This book is not available at Barnes & Noble Online, but I'm sure that you can get it at other sites on the Web and, of course, at any Library. Sarah and I are looking forward to discussing the book with you soon......

Ella, when I put "Dr Zhivago" in Amazon search, the result was "out of print," etc, etc. I found it impossible to believe that this still popular book was not in stock. Then I thought to put "Doctor Zhivago" into search, spelling out "doctor" and there they were....tons of books for sale plus used books also offered from guaranteed sellers. Then I went to Barnes and Noble and put "Doctor Zhivago" into search and found the same...plenty for sale. If I remember, I think the prices ranged from about $9 to $13 for new paperbacks. At Amazon, used copies begin at $2.50.

Right, Betty, and powellsbooks.com also has lots of used copies.

I so look forward to discussing this epic novel with everyone!

I have the book at last. I'm going to read it first which helps me keep up in a discussion. Also, I like the pure pleasure of reading straight through which illuminates the symbolism, themes, metaphors, plot, characterization, etc.

A good lead-in to Pasternak's novel is the current discussion of Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov" which includes a theme of orthodox religion versus revolutionary ideals. This pre-revolutionary book of the 1800's predicts the great upheavel in Russia. Fascinating book discussion! The discussion leaders keep us thinking. Check it out.

Looking forward to this upcoming discussion on "Doctor Zhivago".

--Marvelle

Oh, good, Marvelle, I'm so happy that you are going to be in the discussion; particularly as I'm not very good at discerning symbolism, metaphors, etc. I know Sarah is much better than I at this and I do hope to learn much from the two of you and others who will be joining.

I haven't had the time to follow the Brothers K discussion although I know it would be helpful. Does your book have the poems in the back of it? Of course, they are Pasternak's poetry, but they are called "The Poems of Yurii Zhivago." If not, would you like me to type in a few of them before we start discussing the book?

(P.S. I'm not very good at poetry either, but I do typing well, haha)

Hi Ella, Well, I like stories that use symbolism and metaphors but I can't say that I'm good at detecting them. This time around, I'm going to read the novel before the discussion, strictly for the enjoyment of it. I promise not to divulge any book secrets. My book has the poetry, thanks for the offer of help. The info in the heading is great and oh you had the music too and comments by the composer. Lovely.

Marvelle

Marvelle - you were such a joy in House of Mirth, so I am thrilled to have you!

Is anyone else planning on joining the discussion? The book is readily available at the library - and none of the copies seemed to be checked out when I visited today - so please pick one up and join us!!

Hi Sarah! So far it's Marvelle, you and I that will try to decide how much of the book is Pasternak himself and how much is his imagination. And we're going to have a good time doing it - despite the gloom and melancholy that persists in all Russian novels.

I'm hoping that a few of those in the Brothers K might come over and tell us a bit of Russian history that occurred before we begin our novel which takes place in the early 1900's.

Someone please step up to the mike and announce you are going to be here come July lst.

Sarah and Ella, I would like to participate in Dr. Zhivago's discussions, and meet more book lovers. It was such joy to learn from all of you during the discussion of 'The Blue Flower'! ine

I'm reading, I'm reading, dear Ella. Even though I wish it differently, I am also "seeing" it and hearing it in every page because of the movie, which I loved. No chance to conjure up the characters on my own, alas, but already care about the ones that come up from the movie. The beauty of the setting, too. So, no complaint.

betty

Welcome ine and Betty! Am so happy you are both going to be with us! See you both come July lst - we'll have a great time.

I checked at my Library yesterday and it has 3 copies of the video "Doctor Zhivago" so after our discussion, I can get the movie - I bet all of you can find it somewhere also.

This novel will be my expression of my views over the arts, over the Gospels, the life of a person in history, and many other things," Pasternak wrote in an October 1946 letter.

The author, who died in disgrace in Russia in 1960, deserves to be heard again by a few of us who can appreciate his lovely verse, his views on love, life, Russia, and all of the above.

Oh, ine, you may join any book discussion I'm involved in - love your insights! Yeah, Betty!! Hooray, Marvelle!

Ella is away this weekend and wanted me to let you know that she will be here with bells on next week.

How is the reading going for the rest of you. Do you plan to join us? We've posted a TENTATIVE schedule in the heading that has us DISCUSSING Ch. 1-4 starting July 1, but please, read at your own pace and do not worry if you have read more, or less, by that date. Even if you've just ORDERED the book, come on in. We'd love to have you.

This is officially the first day of the discussion of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.

The book opens with a chapter full of loss, of absent fathers and children in despair, of religion that is becoming irrelevant, of death. Yura's mother Maria Nikolaaievna is being buried, and Yura feels such despair that he wears a look of a "wolf cub . . . about to howl." The image is so sad. Then, the night after the funeral, he stays at the monastery, where his defrocked Uncle Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin has been given a room for old times' sake, and is awakened, and terrified by a blizzard. His impulse is to dress, run outside, and make sure that the cabbage patch outside is not buried; he fears if it is one could not dig it out and that "his mother would helplessly sink deeper and deeper away from him into the ground."

Yura's father has abandoned him and his mother, and their previous fortune - consisting of a Zhivago factory, a Zhivago bank, Zhivago buildings, a Zhivago necktie pin, even a Zhivago cake - is all gone and he discovers that he is poor. As Yura prays for his lost mother, he recalls her request that he pray for his missing father - but decides that "nothing terrible would happen if he prayed for his father some other time, as if saying to himself, 'Let him wait.'"

At the same time, we see the suicide of a man on a train through the eyes of Misha Gordon, an unhappy, bitter child. "For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to wonder why, having arms and legs like everyone else, and a language and way of life common to all, one could be different from the others, liked only by few, and, moreover, loved by no one."

What are your impressions as the book opens, of these lonely children and their experiences with death? Why does Pasternak choose to open the book this way? I am struck with a feeling of pessimism and darkness as the book opens - we seem to have a society, and people, in upheaval. Tragedy seems close at hand, change is in the air, and yet there is no feeling of optimism in these opening pages, but rather of young people with little to live for and little hope.

I think Pasternak's opening is brilliant. Before introducing the revolution, he wants us to see Yurii as a child in deep pain. Later, when we're smack in the middle of the revolution, we will know the main characters as more than just peasants who revolt or the privileged elite (Yurii) against whom the revolution is directed. He begins the tale on a human level and stays on this level even as real history is added.

Weather is introduced right from the first, also, stormy weather primarily. Pasternak's descriptions of this constant and extreme weather in which ALL characters, all of Russia, have to survive....I don't know, how far off base am I.....I almost see weather as another character. (It is personified as an attacker when the child Yurri goes to look out at the storm, the night of his mother's burial.) At any rate, the author's descriptions are really wonderful and were a favorite part of my reading.

betty

Cold, cold, cold is how the book started! Cold and gloomy with the funeral, sad and dreary!

This is Russia as we know it to be, a country filled with sadness, cold and dreary. Were you surprised at the priest, with the gesture of a cross, scattered earth over the body of Maria Mikolaievna.

Where does the church fit into Russian society at this point - before the revolution begins? More of this later.

When I read the book for the first time, I couldn't keep these characters straight in my mind and was forever returning to the front of the book where the "principal characters" are listed. The strangeness of the names, the short little stories of each one, no continuance of their part of the whole, left me confused.

But the beauty of the book, the atmosphere created by Pasternak comes through on the second reading. Perhaps I'm just slow? I even emailed Sarah with my concerns about helping lead this discussion as I found myself concerned about understanding the characters and the plot.

However, that's gone now and I love this book.

