all-in, move-over-Tolstoy sort of thing, with a plural hero (Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Bradford Dillman) who has any number of women (Dana Wynter, Hope Lange, Sheree North, France Nuyen) in his composite life. Nothing happens that has not happened a hundred times before in other war pictures-except perhaps an unusually large number of sincere but badly misdirected performances by promising young cinemactors. All of them, as Producer Jerry Wald proudly points out, have been carefully nurtured...
...Pasternak admits, Doctor Zhivago is "partly autobiographical." Like Zhivago, he grew up in a cultured home; Pasternak's father illustrated one of Tolstoy's novels. In the years immediately following the Russian Revolution, Boris Pasternak wrote symbolist poetry accented with vivid and highly personal imagery. Attacked as a "decadent formalist," he switched to translating, e.g., Shakespeare, Goethe. During the purge trials, he risked death by refusing to sign a denunciation of "traitors," but fellow writers covered up for his defection...
When the church fails to raise up prophets, McCord feels, the world raises them up. Who are such secular prophets? Dostoevsky, in Crime and Punishment (but not Tolstoy-"there was too much sweetness and light about him"). Also Novelist Albert Camus, especially in his latest book, The Fall ("I think Camus is on a pilgrimage and he hasn't arrived"). Oddly, Theologian McCord also includes Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. If anyone criticizes such literary judgments, McCord has an answer: "I think the first thing the Lord requires of us is honesty. He requires you to be honest before...