Word: zhivago
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...DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (558 pp.)-Boris Pasternak-Pantheon...
Thus the U.S.S.R.'s Boris Pasternak, who once described himself as "almost an atheist," seems to summon his readers to stand-not before the official Communist deity, which is a thing called history-but before the divinity of Jesus. This helps to explain why Doctor Zhivago, the greatest Russian novel since the Revolution, will not be read in Russia. The poem is attributed to the novel's hero, who supposedly leaves it with a sheaf of other verse as his legacy, but it plainly speaks for Pasternak and his gentle genius...
...Failure. Zhivago's tortuous path takes him from boyhood at his mother's grave through the lurid landscape of war and revolution. An utterly credible and pitiable man. he is seen first as a student whose gift for happiness makes him feel lost among the fanatical miseries of Russian revolutionary youth. All are anarchists, nihilists. pro-Bolsheviks: young Zhivago is merely human, and he remains stubbornly human as he moves through marriage, friendships, his career as a physician, front-line service in World War I. In the vast plains of Russia, he seeks to shelter his family from...
...20th century fiction. l'homme engage -the ideologically committed man. He is unlike Antipov. the revolutionary idealist who thinks he can remake the world and shoots himself when he finds his dream betrayed; and he is unlike his own father, the dead libertine, symbol of a dead Russia. Zhivago worships neither the past nor the forces that act in the name of the future. His philosophy is: "People must be drawn to good by goodness...
...most accounts a literary work of the first order, Pasternak's novel leads his physician-hero, Dr. Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, through World War I and the revolution to his death in 1929. It deals harshly with Communism's first years. Says one character: "I think that collectivization was a wrong measure and that it failed, though the error could not be acknowledged. To conceal the failure by every means that terrorism can suggest, it is necessary to make people learn not to think and to judge, forcing them to see things that do not exist and proving...