Doctor Zhivago
I just finished reading Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, which I really liked. I liked the fact that Yurii Andreivich (Zhivago) was both an artist and a scientist. I enjoyed the depth of the philosophical discussions. I felt like I really got to know many of the characters in great depth and could forgive them for their shortcomings. This is especially true for the title character, whose persistence, and depth of both feeling and thought I really admired, despite his entangled relationships with multiple wives. His descriptions of love and his feelings for his two loves were particularly moving.
It was nice for a change to be able to admire characters in a book. In books I’ve read recently by more contemporary authors like Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami, James Baldwin, etc. the characters have few redeeming qualities. Maybe all of the books about admirable people have already been written, maybe it’s too hard for a modern person to be as admirable as a character in a traditional novel, maybe the characters aren’t all that admirable, but just appear to be. Finding such characters appeals to my own search for fictional role models.
Another very interesting part of the book was the look it gave into the Russian revolution. The various characters we meet as children growing up together follow such different trajectories and end up on opposing sides of the conflict. I don’t know how accurate the description is, since the CIA was so enthusiastic about it, but it is quite believable. After the revolution began, but before the new government could figure out how to run the country, people lives stopped. The chaos included the selling of heirlooms illegally for food or firewood and the collapse of the currency. Power moved from the inscrutable aristocracy to the equally inscrutable party elite, who always happened to have plenty of luxury items like butter, sugar, and kerosene.
The changes the Russian people had to make to their daily lives were rather stunning to a modern reader seated in a comfortable and generally stable and safe location. At one point in the book, Zhivago is forcefully conscripted into the revolutionary army. For over a year, he cannot contact his family in any way, and everyone generally goes on with their lives. I get upset if my routine is disturbed for a day, let alone a year and a half. The revolution upset people’ lives for decades, if not forever, I can not imagine what that is like. Well, I imagine it’s like what’s going on in Iraq or the West Bank. Zhivago floated around for years in and out of a medical practice, in and out of his writing and thinking, in and mostly out of his family. It turned out that it didn’t really matter much, he survived, for the most part.
A though provoking book, I hope the movie measures up to it.