Word: zhivago
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Pasternak has called his book's tremendous success the "Zhivago miracle," but the paradox of the Pasternak miracle is equally compelling. He is a stubborn man who is not really a martyr. He is an aggrieved man and yet not an avenger. He is a man without weapons, wielding "the irresistible power of unarmed truth." Most paradoxically of all, out of Communist Russia, a society that officially denies the existence of God, Pasternak has sent a deeply Christian statement of the condition of man, such as most writers of the professedly Christian West are too embarrassed or too unbelieving...
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...
That meaning is manifold. Zhivago is a historical novel of "Russia's terrible years," bearing 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...
Bury the Living. In strictly literary terms. Doctor Zhivago is an extraordinary novel, but it is not a great one. It is riddled by implausible coincidences, cluttered with distracting minor characters, shamelessly melodramatic. With the exception of Dr. Zhivago, none of the major characters are developed much beyond the point of abstraction. Even the doctor exists more as a luminous conscience than a physical presence; all the reader is ever told of his appearance is that he is tall and has "a snub nose and an unremarkable face." As for the novel's structure, it is like an endless...