Doctor Zhivago is a highly unusual book, an incomparable book in the most literal sense. Pasternak suggested its unique quality in his reply to a letter from an English schoolteacher: The objective world in my habitual, natural grasping, is a vast infinite inspiration, that sketches, erases, chooses, compares and describes and composes itself … living, moving reality in such a rendering must have a touch of spontaneous subjectivity, even of arbitrariness, wavering, tarrying, doubting, joining and disjoining elements … Over and above the times, events and persons there is a nature, a spirit of
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