BETTY has put her finger (literally, haha) on the one constant in the book and that is the weather - "The wind bearing down on him lashed his hands and face with cold gusts of rain."

"It grew very cold that evening" - "frozen puddles" - "The blizzard was alone in the world; it had no rival" - "air smoking with snow" - and all of those and more on the first two pages.

"Whose lands are these?" Nikolai asked. "the landlord's or the peasants?"

"These are the masters's" Pavel answered. "And those are the peasants."

And thus begins the tale.

Barbara is hoping to become a participant in this discussion, but is at her daughter's home for a few days; however she left this intriguing little note for me to post:

" Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivaqo, is saturated with religious and philosophical allusions and symbolism -- almost on every page. The title itself reminds every Russian, regardless of religious background, of the Russian Orthodox Bible. This is because "zhivago" is the Old Church Slavonic pronunciation (akin to our King James English) of the word "living." The very title "Zhivago" is a Biblical allusion, referring to the quotation "why seek ye He among the living...".

Barbara is hoping to become a participant in this discussion, but is at her daughter's home for a few days; however she left this intriguing little note for me to post:

" Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivaqo, is saturated with religious and philosophical allusions and symbolism -- almost on every page. The title itself reminds every Russian, regardless of religious background, of the Russian Orthodox Bible. This is because "zhivago" is the Old Church Slavonic pronunciation (akin to our King James English) of the word "living." The very title "Zhivago" is a Biblical allusion, referring to the quotation "why seek ye He among the living...".

Religion plays a big part in Pasternak's book. We must try to decipher exactly what he believed in as we read through the book.

I do hope Barbara can join us later - she is so great at research!

Living, life, living...at some point I got it that Pasternak wanted us to see more than just two sides at war. In fact, I'll tell you now (because, boy, could I be so wrong about this) that I thought once of a sleeping giant drawing the first DEEP breath of air...as the revolution explodes. So, the opening darkness (and death) is in contrast to the life that comes. There is more to be said about this burst of living...just as Yurii (as well as Lara) is preparing to leave the front and go home to Tonia. I think that's when Yurii talks so much about "living." Well, of course he does...given what is in his heart, but I'm getting ahead.

A small complaint....why does the quality of the dialogue seem different than the descriptions of place and of weather? As smooth and beautiful as the descriptions of settings are, all the dialogue seems stiff, even awkward. (Once I felt like I was watching a dubbed film.) Is this Pasternak or translator? Am I the only one who thought the dialogue didn't measure up to the rest? For whatever reason, none of this ruined the book for me...I loved reading it.

Ella, I'm still in the stage of consulting the list of characters, and trying my own pronounciation of the names - luckily no-one can hear me. This book will be a challenge, and what blessing to learn from those, like Barbara, who have knowledge of the Russian Church or of the Russian Revolution. Pasternak describes people so well. I see Pavel, the publisher's odd-job man sitting on the box, shoulders hunched and legs crossed to 'show that driving was not his regular job', showing his 'social position'(14). About foreshadowing: The books which later made Nikolay Nikolayevich famous were still unwritten, but his ideas had already taken shape. 'yet he did not know that his hour was close at hand....' (15) I watched the movie long ago (and loved it at the time), but I lost much of the plot, therefore this sentence makes me curious. Betty, I didn't notice the awkwardness in the dialogue before, but when I read some passages again, I think so too, and sometimes in sentences too. I have to watch it, because English is my second language, so I'm off myself all the time. However, take p 14: '... Nikolay Nikolayevich 'had with him' the proofs of Voskoboynikov's book etc.' Is that 'good english'? But even so: it's hard to stop reading this great book!

I agree, Ine, about the wonderful descriptions of people. I took notes on many and will dig them out soon. I'm so glad, Ella and Ine, that I wasn't the only one constantly returning to the list of names. It did take a while to feel as if I knew them, so wasn't so thrown when someone new was introduced.

Pasternak likes the new testament, we find out, likes the humble origins of Jesus. I had never thought of the old testament as the place of kings and rulers. Duh...she says. Well, I didn't.

betty

Betty and ine, I didn't feel comfortable with the characters until I was half way through the book, so we are all in this together.

Do you think this is Pasternak describing himself as an author here (7):

He passionately sought an idea, inspired, graspable, which in its movement would clearly point the way toward change, an idea like a flash of lightning or a roll of thunder capable of speaking even to a child or an illiterate. He thirsted for something new.

.

Was he attempting to provide answers for the failure of the revolution to provide change for the peasants? Just an idea I had when I read that passage from the book.

Here is a site which explains the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in its infancy, its break from Rome and then Constantinople:

http://www.friends-partners.org/oldfriends/mes/russia/moscow/history.html

If anybody can find the interpretation of the word "autocephalous" do let me know what it means! INE, I've been meaning to WELCOME YOUto our discussion and if English is your second language you do very well with it! So happy to have you.

Nikolai N. asks (pg.9) how many things in the world deserve our loyalty and he goes further to state that we should be loyal to life - true to Christ. Pasternak was a believer in Christ, certainly, don't you think?

Is this Pasternak speaking or forming words in the mouth of a former priest? Can we tell?

Just a quickie - I'm enjoying five grandboys all at one time as they are so full of themselves with this get-to-gether.

Who could forget the exotic and wonder of the music and the only legacy of his mother being the balalakia and this wonderful site with painted balalaika

Hey, Barbara!, so happy you peeked in and gave us that site to look at! In our little city, we have 4 concerts a year and one last year was a group of about 50 Ukranian dancers and singers with their own music - and balalakais were a part of it. Wonderful. They had their own interpreter with them as none could speak English! And they were touring the United States - we lived to see that!! Amazing!!

What someone must answer for me is how a Jewish fellow like Pasternak speaks as though he believes in Christ - "One must be true to immortality-true to Christ."

How can that be?

Do peek in often, Barbara!

WHAT IS THIS? NO ONE IS READING - NO ONE HAS ANYTHING TO SAY? CAN'T BELIEVE IT!!

Or are you all off on the Holiday celebration with family and friends?

Our California relatives are arriving tonight for a few days with us and others, so I'm busy with food, cleaning, etc., but thought perhaps I should post something as I may be a bit busy for the next few days.

As I asked the question, I guess it will be I who shall answer it - or attempt to! And I may be far out on the proverbial limb with this, but it is my best guess.

Pasternak resented being born a Jew!

I know, I know, that sounds awful and must have been terrible to the Russian Jews who later read the book; but how else to explain this (13):

"For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to wonder why, having arms and legs like everyone else, and a language and way of life common to all, one could be different from the others, liked only by few and, moreover, loved by no one. He could not understand a situation in which if you were worse than other people you could not make an effort to improve yourself. What did it mean to be a Jew? What was the purpose of it? What was the reward or the justification of this impotent challenge, which brought nothing but grief?" - Misha

And there is more, but that is enough to state the obvious to me. As we all know the frequent pograms in Russia against the Jews were terrible occasions and it must have been humiliating as a boy to be so different, to live in the ghettos.

Does anyone agree? Pasternak did say he put his whole self into this book, all his thoughts on religion, humanity, etc.

