Word: zhivago
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...howl against Soviet oppression and conformity. Aksyonov has published other books in exile, but now, after a decade of personal and artistic freedom, he has written one for the American market. Generations of Winter (Random House; 592 pages; $25) will probably draw comparisons to War and Peace and Dr. Zhivago. In fact, Aksyonov has assembled a clumsy reproduction of a romantic Russian family saga, erratically decorated with historical murals, folklore, fantasy and B-movie dialogue...
...similar way, of course, the bourgeoisie deserved every bashing it took under Soviet communism: After the revolution, the Zhivago family had to retreat to a corner of their Moscow mansion and submit to the insults of the proletariat who moved in to abuse the former masters and break up the furniture for firewood...
Friends of De la Uz call him a Dr. Zhivago. He fought underground with Castro's 26th of July movement and in his early 20s went to the Communist Party school in Moscow for grooming. But by 1968 he had lost his zeal and wrote a stinging critique of the party for being undemocratic. He was banished to a railway shop, where he labored in silence until...
Filmed in Vietnam, Malaysia, Switzerland and France, covering 155 minutes of screen time and 30 years of convulsive history, Indochine sprawls and enthralls. It has the breadth and intelligence of the David Lean epics from whose plots it borrows: the juggling of passion and politics in Doctor Zhivago, the muddle of racial emotions in A Passage to India, the grandiose failure of colonial outsiders in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. But Indochine's vision is essentially feminine; its ample grief is that of a mother mourning her lost children in a land shifting and receding...
Even Nobel Prizes for Literature have produced political storms. When Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, was named in 1958, the official press labeled the decision "a hostile political act." The vilification became so intense that Pasternak declined the prize. He died in 1960, and his son claimed the medal on his behalf only last year...