Word: zhivago
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...week has given MacDonald chance to catch up on outside reading. Among his selections has been Doctor Zhivago...
Lara was "the purest thing in the world," and "nothing equaled her in spiritual beauty." She was like Russia itself: "martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored." In these words, Boris Pasternak described the beautiful heroine of his great novel, Doctor Zhivago, known to readers the world over-except in Russia, where Zhivago is banned...
When Pasternak was savagely attacked for his brief acceptance of the 1958 Nobel Prize, Olga tried to persuade the Soviet authorities to behave with more intelligence. The authorities retorted that she should have used her influence to make Pasternak follow the official line in Doctor Zhivago. Fearing that Olga might be made scapegoat for his doctrinal errors, Pasternak wrote friends in Paris: "If, God forbid, they should arrest Olga, I will send you a telegram saying someone has caught scarlet fever. In that event all tocsins should be made to ring, just as would have been done in my case...
Friends in the West see more than simple vindictiveness in the case. They note that Moscow has proposed bringing out a volume of Pasternak's posthumous poetry. Clearly, the first step in rehabilitating Pasternak as a "great Soviet writer" is to explain away Doctor Zhivago by claiming he had been misled by the evil genius of Olga Ivinskaya...
...conclusion of Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak wrote, "One day, Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace . . . forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north." Olga Ivinskaya last week was following the course of her fictional self to the bitter...