Have as good a birthday as we celebrated in Canada on the first of July! Ella, the words of Misha about being a Jew were touching, and your suggestion: 'Pasternak resented to be a Jew' struck a cord within, except I'm not sure if the word 'resent' is what expressed Misha's feelings. 'Perplexed' would be more like it, I thought, especially since the sentence "For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to WONDER why .... I'm so glad you brought up this question because yesterday I happened to find I REMEMBER, the sketch for an Autobiography by Boris Pasternak and was reading it. I felt kind of guilty because it kept me from contributing to the discussions. The book's illustrations are drawings, many of Boris' father who was a famous painter. Pasternak's mother was a concert pianiste, and a drawing of the couple is also in the book. Pasternak writes about the artists who crossed his path in youth and in later years, and I was struck how he wrote about these famous people with such a generous and admiring spirit. About his feelings about being a Jew I wondered if the sentence on page 17 is also applicable to the issue: "It is always a sign of mediocrity in people when they herd together, whether their group loyalty is to Solovyev or to Kant of Marx [or their race??]The truth is only sought by individuals, and they break with those who do not love it enough. etc.... Yes, it seems that we can't get started with this wonderful book. I wonder for myself if it's the summer that makes me slow like molasses. You also posted some other questions which I am still pondering, but I'll be back soon, I hope. ine

The intro to my copy of the book says this about Pasternak's Jewishness.

"Pasternak was partly Jewish, and alhtough there was no strong tradition of Jewish belief on either his mother's or his father's side of the family, both had extensive connections with the sophisticated and cosmopolitan Jewish families of France and Central Europe, as well as in Russia. . . . On more than one occasion conversations in the novel refer disparagingly to the Jews' wish to keep their own identity and destiny sacred and apart, and the character Gordon (a common Jewish surname in Russia) could be said to embody some of Pasternak's prejudices on the subject. Pasternak's own hatred of anti-Semitism was at least partly in opposition of so many Russian Jews with the revolution, its aims and its methods. The same dualism can be found in the writings of Solzhenitsyn. Both authors fear and repudiate the tendency, ever latent in Russia, to make a scapegoat of the Jews for the nation's ills."

Perhaps that final sentence explains best Pasternak's attitude - not resentment at being a Jew, but at the treatment and scapegoating of Jews. That, to me, fits in best with the quote Ella placed above from Misha, who wonders why everyone hates him: "liked by few and, moreover, loved by no one."

I found this feeling in Misha to be indicative of the times in which they were living - revolution was stirring, and the inevitable backlash was forming, and Jews (and perhaps others) were being scapegoated such that even a young man such as Misha felt set apart and resented.

Ine, what does the Pasternak sketch say about this, if anything?

That's thought-provoking, Ella. If he did, it would certainly be understandable and forgivable, given the restrictive, confining, and pogromatic circumstances of Jewish life in the Russian Pale. Not to mention the oppressiveness,for some, of religious orthodoxy in the Jewish community. Discriminated against, if not despised, seemingly, by all the world, and forsaken by their long-awaited Messiah, is it any wonder that many young Jews, men and women, felt inclined to active participation in directing the course of Russian history, to help in creating a new and better world. There was a lot riding on a successful revolution, for many Jews. And in the end, I believe it's not possible to understand the Russian Revolution without taking into account the role played in it by many Jews.

There! I'll toss that into the discussion. I'm no expert in either Russian history, the Revolution, or Pasternak and his work; so I expect some disagreement. And sure enough. SarahT looks at it from an entirely different point of view. How interesting. Does the book, in fact, reflect Jewish involvement in the historical events portrayed? If so, I'm very interested.

My Doctor Zhivago must have been a Book-of-the-Month selection forty years ago. It's time I read it. But I'm only at page 57. Such a confusion of Yuras and Laras, Nikas and Nadias, Pashas and Mishas, not to mention the Ginazetdins and Grimekos...this is only slightly less difficult than reading a Chinese novel.

But how can one not be interested in everything Russian? Thanks, Barbara, for the link to some fine balalaika music. I ended up running through a jolly balalaika christmas CD, at Amazon. A good thing to have running through one's mind?...as one embarks on another Russian novel. I just didn't have the emotional resources for Dostoyevsky's Brothers and Dad. He seems to find inspiration in telling his readers at the end of one book that it's only a preparation for the next, in which love will once more be sought and found through more endless sorrow and suffering. Oh, that Russian soul! Wouldn't it be easier, after all, to be Jewish?

Maybe we're about to see the best, or worst, of both worlds. I'm looking forward to seeing the Russian world, through Jewish eyes. Does that answer your question, Ella?

The holiday is over and now I have to catch up with the posts. I love the lyricism of the book. I too am confused by all the characters. For example, Pasha is briefly mentioned in one place, then pops up much later and I have to backtrack to find who he is in the story, how Lara knows him, etc, etc. I think it would be easier if the names weren't Russian but then it wouldn't be Doctor Zhivago would it? I noticed that the movie, in comparison to the book, has fewer characters, scenes, and plot complications yet it still has that Pasternak lyricism.

A big pull in the story for me is that the storms of life/death are skilfully counterbalanced by Yura's love of life. This is a nicely woven book. Now I have to go back and read the links!

-- Marvelle

Hi Ella! Here I am, as promised. Looks to me as if you have a nice group going already. It has been many years since I read the book and my thoughts on it have been greatly colored by the wonderful movie that was made starring Omar Sharif. So I will refrain from getting into the nitty-gritties of the writing.

All I really remember is how very much I enjoyed the plot and the adventures, good and bad, that affected the hapless doctor's life. Not easy living in bad times. Did the movie overemphasize the clandestine love story or is that an ever-present theme in the novel as well? Just don't remember... as Lara's Theme twirls through my poor head!

Sarah, as far I can see, Pasternak doesn't mention anti-Semetism in his sketch for an autobiography. Neither does he write about being Jewish, or about his beliefs in Jesus Christ and he tells very little of his personal life, or the political persecutions he had to endure later in life. He writes (with such a fresh look at nature) about his childhood, which seemed to be quite peaceful until the unrest of the Revolution. This is a book about his artistic development and growth, and he writes about the artists who influenced him. He relates the story of his friendship with Marina Tsvetayeva, a poet, and touches on the aspirations and interests that created the common bond. He says he would have to devote a whole book to it to give the relationship credit. Perhaps Lara in Dr. Zhivago is patterned after this poet. Only a guess, though. I better get back to reading, 'cause I'm way behind.

Jonathan, (nice to meet you) I loved your remark about the Russian soul with its 'endless sorrow and suffering'. Wouldn't it be easier, after all, to be Jewish? Perhaps, but Jewish people are also sufferers, and their passionate folk music reminds me somewhat of the Russian songs. How about this: Wouldn't be easier to be a World Citizen?

Jeryn (glad to meet you too), and Betty, Lara's Theme also haunts my memory, ever since I saw that wonderful movie. I'm so tempted to look at it again, but afraid, like Jeryn, that it will be hard to concentrate on the book itself. ine

Sarah quoted this from the Intro: Dr.Z's family had "extensive connections with the sophisticated and cosmopolitan Jewish families of France and Central Europe, as well as in Russia." Interesting - does that make one less a Jew? A different kind of Jew? It is my understanding there are 3 groups of Jews, and please correct me if I am wrong - Orthodox, Conservative and Reformed. Has there always been these groups, even in Russia during the early part of the century?

And Ine believes the word "perplexed" about Jewishness accounts for Misha's statements. Thanks, Ine, for bringing this sentence to our attention, what a thought-provoking statement it is:

"It is always a sign of mediocrity in people when they herd together, whether their group loyalty is to Solovyev or to Kant of Marx [or their race??]The truth is only sought by individuals, and they break with those who do not love it enough. etc....

That could, of course, speak to many groups - political, religious, etc. But "the truth" - what is the truth? How do we know what is truth?

Jonathan brings to the discussion this statement: And in the end, I believe it's not possible to understand the Russian Revolution without taking into account the role played in it by many Jews. Hi Jonathan and Welcome! Do tell us what role the Jews did play in the Revolution other than that of the Russian peasants? And I am assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that Jews were all of the peasant class - I'm sure I'm wrong. There must have been some, or many, wealthy Jews, or do we know?

