Life, love & death in ‘Doctor Zhivago’

Like all great movies, this monumental work by Boris Pasternak, which won for him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 can be read on several levels. (Incidentally, the Soviet government did not allow the author to accept the Nobel prize, just as it did not allow the publication of the novel or its dissemination in the Soviet Union for reasons that were left unclear by the authorities.) On one level, the way it is presented in the movie, it is simply a tragic love story about a married man, Dr. Yuri Zhivago, a noted poet, and a married woman, Lara Antipova, who were drawn close together by events of indescribable chaos, disorder, destruction and human suffering brought about by the Russian communist revolution early in the last century.

In contrast to watching the movie version, which was mere Hollywood entertainment and so quite a letdown, reading the Pasternak epic was to me, in midlife, a deep spiritual experience that brought with it a better and greater and lasting appreciation for the great religious vitality of the Russian people, freeing me once and for all (having in the meantime read the great Dostoyevsky) from the gross misconception about and prejudices against everything Russian, implanted and nurtured in me by Western propaganda as I was growing up in the midst of the cold war. If the saying "Corruptio optimi pessima" (the corruption of the best is the worst) has universal application, nowhere does it apply more profoundly than to Russia at the time of the communist revolution and beyond.

What the movie failed to bring to light was that this was a deeply religious novel, a veritable celebration of life the way life is understood from the Christian point of view. This view finds expression in Zhivago’s uncle, one of the main characters of the novel but who does not appear in the movie at all. Neither does Lara’s short speech before the dead body of Zhivago, which seems to me to sum up this view of life, as it is also the summation of the meaning of both their lives, of all the things they stood for: their truthfulness to life, to love, to the truth within themselves. In a word, their utter faithfulness to that humanity that was assumed by Christ in the Incarnation. This view is made even clearer when contrasted with the corrupt and perverted vision of life, of reality itself embodied in Lara’s husband, Antipov, a humorless idealist-turned revolutionary who becomes a commissar in the revolutionary army and is now known as Strelnikov. A perverted vision of life takes possession of man when he surrenders himself to an idea, no matter how good and noble in the abstract, or to a system of thought or a vision of reality that has very little regard for or does away completely with the traditional (and Christian) human values which recognize the absolute worth of the individual person and put his welfare above that of the state or any collectively governed by man-made rules. (One may perhaps find in this contrast of visions, which cannot but put the new revolutionary ideas in a bad light, the reason why the communist authorities banned the novel from being published and circulated in the Soviet Union.)

Lara’s words are so eloquent in this regard as she describes the subtle change she noticed in her husband Antipov. "It was as if something abstract had crept into his face and made it colorless. As if a living human face had become an embodiment of a principle, the image of an idea. My heart sank when I noticed it. I realized that this had happened to him because he had handed himself to a superior force, but a force that is deadening and pitiless and will not spare him in the end."

Earlier, in telling Zhivago how she tried unsuccessfully to reach her husband, she has this to say: "They are made of stone, these people, they aren’t human, with all their discipline and principles. Even if I had managed to prove that I was his wife, it wouldn’t have done me any good! What do wives matter to them at a time like this? The workers of the world, the remaking of the universe – that’s something! But a wife, just an individual biped, is of no more important than a flea or a louse!"

"The remaking of the universe" – that’s what counts for people like Strelnikov. But for Lara and Zhivago, the scale of values is reversed. Listen to Lara’s lament over the dead body of Zhivago – "At last we are together again, Yurochka. And in what a terrible way God has willed our reunion. Can you conceive of such misfortune? I cannot, cannot, oh God. I can’t stop crying. Think of it! It’s again so much in our style, made to our measure. Your going, my end. Again something big, irreparable. The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of unadorned beauty – yes, yes, these things were ours. But the small problems of practical life – things like the reshaping of the planet – these things, no thank you, they are not for us."

The reshaping of the planet is a small thing indeed compared with the task of trying to understand the mystery of life, of trying to unravel the riddle of death.

And what suffering, what torment this poor unfortunate woman had to endure! And yet by some miracle, her spirit remains whole, unconquered. Her sufferings, instead of crushing her, have purified her soul and made its primal purity shine in even greater brilliance. True, she remains vulnerable, frail, weak, but yet she is possessed too of an inner strength which enables her to withstand the cruel blows of fate, the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." She will not try to deaden the pain of living by taking to drink, the sure refuge of the weak, because according to her "a drunken woman, that really is the end."

No, she will be true to life until the end.