From the Bookshelf of Mineola Library's 2012 FALL Reading Challenge…

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak,

John Bayley (Introduction),

Max Hayward (Translator),

Manya Harari (Translator)

Start date: December 1, 2010

Finish date: February 28, 2011

Why we're reading this: This book was selected as the Winter 2010 Group Read for "Winter/Holiday" …more
[close] This book was selected as the Winter 2010 Group Read for "Winter/Holiday"

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Jun 08, 2009 Suzanne Moore rated it really liked it

Shelves: 1001-2006, 1001-2008, summer-challenge-picks

Doctor Zhivago is an epic story where internal conflict between Red Russians and White Russians have caused many hardships. Beginning with the Russian Civil War and continuing to the beginning of WWII, Yury Zhivago’s life is played out. He marries his childhood playmate and as an adult becomes a physician. He is also a poet, and I thought some of the best parts of the novel came from pages of Yury’s journal.

Example: "However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active Doctor Zhivago is an epic story where internal conflict between Red Russians and White Russians have caused many hardships. Beginning with the Russian Civil War and continuing to the beginning of WWII, Yury Zhivago’s life is played out. He marries his childhood playmate and as an adult becomes a physician. He is also a poet, and I thought some of the best parts of the novel came from pages of Yury’s journal.

Example: "However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity-- in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. ... You in others--this is your soul. This is what you are....You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you--the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it."

Yury’s life is tragic and bittersweet. Because of the rebellion, he is separated from his wife Tanya. He crosses paths with Lara, who he remembered from a distance in earlier days. They develop a friendship that leads to an affair. Her husband is away with the war and rumored dead. Lara insists that he has taken an assumed name and has gone into hiding. Yuri and Lara try to leave together for refugee in a safe place, but safety and comfort are rarely easy. When a political friend of Lara comes to escort her and her daughter out of Russia, Yury becomes separated from Lara. He feels as if he has lost the love of his life. Yet he still holds feelings for his wife Tanya, who he learns is safe in Moscow with his children. His shame of not being there for them … being torn by his love for Lara, keeps him away. As he lives out his final years with a weak heart, he struggles with his personal demons, but even so takes another wife. As his health fades, he feels the need to leave his new family and deal with his past. He doesn’t have the opportunity to resolve the loose ends of his life, when his heart gives out at a crowded train station and he dies … the same day that Lara comes to town looking for him.

Here is another excerpt that makes me wonder about the possibility of destiny .. ”[Dr. Zhivago:] tried to imagine several people whose lives run parallel and close together but move at different speeds, and he wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others. Something like a theory of relativity governing the hippodrome of life occurred to him, but he became confused and gave up his analogies."

In the end Tanya reappears, but as a washerwoman who tells a wild story of an obviously created past. I can only guess the war left her mad from grief and sadness.
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