Word: zhivago
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...Doctor Zhivago has sold more hardcover editions in the United States than any other book since Peyton Place. It was the most popular literary Christmas present of the 1958 holiday season. The proportion of pages read to books bought must be more lopsided than that of the Gideon Bible. And one of the biggest reasons for the disparity is reader fatigue; the busy man must choose between the book itself and the welter of commentary...
...Zhivago is a novel by a poet, and as such is at once too great and too restricted for its literary form. It is apolitical, and, ironically, a political shillelagh inveighed by both sides in the Cold War. It alternates between axes of profound beauty and profound confusion. It is not quite Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, but its intellectual vitality and respect for human dignity make it tower above anything else around these days...
...story of Yuri Zhivago is the story of the Russian intellectual--the disintegration of the man of ideas. Zhivago, as a student in the University, welcomes the Revolution; as a professional man displaced, repudiates it; as a degenerate in a one-room Moscow flat, is finally destroyed by it. In the process of that destruction, Pasternak tells the story of Russia in the 20th century--of the parasites who feed on emergent ideologies, of men serving and struggling against systems and faiths they cannot grasp, of the miasma of bureaucracy, land reform, nobility, and military that was Russia after October...
...process of disintegration, Zhivago devolves from a respected physician and devoted poet to a tired, beaten man who dies of a heart attack on a Moscow trolley-car. And that disintegration cannon be ascribed solely to the disruptive political system which surrounds him, to the "inscrutability of universal chaos...
...Zhivago himself is a weak man, a Russian Hamlet to whom reality itself is the greatest antagonist. (The figure of Hamlet dominates Zhivago's conception of himself, culminating in the most notable of his poems collected at the end of the book.) The collection of pygmies in the Soviet Writers Union, besides their fatuous forays against Zhivago's politics complained that the character lacked a social conscience, that the book itself was devoid of a social meaning. And, in a way, it is legitimate criticism. When a protagonist of great stature fails to come to terms with reality...