But we must get on with the book and into the chapters that are less confusing, more of a whole story in one chapter. Perhaps we could just finish briefly the "Five-O-Clock Express" chapter by commenting on the suicide of Yuri's father. Here's a young boy, bereft of a loving mother, and an alcoholic father, who remembers better days when his family name meant wealth and power in Russia.

Quoting from a book on Russia that I have:

"At the turn of the century Russia was industrializing, factories being built and foreign investment money pouring in; however this was being done at the expense of the masses. The Tsar had decided to industrialize rather than upgrade the standards of living of the poor. Revolt was coming and in 1901 and 1902 the cry was heard across Russia for more farmland for the peasants and fewer taxed. War between Russia and Japan in 1904 over a treaty with China for access to its seaports which worried Japan for fear Russia might want to take control of Manchuia and Korea, areas Japan was interested in." - (World History Series)

Thus begins Chapter Two and the character of Komarovsky, the lawyer, begins to unfold. He plays an important role in the book - "a cold-blooded businessman who knew the Russian business world like the back of his hand." (not any original expression, certainly, Pasternak does so much better elsewhere)

This Chapter entitled "GIRL FROM A DIFFERENT WORLD" is more easily read than the first and I think you will begin to see a plot commencing.

Am looking forward to your comments! Thank you all so very much for your comments even though, as we have all agreed, it is a difficult book to follow - IT GETS BETTER, HANG IN THERE

Hello INE: We were posting at the same time. I was at the Library briefly a couple of days ago and looked up books about Pasternak - there were about 3-4 biographies and also critiques of his poetry and art. I did reserve a biography and when I get it will, hopefully, be able to understand the author better. I'll let you know.

Also, hello Jeryn! Are you reading the book? We're being slow about it, but's okay. That's what is so nice about Seniornet - we have no time limit - if we take 2-3 months on a book, HEY, it's our discussion and we may do as we please! Nice!

Hi All - I was off the mark with a few of the things I said. I'm a little farther along in my reading now, and I see the book is something other, and something more than what I had 'notioned' it to be.

And that with a little help from ine, thanks. For that reason I particularly enjoyed that first paragraph of your post (31). Some good ideas on what the book is about...as well as what it's not about.

As for Lara's Theme: I've got it going now on my player, over...and over...and over.

When I got to your post, Ella, I find you asking me to add MORE to what I said about the role of Jews in the Revolution, now that I had decided that it may not really be part of the book. Well, we'll have to see. I would like to suggest that no Jews were members of the peasant class.

What a difference another fifty pages make! The book is coming alive.

Just wanted to respond to another of your questions Ella, about the three branches of religious judaism - Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. I consider myself culturally and ethnically a Jew, and I am religious in my own way, but I am not observant enough to characterize myself as falling into one of the religious traditions reflected in those three categorizations. I think American Jews, especially, often feel Jewish without having any connection to religion. I went to Jewish camp as a kid, had grandparents from the old country (Russia/Poland - peasants who left at the time of the pogroms from an area called Rovno I think) and ate lots of matzoh products (!), but never recall celebrating the religious holidays as a kid. So being Jewish very much has two components for me - the religious, which is but a tiny part of my life, and the ethnic/cultural, which is a much larger part.

And now, back to the book....

Not reading the book, Ella. At least, not this minute. It lives downstairs in my collection if I should find some time soon enough to join you all. Nevertheless, I am following the discussion with interest... lurking away!

Thanks, Sarah, for that explanation!

Jeryn, we're always grateful for lurkers, as well as participants and do join in with comments anytime as this is Russian history in the not so distant past and whether you are reading the book or not, events will be familiar to you.

In this second chapter the unrest of the populace begins to unfold with the vivid depiction of the railway strike. One can imagine what a railway strike would mean to people in a country that depended so desperately on the railroad for every manner of transportation, and we read of the Cossacks ambushing the crowd - "Half a platoon galloped through, turned, reformed and cut into the tail of the procession. The massacre began. "

I loved this -very pictorial phrase - "The afternoon was dry like a charcoal sketch." And further on pg.37 all the RED in this:

Then the sun, setting behind the houses, pointed as though with a finger at everything red in the street-the red tops of the dragoons' caps, a red flag trailing on the ground, and the red specks and threads of blood on the snow.

Never thought of "RED" as depicting blood did you? The Reds were Communists, of course, and certainly spilled the blood, but to be honest, they fought and lost millions of young men in two world wars and they fought bravely; but when current Russian history is discussed we often think of Stalin and his bloodbath.

Keep in mind as you read this chapter where the main characters are - Yuri is living in a household composed of Tonia and Misha, two friends whom he grows up with in these impressionable adolescent years where together they are going through a "frenzy of purity" and the domain of the sensual….is vulgar, and Lara is meanwhile - well, let me quote here a bit from the book. "well developed. People thought she was eighteen or more…..good mind, easy to get along with….very good-looking…..(she) felt her size and her position in the bed with two points of her body……her soul or inner being harmoniously fitted into her contours and impatiently straining toward the future."

Two very different home atmospheres and personalities at this stage of their lives. Perhaps if we keep this in mind we can understand the developments in their future lives - or maybe not.

What do you think of these young people? Do you have any impressions of them at all? Have you finished Chapter two? On page 61 Yuri comes face to face with a force which he can never forget - what did you make of that scene?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEOPLE GONE? MARVELLE, INE, BETTY, JONATHAN? WHERE ARE YOU?

Are you still reading the book? Do you have any opinion as to why this book won the Nobel Prize for Literature?

There is much to be discussed, much to be enjoyed, much to learn about Russia and one man's efforts to portray the life of a Russian through the turmoil and tragedies of a revolution that marked the end of one oppressive regime and the beginning of an another.

Do come in and tell Sarah and I what you are thinking, whether it is that you don't want to pursue reading any more of the book or have just taken a hiatus?

and I'm very interested in Doris Pasternak and his Dr. Zhivago. I also found your last posting very insightful and liked the remarks and question you asked. I did finish chapter 2, and also brought home 'Boris Pasternak' his life and art by Guy de Mallat. It slowed me down, but it is fascinating. Your remark about the colour red and how it relates to blood was revealing. Usually it's the colour of passion, I thought. You also asked about Yura's sudden awakening to a new feeling. He and his adolescent friends had, up to that point, surrounded themselves with a frenzy of purity, and had rejected anything in the domain of the sensual as 'vulgar'. The scene between Lara and Komarovsky tore the veil of his childish philosophy and what was he to do? Frankly, I'm not sure yet how to comment on it, because I have forgotten most of the details of the movie, and will have to wait for further development to see what will happen. But, I hope others are not given up on the book, because it promises to be a good read. Jonathan, how do you like to read the book as a 'Book-of-the-Month selection? Marvelle9, I like your remark: 'that the storms of life/death are skilfully counterbalanced by Yura's love of life. That's what attracts me so much to the character too. ine

With all the desire in the world to continue the discussion. It is a strange book about an even stranger piece of human history. One comes at these Russian things after having been forewarned by Winston Churchill that one will find, how does it go?...a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Or was it in a different order?

How convenient...I'm going follow ine, and borrow a phrase from her last post: 'I'm not sure yet how to comment on it'. Not that I'm not reading or thinking about it. Just puzzling over it. Maybe we're all waiting for someone else to get the ball rolling. And roll it will, I'm sure.

