Doctor Zhivago in Around the Year in 52 Books

May 29, 2011 Nathalie rated it liked it

Shelves: from-1001-list-i-have-read, read-more-than-a-decade-ago

Doctor Zhivago.
The 'light' read compared to 'The Sorrow of Belgium'. Says enough, doesn't it, why I haven't finished the latter, but I will, someday!

Back on Doctor Zhivago. It's an epic tale about Yuri Zhivago and his rise and demise in an unstable Russia. The novel starts out with him as a young boy, in the care of his uncle. As he grows up he decides to become a doctor and eventually joins the army.
He rejoices when the era of the Tsars is ended in Russia and communism is taking its first baby Doctor Zhivago.
The 'light' read compared to 'The Sorrow of Belgium'. Says enough, doesn't it, why I haven't finished the latter, but I will, someday!

Back on Doctor Zhivago. It's an epic tale about Yuri Zhivago and his rise and demise in an unstable Russia. The novel starts out with him as a young boy, in the care of his uncle. As he grows up he decides to become a doctor and eventually joins the army.
He rejoices when the era of the Tsars is ended in Russia and communism is taking its first baby steps, but as his path unwinds he doesn't seem to get ground in any of the convictions around him, which ultimately costs him his happiness.
Doctor Zhivago doesn't only revolve around Yuri himself, but we follow the path of Larisa Feodorovna, a girl who is too beautiful for her own good and starts her journey in life disgraced (by the standards of those times, I must add). Yuri and Larisa seem to exist next to each other, never seeing the other if only for glimpses until fate puts them together at last.

Its story seems one of love gained and lost again. Whether by chance of choice, love seems to be very fleeting and of such an importance that lives are spilled because of it.
Amid the troubled history of Russia, Zhivago is struggling with understanding the treacherous emotion that is love. He doesn't understand it, therefor he is afraid of what it could do, what harm it could cause. In the end he runs away from it, in a desperate attempt to make himself whole again.

This novel is acclaimed to be a very good novel and I'm sure it got its historical facts right, otherwise it wouldn't have been banned in the Sovjet Union, but I'm not sure what I felt about it. It surely wasn't a novel I could read for hours on end. It didn't evoke any great emotions in me, how stylishly it was written.

Would I recommend this novel?
Well, yes, if you want to read something more than just a love story.
No, if you haven't got lots of times on your hands, because it's a novel that you need to invest in.

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Jul 12, 2020 Ron rated it liked it

Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is a Russian youth, orphaned around age 11 at the beginning of the 20th Century. The apolitical Yura finds himself in his coming-of-age and young-physician years as a reluctant witness to (and an even more reluctant participant in) two revolutions and two wars. A complex web of love triangles involving a pretty nurse, Lara, give this slow-moving historical fiction something resembling a plot. Otherwise, we get a lot of nature meditation, and about as many descriptions of Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is a Russian youth, orphaned around age 11 at the beginning of the 20th Century. The apolitical Yura finds himself in his coming-of-age and young-physician years as a reluctant witness to (and an even more reluctant participant in) two revolutions and two wars. A complex web of love triangles involving a pretty nurse, Lara, give this slow-moving historical fiction something resembling a plot. Otherwise, we get a lot of nature meditation, and about as many descriptions of snow as we get descriptions of socialism.

This maudlin depiction of misery under a misguided socialist regime was a right-place-right-time sensation circa 1958-1959, given the then-extant Cold War tensions. As a book, it does not hold up all that well for the future. I am so united with Pasternak in his condemnation of socialism or communism that I am tempted to throw on a few extra stars just to improve the world by getting more people to see the world in the way that he sees it. But frankly, the book is rather dull, has no compelling story, and suffers from the absence of any heroic figure or anything resembling a happy ending.

The book should be considered in comparison with Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957, about a year before Doctor Zhivago's English-language translation took control of the NYT Best Seller list. Pasternak was the child of an assimilated Russian Jewish upper middle class family born in 1890. Ayn Rand was the child of an assimilated Russian Jewish upper middle class family born in 1905. (If it matters to you, I am a thoroughly Americanized and hybridized great-grandchild of Russian Jewish immigrants.) Both Pasternak and Rand (Rand's real last name was Rosenbaum) were young, percipient witnesses to the Bolshevik Revolution, and the ensuing Russian Civil War. Pasternak stayed in Russia his entire life, and Rand migrated to the United States in the 1930's. (My Blumenfeld and Zwetow great-grandparents left Russia for Chicago in the 1880's.)

With Rand's Atlas Shrugged, you get Russian society and the privations and economic collapse of the Bolshevik Revolution projected into a futuristic, fantasy-dystopia America. This is a prediction that of course never did come true, but it is much more entertaining and thought-provoking, and has the literary advantage of many heroic characters with whom the reader can empathize.

With Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, you get a worm's-eye view of actual Russian life around the Bolshevik Revolution, with no heroes, and no distraction from the maudlin accounts of death, disease, cold, and hunger except for the nature meditations and the unsatisfying love story. Yuri Andreevich, far from being a heroic figure, is basically just a guy who abandons three different women, does nothing for his children, and allows himself to be overwhelmed by his impossible political environment. Uggh. ...more

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Dec 05, 2010 Bea rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I vaguely remember the movie that I saw eons ago and thought that, by reading this book, move of the movie would be recalled. It was not. Either the movie was not true to the book or the book had so much more of the revolution that was not contained in the movie. I remember loving the movie but I did not have that reaction so much with the book. Yes, there is a love story but it is set so firmly in the author's need to tell of the thinking of the time and the revolation that the love story is ne ...more

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