Doctor Zhivago [Hardcover]

I adored the film version of Dr. Zhivago as a teenager and upon finally reading Boris Pasternak's novel I am even more in love with the story than ever.

As the reviewer prior to myself has put very elegantly, this is far more than a story of the relationship between Yuri and Lara. I feel that the novel allows the reader greater access to the different relationships that Russians had with their country at this point in history depending on their political perspectives.

Although it is difficult for me to express this eloquently, I felt that the real love story of Dr. Zhivago was that of Boris Pasternak for his beloved Russia, which had changed so markedly that life with her could never be the same again.

A beautifully bound edition of a powerful story.

Whisper it, but Dr Zhivago is a difficult read in any translation. It may verge on sacrilege to say it, but it is profoundly flawed as a novel. It's a rambling, disjointed, episodic work. There is a huge jumble of characters, most with little back-stories, who you may need bear in mind for eventual reappearances, or may not. Some theoretically central characters, such as Zhivago's wife Tonya, are woefully under-drawn. There are many children present, but they have no presence. There are plot twists of Dickensian levels of improbability.
Dr Zhivago is a highly cerebral work, indeed it is probably a novel of ideas above all else (though it is also a chronical of an epoque, an era of social and moral collapse). Possibly as a consequence, the dialogue is at times breath-takingly clunky, unreal. You can't help thinking that Pasternak was not a listener. It may be different in Russain, but in English transaltion the prose often doesn't flow, though from time to time you will be stopped in your tracks by a lovely, evocative, poetic piece of description. Russian naming conventions are a problem for any Russian novel (and they are worse in one set in the Revolution, because of the additional stratum of 'noms de guerre'), but we can hardly blame Pasternak for that. On the other hand, a proper name index would be a blessing. And by proper index I mean, in the case of Dr Zhivago, an index several pages long, with page references; a necessity because so many minor characters make reappearances somewhere down the line. (A tall order, perhaps, but I think the publishers owe it to us poor readers as we struggle to differentiate narrative wheat from chaff).
Yet, for all its obvious difficulties, this is a work with a massive, world-class reputation. How can this be? Given the patent difficulties with the text, I can't help thinking that geo-politics is partly responsible; the West did so love a dissident voice during the Cold War. Pasternak also had a first class (Nobel standard) reputation as a poet. You may find that the novel's reputation is the main reason that you persevere. If I'm honest, it was for me. Even though the wait for the novel finally to come into its own, reveal itself, was ultimately a search for the end of a rainbow. The emotional climax is fleeting, and ended by another improbable plot twist. The conclusion is a great anti-climax. Even so, I am glad I persevered, because the novel does have its rewards, and lingers in the memory. But it was a big struggle (in a way that, for example, War and Peace, with which there are obvious parallels, is not)and I confess I did resent it, frequently. I can't help coming away with the abiding impression that this novel is a mess, albeit a mess with the best intentions, and its heart in the right place. Why is it such a mess? I suppose, first, it's a novel written by a poet and an intellectual - a different skill-set from the average novelist, though some can pull it off (for my money, Michael Ondaatje can). Secondly, it would have been utterly transformed by the firm hand of a good editor, which it evidently never received; good editors for politically controversial novels cannot have been thick on the ground in the USSR in the 1950's.
So, with all these difficulties, Dr Zhivago needs all the help it can possibly get from its English translator. Here is where you can improve your experience, and should tread with care. I strongly recommend you look at both translations before you buy - the original Hayward & Harari (a much looser, but more readable translation, though still frequently a struggle) and the recent Volokhonsky & Pevear (a much more literal, but more clumsy translation). I also suggest you read the article in the Guardian on 6th November 2010 by Ann Pasternak Slater, which extols the merits of the former over the latter, and gives specifics: see [...]. It is intriguing that the Volokhonsky & Pevear literalism which worked so well in their translation of War And Peace runs into such difficulty with Dr Zhivago.
Your choice could make all the difference between surviving the experience, or not.

And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness,--melt itself Into the sea! "
King Henry IV, Part 2, Act III. Scene I

Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago takes us back to a time when fate took Russia through a perfect storm of revolution, war, revolution, and civil war. This was a time that did not just level mountains and melt a continent but also melted and cruelly leveled the lives and fates of untold numbers who were caught in these turbulent waters. Josef Stalin is reported to have said that "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic." What Pasternak has done so masterfully in telling this story is to paint a picture on a huge canvas that stretches from Moscow to Siberia while at the same time telling an intimate story that allows the reader to maintain that feeling of tragedy.

I've had a copy of Dr. Zhivago sitting on my shelf for decades, one of the books I inherited from my father's collection. I never bothered to pick it up. I'd seen David Lean's classic film and wrongfully decided that there was no need to invest any time in reading an epic novel about the tragic romance of Yuri Andreevich Zhivago and Larissa Fyodorovna Antipova. When I saw that Pevear and Volokhonsky had done a new translation I decided to give Zhivago a shot. What a revelation. As good as the movie was it didn't begin to plumb the depths of the book. The movie focused, understandably enough, on the relationship between Yuri and Lara and it seemed that the Russian Revolution and Civil War was merely the back-story to the relationship. But in Pasternak's hands I think it was close to being the other way around. The first two-thirds of the book takes two separate lives that contain just a few incidental touch-points where those lives intersected.

The emotional heart of the story for me was elsewhere. It was a story of the dissolution of Russian life in the years between the 1905 Revolution and WWI where the decadence and debauchery of a life lived in fancy clothes and salons played out against the turmoil bubbling beneath the surface. It was a story of the disruption and destitution set in motion by WWI and the October revolution. It was a story of the story of hunger and desperation brought on by a vicious Civil War in which the phrase "man is wolf to man" comes to the fore and the fragile web that keeps a society civilized is swept away in a sea of inhumanity. It is into a world that has already been rent asunder that the relationship of Yuri and Lara comes into bloom. The story of Yuri and Lara almost seemed to me to be the back story, the context that illuminated the age of unreason that Pasternak wrote about.

One passage set this out for me in stark terms: "This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver." The passage concludes that people denounced themselves, "drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped." This struck me immediately as Pasternak's version of Yeats' "Second Coming" where the centre cannot hold and where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It was one of the many touch-points in the book that were immensely moving to me.

The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has said, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that a "translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful." My school-boy level Russian does not permit me to speak to this translation's faithfulness but I can certainly attest to its beauty. Pasternak's prose, as rendered by the team of Pevear and Volokhonsky, flows beautifully. As I read through the book I did not feel I was reading a translation. Any time I read a piece in translation and feel compelled to underline or highlight particularly noteworthy passage I think of the translation as one that does justice to the book. Time after time I found myself highlighting passages that I wanted to remember. This strikes me as being my own testimony not just to the beauty of the translation but what also must be its faithfulness.

Dr. Zhivago is not, as I imagined, a eulogy for a pair of tragic Russian lovers but an elegy for an age in a specific time and place. It is a beautiful, moving story that was a pleasure to read.