Partly, I think, it's the nature of the book. Or the authors style. Taking a long time to set the table, for us, which is really appreciated only much later. As a matter of fact, I'm well into chapter six, and thinking: now I'll go back to the beginning, reread and, hopefully, make up my mind and post some opinions.

For a starter. To comment on the use of Red. It serves very well in that poetic paragraph on page 37. But for me, it immediately brought to mind my Mother's mentioning it long ago. It was, she told us children, the red banners carried by the students demonstrating their revolutionary fervor in the streets, which convinced her that Dad's proposal to emigrate was a wise one. That was in 1924, so of course they had lived through some difficult times, with war, famine, typhus. How often she longed for the beautiful Crimea, and the parents and siblings she had left behind. I can still hear Dad at ninety, in the late 80's, wondering out loud: Why did God permit the Bolsheviks to win!? I'm hoping Pasternak will shed some light on that.

As for the strange impression made on Yuri by the Lara/Komarovsky scene on page 61, it is one more opportunity to observe Yuri's unique way of allowing himself to be affected by his surroundings or events. For one thing he brings a lot of poetic sensitivity, and imagination into play in reacting to things. What he saw in that exchange between L and K, isn't too clear to me, yet. Even stranger, if I can jump ahead, are the bizarre images and thoughts which run through his mind when he looks at Tonia, just after she has given birth to their son. Their are so many weird symbols in there, that I doubt we'll ever get it unless Barbara helps us out. But all in good time. I've said enough.

I've missed not being a part of the discussion but I have to finish a project -- hopefully today or tomorrow at latest --and then I am back to Yuri, Lara and all the fascinating people in Pasternak's world. I read Zhivago a month ago and will do a second read as we discuss each chapter. I get so much more out of a book that way. For instance, the symbols Zhivago sees(?) after Tonia gives birth? Oh, I can't wait to read that part over! I promise that by tomorrow I will be back in the game. Don't give up on me.

-- Marvelle

Oh, thank you all for posting and for not giving up on this wonderful book - so much to explore in it, we've just begun actually!

We are going to have thunderstorms here soon, so I don't have long to post but I think Sarah (on the west coast) will be in later; hopefully the storms have been and gone.

The third chapter of the book is the coming of age of Yuri as he begins to see Tonia as a woman, instead of a friend (and did you notice they are being pushed together by Tonia's mother whom they both loved?)and here, I think, is Pasternak possibly describing himself:

Yura had a good mind and was an excellent writer. Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of composing a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about. But he was too young to write such a book; instead, he wrote poetry. He was like a painter who was always making sketches for a big canvas he had in mind.

Pasternak wrote the poetry and we are reading the book - does it contain "buried explosives?"

I loved what Jonathan said about Pasternak and this book - "Taking a long time to set the table, for us, which is really appreciated only much later. Yes, right on, Jonathan.

And I must set my table for dinner - see you all later. Thanks again!

In the beginning of chapter 5, the narrator, describing the events in the war, suddenly uses the first person plural: 'WE were pulling out of Galicia...' and again in chapter 9: 'To the south of the district where Gordon found himself, OUR forces had succeeded in breaking through ....' perhaps Pasternak used this device earlier, but I didn't notice it until now. I wonder what it means - it feels to me as if the army is a overpowering force, the fate of all the characters - which it is, of course. I'm puzzled. ine

ine - thanks for posting 'a question'. And that was like twelve hours ago. You must be thinking that the rest of us have abandoned you; that you're left to puzzle all alone about Boris Pasternak's strange and wonderful book...or about his unique style.

Take heart. It's like Ella says: 'we've just begun, actually'. I find those words very encouraging, in more ways than one. It's an exceptional book, undoubtedly, and yet Ella asked if it's deserving of the Nobel Prize. By any standard that should have provoked a lively discussion. I don't remember that anyone cared to post an opinion on that.

Do you all remember the impact it made when it first came out? How excited the world was to have an honest novel come out of the secretive Soviet Union? That the author was made to suffer an internal exile only made it more credible.

But it turned out to be more than just an historical account about significant events in Russian history. It's a real work of art. Prose in form; but poetry in spirit. And as such, demanding that much more of the reader, while, rewardingly, providing that much more pleasure. Can't one just sense it, when he's looking at things with poetic inspiration?

I'm convinced that there is great interest in Doctor Zhivago on the part of everyone who looks in on Books and Literature. Everyone remembers the great movie. I think the book, given a chance, is even better.

Keep puzzling everybody...you're not alone. When the breakthrough comes, and the splendour of the author's art shines forth...the posts will come thick and fast. Right?

Absolutely, Jonathan, a slow start doesn't predict much of anything. I also agree that the book was even better than the movie and the movie was wonderful. I found the book very readable and Pasternak's descriptions of storms exquisite...I'm sure we'll talk much about the meaning of the storms. I believe they are related to one of Pasternak's themes introduced in Chapter 7 when Zhivago says, "The rest isn't in our hands."

But, hey, it's the beauty of the prose that carried me from page to page, such as in Chapter 5, the night before Yurii says goodbye to Lara. Late at night, he is by himself in the town square, observing the town....

"Narrow dead-end streets ran off the square, as deep in mud as country lanes and lined with crooked little houses. Fences of plaited willows stuck out of the mud like bow nets in a pond, or lobster pots. You could see the weak glint of open windows. In the small front gardens, sweaty red heads of corn with oily whiskers reached out toward the rooms, and single pale thin hollyhocks looked out over the fences, like women in night clothes whom the heat had driven out of their stuffy houses for a breath of air."

Even though Zhivago turned away and did not go to Lara in her room that night (leaving the goodbye scene for the morning), his heart is "reaching out toward the rooms," maybe even wishing that Lara would be "driven out" of her "stuffy" room by the heat and see him in the square. Hollyhocks looking out over the fences like women in night clothes....is one of my favorite images in the book. Zhivago is looking at the flowers and seeing a woman in night clothes. This is poetry.

betty

I am so sorry, Ine, for being so lax in my duties as a discussion leader. I apologize for not being here sooner, but I do have an excuse. My nephew and his wife from California have been visiting all the relatives in the Ohio area and the last two days was our turn, plus our daughter drove over from Dayton for a couple of days to visit. It has been busy here, but now they just left and I want to post a few comments.

Ine,perhaps you are somewhat like myself - I must have the facts. Who is fighting who here and where do our characters fit into the picture and at the moment I cannot answer your questions as I must re-read the next 4 chapters, my memory is not to be trusted. Perhaps it is time to go back to the Russian book I have for a paragraph or two - and I will do that tonight.

But if you think it's confusing to read about, think of the Russians, for heavens' sake, and all those factions fighting each other, and which should you support, or which can you support, to which do you owe loyalty?

As Jonathan stated we are barely begun and I know we are not on schedule - at least, not on the schedule posted in the heading, but we will get there. Sarah, I believe, is out of town for the weekend, but will be returning and all of us together can figure this all out…..

But in the meantime, I do want to thank Betty for that lovely passage she copied in the discussion - doesn't Pasternak do those analogies well? Beautiful images! Oh, for a wee bit of his talent!

Here's another one that will appeal to the mothers among us (I got goosebumps when I first read it and no doubt will again as I type it out):

Raised higher, closer to the ceiling than ordinary mortals usually are, Tonia lay exhausted in the cloud of her spent pain. To Yurii she seemed like a barque lying at rest in the middle of a harbor after putting in and being unloaded, a barque that plied between an unknown country and the continent of life across the waters of death with a cargo of immigrant new souls. One such soul had just been landed, and the ship now lay at anchor, relaxed, its flankds unburdened and empty. The whole of her was resting, her strained masts and hull, and her memory washed clean of the image of the other shore, the crossing and the landing.

