Everyman's Library Dr Zhivago

I have waited so long to get this edition of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Finally, I found it for just Rs. 650. Happy with the purchase. It is translated from Russian by Manya Harari and Max Hayward. I was reluctant to buy other editions since they were translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky which isn't the best for this book.

Remembering reading this book as an important literary event during my high school years, I finally made it back to Dr. Zhivago to see if it was as great as it seemed back then. And it was. There's that grand sweep of a classic Russian novel, the vast cast of characters who keep miraculously reappearing, the romantic dilemma of a good man trapped by a tragic fate, plus all the details of the confusion during and after the Russian revolution.As a teenager, I was enchanted by the love story, and couldn't really follow (or understand) the politics. Now, so many decades later, I appreciated the emotional and moral tensions. I still didn't understand all the ins and out of politics. I found myself a bit impatient with the lengthy philosophical discussions, and the numerous extraneous characters. However, the majesty of Pasternak's language entranced me all the way through. Here's one passage from where Zhivago is being swept away writing poetry:"His work took possession of him and he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind which he is trying to express, but with language. his instrument of expression. Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow.""An old Russian folk song is like water in a weir. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice-gates and its stillness is an illusion."This next one is lovely -- Zhivago describing Lara. But I doubt that it would be get past an editor today (might be seen as sappy):"How well he loved her, and how lovable she was, in exactly the way he had always thought and dreamed and needed. Yet what was it that made her so lovely?.. She was lovely by virtue of the matchlessly simple and swift line which the Creator at a single stroke had drawn round her, and in this divine outline she had been handed over, like a child tightly wound up in a sweet after its bath, into the keeping of his soul."This is a long book. By the end, I felt like I'd spent about thirty years in Russia.

Having seen the David Lean film many years ago in the cinema and since then umpteen times on TV I thought it was time to read Pasternak's book. And I was not disappointed. More complex than the film but equally enjoyable.

Pasternak, escritor sublime. El tema es extraordinario, pero la narrativa...un milagro! Se trata de la experiencia vital hecha palabra. las imagenes y metaforas (todo sin acentos, lo siento, mi teclado es francés) son, sencillamente, sublimes!!!

This is a most fascinating epic novel set in the turbulent times in Russia in the early twentieth century. Doctor Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is apolitical at the time of the October Revolution and the subsequent civil war. But, forced to work as a doctor for the partisans (Bolsheviks), he witnesses brutality and inhumanity committed by both sides. He reflects: "This time justified the old saying: Man is a wolf to man.... The human laws of civilisation ended. Those of beasts were in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the caveman."The relationship between Zhivago and Lara is, of course, the central theme. Their lives get tragically torn apart by the brutal forces beyond their control. When one realises that millions of Russians suffered the similar fate like Zhivago and Lara during the Revolution and civil war and under the totalitarian Soviet regime, the fate of these characters becomes poignant. The author's view on politics in Soviet Russia affecting ordinary citizens is an important theme. Pasternak writes: "Revolutions are produced by men of action, one-sided fanatics, geniuses of self-limitation. In a few hours or days they overturn the old order. The upheavals last for weeks, for years at the most, and then for decades, for centuries, people bow down to the spirit of limitation that led to the upheavals as to something sacred."He also writes later on: "It was precisely the conformity, the transparency of their (Soviet officials') hypocrisy that exasperated Yuri Andreevich. The unfree man always idealises his slavery. So it was in the Middle Ages; it was on this that the Jesuits always played. Yuri Andreevich could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was its highest achievement, or, as they would have said then, the spiritual ceiling of the epoch." These are very brave comments to make about the political system during the repressive Soviet era.It is easy to understand the reasons why the publication of this book in Soviet Union was banned by its authorities and Pasternak was forced by the Communist Party to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.Pasternak's vivid and poetic descriptions of nature are very good indeed. The reader will realise that he was a great poet (as he is apparently known in Russia more than as a novelist) and a religious man.I find the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (an experienced husband-and-wife team) excellent. I have not read other translations, but with this present version I feel the reader will be able to fully appreciate the beauty of the writing. Finally, with detailed notes by the translators, it's possible to follow military and political developments during the civil war and the subsequent period as well as understand some of Orthodox Church customs.