Isn't that wonderful? Particularly this phrase - her memory washed clean of the image of the other shore, the crossing and the land. So true and how quickly our memories forgot the pain and were washed clean.

I'll be back later and copy a little bit of the history of the forces that are fighting each other in these next few chapters. And I will be more faithful, I promise!

This, you understand, is a very short version of what actually happened. After WWI was over and the Tsar abdicated (later assassinated), a provisional government consisting mostly of the liberal and moderate conservative forces was formed which set about a series of reforms. This government was supported largely by the educated and commercial classes. However there emerged an alternative government called the Petrograd Soviet (or council) - a haphazard assembly of representatives chosen by popular acclamation. In this Soviet group were several factions; the largest of which were the Socialist Revolutionaries, next in size were the Social Democrats - a party split into two groups, the majority Mensheviks and the minority Bolsheviks (both parties mentioned on page 143 of our book.

. The Provisional Government tried to instigate reforms; however it made the mistake of continuing the war effort which enraged the people - anti war demonstrations were numerous, people were hungry. Also this government agreed that exiled political leaders could return to Russia - this brought Lenin and Stalin back to the country.

Lenin promoted the Bolshevik revolution of socialism and preached around the country, and Leon Trotsky returned from exile and joined him. Kerensky became the government's new minister of war, and later prime minister, and he kept up Russia's war effort against Germany and Austria. Kerensky appointed a new commander (Kornilov) in charge of the war effort but became suspicious that he planned a military takeover of the government, so he called on other factions to help including the Bolsheviks.

Eventually the Bolsheviks amid the crises gained power, and support from the army and navy, and forced the Kerensky government from power. There was little opposition, few deaths as the Bolsheviks quietly took over each segment of government including the Winter Palace in Petrograd, the seat of the government. Immediately hundreds of government decrees were issued - farmland was to be confiscated from landlords and divided among the peasants, peace talks with Germany began, nobles lost their titles, separation of church and state was announced, equal rights for women.

On March 3, 1918 Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that ended Russia's involvement in WWI. It gave Germany l/3rd of its farmlands and populations, 4/5ths of its coal mines, l/4th of its railways and l/3rd of its factories. The people were shocked, strikes and uprisings again escalated but against the Bolsheviks. However, they unleashed the Cheka, a ruthless secret police force authorized to destroy all opposition, initiated censorship, killings and a reign of terror began.

Meanwhile, in southern Russia factions begun to form - they joined together and called themselves the "Whites" to distinguish themselves from the "Red" flag and Red Guards. Also a huge force of enemy troops were scattered around Russia after the treaty was signed , the majority of them Czech nationalists, and they joined with the Whites against the Bolsheviks or the Communists as they now called themselves (they had made Moscow their capital city). Fighting broke in Moscow, Petrograd, Archangel, Vladivostok and Murmansk. New independent countries broke away - Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

That probably bored you! But it helped me understand the background to the story - hopefully, it will be of help to you also.

More history later, but I must point out what Yuri, in a trembling voice, said about Mother Russia, on page 146. Read it again if you have not already. Poetic, prophetic words.

Ella - the quick historical review is very helpful, and it confirms what I wanted to say.

I'm the one who should say Sorry. I realized too late that I might be putting you as the Discussion Leader in an awkward position. I'm a relative newcomer to Books; but I've come to appreciate the time and the effort which Discussion Leaders put into making Books such a success. I have a lot of admiration for your style and methods, and Sarah's, as leaders in this discussion. And do take time out to enjoy your company...or just simply for a break.

The scene which gave you goosebumps, startled me too when I read it. I'm baffled by it still. What an extraordinary thing to make of the birthing process. What is being born here, in Yurii's poetic perceptions? There must be some meaning.

The 'memory washed clean' had a different meaning for me. It reminded me of a charming bit of Jewish lore in which the about-to-be-born lose all memory of their pre-birth existence by being tapped on the nose at the time of their departure from heaven. Somehow I feel a third person will have a different reaction.

betty - the narrow dead-end streets, and the hollyhocks...like women in night clothes, struck me, too, as remarkable prose. Whatever does he mean by it?

Here's a paragraph I found myself rereading and wondering about (5:5, P139 in my edition):

'Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!'...from one who found articulation in the strangest places!

Thanks, Ella. I do love reading background history and any other social context, but (thinking of other discussions) I want to quickly remind anyone who doesn't warm to it as I do.....don't worry, the book can be enjoyed on many levels. One thing I did keep wishing for, though, was a timeline, not only of the various shifts in power, but in Yurii's, Tonia's amd Lara's story. At one point near the end, I REALLY wanted to know Zhivago's age, so I plowed back through to see what I could find, all the while wishing I'd kept a list of the time clues. some of Oh, I'd forgotten that wonderful passage about Tonia giving birth. Thanks, Ella.

betty

edit....We were posting at the same time, Jonathan. I, too, copied that paragraph into my notes. There is a zen-like yearning in Pasternak's prose that views us as part of the natural world...a oneness.

You are new to the books, Jonathan? Is this the first discussion you have participated in - if so, we are so delighted to have you and hope you stay with us for awhile!

I found it fascinating that you had a different interpretation of Pasternak's "birthing analogy." And, of course, that is what makes an author famous and puts him on the list of the Nobel Prize winners. We can all speak from personal experience as to what he means, for example, when I read your quote - "Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate" I immediately thought of politicians and their endless jabber in the media and how much more rewarding the experience of looking and wondering with delight at the flower garden in my own backyard - silent moments among nature can restore my soul.

Years ago an acquaintance of ours told us of when her husband was dying he often asked her to take him to the woods, it made him feel better temporarily and she didn't understand it exactly but she took him as often as she could. I've never forgotten that.

Indeed yes, Betty, timelines for this book would be helpful. One reads now and then a line specifying a year but it is hidden in the text and unless it was written down, we are not certain as to dates and ages.

Chapter Five's title - "FAREWELL TO THE OLD" - is appropriate and is sprinkled with references to what was - the home of Countess Zhabrinskaia, on one of the best sites of the town, is now a hospital and the Countess is in prison in Petersburg, - every night meetings were held in the town square where in the old days the citizens used to gather for gossip.

And then there is the new:

Among these new things was the war with its bloodshed and its horrors, its homelessness and savagery, its ordeals and the practical wisdom that it taught……..And among these new things too was the revolution-not the idealized intellectuals' revolution of 1905, but this new upheaval, todays, born of the war, bloody, ruthless, elemental, the soldiers' revolution led by those professional revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks.

War teaches practical wisdom? Does anyone understand what that means?

Ella, I agree wholeheartedly with Jonathan about our Discussion leaders being such wonderful people to spend the extra time and effort to make book discussions so interesting, for getting (and keeping) them off the ground. I didn't really ask this question to get an immediate answer, and knew that I should search for it myself, if the reading of (war) history didn't turn me off so much. It sounded like a great visit you had with your relatives, and I just threw that question in to wait for some reaction. However, thanks a lot for the info you sent, and especially about the referral to Yuri's passionate observation about Mother Russia. It fits right in with what Betty said about the subject of background history, "Don't worry, the book can be enjoyed on many levels." That paragraph has so many universal insights:

"Mother Russia is on the move , she can't stand still, she's restless and she can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop. And it isn't as if only people were talking. Stars and trees meet and converse, flowers talk philosophy at night, stone houses hold meetings. It's like something out of the Gospels ... " and: "... The revolution broke out willy-nilly, LIKE A BREATH THAT'S BEING HELD TOO LONG [great expression!]. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions - his own personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions are flowing into it - the sea of life, of life in its own right. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a work of art, tranformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures but in themselves, not in theory but in practice...."

Jonathan, your observations about the birthing process and the question: "What is being born here, in Yuri's poetic perceptions, there must be some meaning?" This might tie in with the above paragraph about 'the sea of life, all private and individual revolutions flowing into it'. Childbirth is, in a matter of speaking a revolution too, and it's a very creative act. Did he bring the birth of his son, a personal experience for Tonya, to the level of creativity, of an almost universal act? Just a thought. ine

Thank you, INE, for your post about Mother Russia and many thanks to both you and Jonathan for your compliments. It is so nice of you!

So many references to the bible and biblical characters throughout the book. What can we make of this? What opinions do you have?

I picked up a biography about Pasternak at the Library, but haven't opened it yet. Perhaps it will tell us something.

Jonathan made a comment earlier that sounded biblical and I did want to comment on it and then I forgot. In a previous post he said something about Pasternak preparing a table for us (I can't recall his exact words right now), but it sounded biblical also. Gosh, maybe we should all get our bibles out?

Yuri is not sure which way to go, whom to support, or whether to ignore all of it and try to carry on his duties at the hospital, his is not a soldier's temperament. The staff at the hospital certainly felt uneasy about Yuri's attitude - The staff had already divided up into camps. To the moderates, whose obtuseness made the doctor indignant, he seemed dangerous, to those whose politics were advanced not Red enough. Thus he belonged to neither group, having moved away from the former and lagging behind the latter.

Pasternak undoubtedly encountered all of it - the chaos, the confusion, fighting in the streets, and he must have encountered the poverty and hopelessness of the people such as is described in Chapter Six in which Yuri, his wife and baby, can find little food or wood to stave off the cold. How can one improve on this description of the hardships of the time:

Winter came……it was not as terrifying as the two winters that followed it, but it was already of the same sort, dark hungry, and cold, entirely given to the breaking up of the familiar and the reconstruction of all the foundations of existence, and to inhuman efforts to cling to life as it slipped out of your grasp……..The old life and the new order had not yet come in contact. They were not yet openly hostile to each others, as when the civil war broke out a year later, but there was no connection between the two. They stood apart, confronting each other, incompatible.

Where is everybody today?

Ella - No, it's not the first. I've taken part in two discussions. So that makes me feel relatively new at it, compared to others who have been participating for a number of years. I shouldn't count The Ancient Mariner. I spent the whole sea voyage in the crow's nest, (without Gravol) watching my shipmates carousing on the deck below me, around an open rum-barrel, before dropping dead one-by-one. What a disaster. God knows I tried to warn them. They either couldn't hear, or wouldn't listen, or my posts were lost in the howling winds coming around the Cape. Whatever happened to Captain Ginny? Did she ever sail again?

The House of Mirth was a lot of fun. And I guess I owe that to the fact that I started out by disagreeing with Betty, over what the book was all about. That made me think a little harder. Why shouldn't it work again? No, I do not think there is a Zen-like yearning in Pasternak's prose. It is anything but.

It's all about the consequences of the attempt of those 'professional revolutionaries', which you mentioned, the Bolsheviks, to force Mother Russia to give birth to a new, chimerical society, with the wildest notion being the possibility of re-making the Russian psyche.

And what was Pasternak really yearning to do? In his own words: 'I want to give a historical image of Russia'. Doctor Zhivago 'will be an expression of my views on Art, the Gospels, human life in history'. I am settling accounts with Judaism...with all kinds of nationalism...with all kinds of Anti-Christianitys and their assumptions'. A Pasternak scholar considers Doctor Zhivago as a sequel to St.John's Book of Revelations. Now, does Zen have that many levels?

Pasternak, with the help of Uncle Nikolai and, thus, of Yuri, wants to re-interpret the Gospels to find meaning and solution for the turmoil about him. And that points to the serious oversight on the part of those 'professional revolutionaries', (mostly that bunch who spent so many years of exile in Zurich, Paris and London) studying the mistakes of the past, the lessons taught, for example, by the fate and failure of the Paris Communards in 1871.

Instead of trying to remake the Russian psyche with notions of dialectic materialism and historical necessity, they should have brought the Church on-side. They had a believing, defrocked priest, Uncle Nikolai, eager to help. With Russian Orthodoxy and Marxism working together (or alternatively, Stalin and Rasputin) who knows where that society might be today.

The important thing in these discussions, I think, is to maintain one's aplomb. Granted that the lack of a timeline is aggravating. I have an additional problem, ordinarily, of not being able to put a book down without misplacing my bookmark. With Doctor Zhivago, however, it's different. His delightful, short prose-poems can be read in isolation, and still immediately take their place on his large canvas. For example, I picked up my Zhivago to continue reading...at a place (7:5,p213) a hundred pages farther along than where I had left off. It's spring, 1918?, and Yuri and Tonia are preparing to leave Moscow for the Urals, after a bleak winter, with an ever-increasingly unsettled and unsettling society.

With a background of: 'Gray clouds (inevitably, and isn't 'white shroud' suggestive?) of spinning snow swept into the sky and came back to earth as a white whirlwind, which ran off into the black depths of the street and covered it with a white shroud', comes this intriguing paragraph:

'Markel (the Porter, who put the wardrobe together for Tonia's mother at the beginning of chapter 3) could not be trusted. At the militia post which he had selected as his political club (talk about endless talk!) he did not actually say that his former masters sucked his blood, but he accused them, instead, of having kept him in ignorance all these years and deliberately concealed from him that man is descended from apes.'

Isn't that beautiful?!!!

WONDERFUL POST, JONATHAN - thank you! I'll read it again when I more time as I have some questions for you, but I wanted to tell you I have skimmed over the biography of Pasternak's life and will report from time to time on a few of the similarities and the differences of Pasternak's life and the characters in the book. One item: notice that the physical description of Yuri is hard to find (I'll give you the exact words later, am in a hurry), whereas Pasternak himself was a very handsome man!

And Jonathan I had to look up the word "chimerical" and I love it when I learn a new word! Good for the mind. Also, just wanted to let you know that Captain Ginny's boat is in the harbor awhile, but will soon sail off again on another voyage, so look for her sail! Isn't she wonderful?

At last I'm back, Ella. Sorry to be so long but the project I'm working on was more demanding and time consuming than I'd have liked. Cross fingers, I completed the bulk of the project!

So we're on Chapter 5? I like Betty's remark about Pasternak's Zen-like thoughts. I would rather say poetic but they are much the same thing, aren't they? How difficult it is to try to live as a human being and an artist (in fact as well as heart), in the middle of suspicion, want, and stress. Zen or merely poet, I think Yurii and Pasternak yearned for a natural reality, away from human machinations.

True poets can make people nervous as we see in the hospital staff. Poets are eternal anarchists who get down to the bone of human existence beyond ideology and "I'm-going-to-tell-you-what-you-think" cant. Yurii believes in the revolution yet when his train arrives at his destination he muses:

Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins -- all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, meaningless space. The first real event since the long interruption was this trip in the fast-moving train, the fact that he was approaching his home, which was intact, which still existed, and in which every stone was dear to him. This was real life, meaningful experience, the actual goal of all quests, this was what art aimed at -- homecoming, return to one's family, to oneself, to true existence."

Obviously, Yurii is a danger to himself and his New World Ordered Society.

-- Marvelle

In the book 'Boris Pasternak' by Guy de Mallat, I found that Pasternak was brought up in the kind of Jewish family - as his father describes it -: '... that was admittely religious but free from adherence to ritual, whose members, including myself, felt completely assimilated to our Russian surroundings, and although I believed in God but did not in practice belong to any religious denomination ....'

Somewhat later Boris' biographer remarks that 'because of Pasternak's Jewish cultural background, Christianity remained "the object of a rare and exceptional inspiration". This fact is very evident in Zhivago's poetry which is Pasternak's. His poems in the back of the book are of a rare, simple beauty and many are 'religious'. His treatment of biblical scenes remind me of Jose Saramago, the Portugese writer who wrote THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST, in which the story of Jesus' life is written so down-to-earth and beautiful, and for that reason it was banned in his own country.

Yes, Dr. Zhivago's book has many Zen qualities, and I feel that Pasternak was able to approach Christianity and the bible in a 'Zen way' because the religion came to him unadorned with any dogma's or rituals. I feel that Jesus's sayings in the bible (and in the gospel of Thomas which is excluded from the bible) are absolutely like Zen Buddishm, a religion that accepts all other religions as equal. Pasternak had those qualities himself. ine

I see Pasternak as using railroads as scene frames, like the opening and closing of curtains during a stage play. Then there is the symbolic impression of movement through time and space toward social change.

In my prior post I responded only to Betty's post and to Ella's question about the hospital staff which led to my impressions of Yurii's poetic soul always an abiding interest of mine. I had to find a way back into the discussion and knew that I couldn't do justice to everyone's wonderful posts. Anyway, I wasn't commenting on religion in general. You'll find that I rarely, rarely state my religious views, even in the context of a book we're discussing, although I appreciate others' opinions.

Here's an afterthought to the hospital staff's reaction to Yurii: another reason for suspicion of Yurii is his upper class background? Wouldn't some people in those paranoid times see his class as an obstacle to his conversion to the 'cause'? Plus, wouldn't the old resentment against the upper classes surface?

A grateful thank you to ine for generously providing the historical backdrop. That helps me visualize the action and mood (can mood be visualized?) of the novel.

Ella, where are we at with timelines? I don't need a specific timeline, so long as the discussion progresses, but I would like a general idea of where we are with current reading. I don't want to jump ahead or lag behind. Sooooo...do I take the posted schedule as a guide?

-- Marvelle

ine - thanks for posting some interesting remarks which help to explain what Betty might have meant by suggesting Zen-traits of thinking in Pasternak's work. Could 'zen-like yearnings' and 'religious-like yearnings' be used interchangeably? I found Betty's question extremely interesting and worth following up. You did in an interesting way.

Russian spirituality is elaborate, distinctive and complex. And that is said by someone who knows nothing about it. Well, recently I did attend a funeral, conducted in the grand Russian Orthodox way, and found it very impressive. To add a Zen dimension to that spirituality is certainly intriguing.

Pasternak, it seems to me, saw Christianity in terms of entombment, resurrection, and, especially, perhaps, in Doctor Zhivago, as sacrificing oneself for others. I'm trying to see that in relation to the Zen view of 'us as part of the natural world...a oneness', in Betty's words. Nature certainly meant everything to Yuri, considering the constant use Pasternak makes of it.

I've seen the movie at least 6 times and enjoyed it everytime, but have never read book. Does the book cover more than is possible to cover in a movie of several hours? From computor6 at costamesa6.

costamesa6 - my guess is that the author would probably say yes, having worked on it for ten years, if not a lifetime. Some of his readers might, perhaps, say that there's more in the movie, depending on media preference, and which one makes a greater impact on one.

There's ugliness in being famous.
That's not what elevates a man.
No need to institute an archive
Or dither over manuscripts.

Let others, hot upon your trail,
Pace out your life's span inch by inch.
But you your failures from your triumphs
Must never differentiate.
---Pasternak, 1950

And this is just how we are proceeding in our discussion - "inch by inch" - rightly so? According to Hingley's biography (1983) the fact that Pasternak destroyed all evidence of himself, deliberately, makes the man more mysterious, elusive, intriguing, although there is reason to believe that more material resides in the closed archives of Russia. And the saga of this author will continue!

To console ourselves, if such be needed, the reason for our dawdling over the text can be found in these words of Hingley:

"He (Pasternak) was, let the fact be faced, a man who liked to muddle things - a process to which he brought the creative flair of genius. One is right, surely, to suspect those of his interpreters who imply that they understand every word he wrote…..He could hardly express anything without complicating it."

We could be at our task of reading and discussing the book for months on end I do believe, but perhaps we should finish up Chapters 7 and 8 quickly (if such be possible?) - the trip to the Urals and arrival. One is constantly, and I am very guilty, wanting to share the poetry of this man, one of the reasons that the book won the Nobel Prize which consequently made Pasternak Russia's Public Enemy Number One.

And, Ine, you are reading a biography of Pasternak also? Why are we all so intrigued by the man and his novel to the extent that we want to even read more about the author? The beauty of it? The fact that it is difficult to understand or possibly the things left unsaid?

I did want to mention briefly a few things about Pasternak's physical qualities. In 1903 on a holiday with his family he fell off a horse and broke his leg, which healed imperfectly leaving him with a limp disqualifying him from military service in 3 wars. He was a man of striking appearance whom many regarded as devastataingly handsome, deep, hollow-set eyes, an air of intelligence, sensitivity, nervous tension and physical energy. In contrast, the book's hero, Yuri, is "that snub-nosed, utterly unremarkable person"…..who has a "dark auburn beard" and these are all the details we are to learn in a novel remarkable for descriptions of nature, but scarce in descriptive qualities of the major characters.

Strange isn't it? Of course, I see Yuri as Omar Shariff - don't you?

Oh, I loved this,Marvelle - "I see Pasternak as using railroads as scene frames, like the opening and closing of curtains during a stage play. Then there is the symbolic impression of movement through time and space toward social change."

Wonderful metaphor for the train trip to the Urals. Thank you for that!

You attended a Russian Orthodox funeral, Jonathan - had you ever before? Someone once described (and I can't remember where I heard it) the Russian psyche as either attending a funeral or returning from one. The melancholy Russian soul! Is it true? And tell us about the funeral rituals.

WELCOME COSTAMESA6. Yes, I could say definitely that the book covers much more than the movie. It is lovely prose, poetry, scenes that could never be described accurately in a film, although a lovely film and we hope to take the time at the end of our discussion to all watch the film and make comparisons, perhaps, to the book. Do join us at any time with your comments or get a copy of the book! It's never too late!

As Jonathan said, this is the only novel that Pasternak wrote and it covers all his thoughts of love, life, revolutions, history, people, etc. A great book and though the movie was beautiful it couldn't ever compare to the written word. Is that always the truth?

What did the rest of you think of the train trip to the Urals?

Such interesting responses to my use of the word zen and though I'm still reluctant to explain the reference, my reference, that is, I'll try. Not connected to christianity or religion directly.

At a particularly low period in my life, I read a first book on Zen, then another and another. Having an academic and clinical background in psychology, I found this material didn't fit anything I knew but brought deep relief and a completely different outlook, a different approach to all things living and where I fit in that natural world. It was technique and philosophy in one.

It was more feeling than intellect, but even more, was a focus, even a yearning not to let this moment get past me without living it. (at which I fail all the time) For the reference I gave, however, it is also a connection I feel toward others and which I see among others. I usually find myself thinking along the lines of...we're all the same here, just wonderfully flawed humans doing the best we can most of the time. Negative feelings evaporate. Divisions fall away.

Pasternak refers often to the new testament...and explains in one place (a note here somewhere) how the common person is the focus in the new testament as Kings and rulers were the focus in the Old. That, plus so much he gives Zhivago to speak, leads me to believe that Pasternak envisions the unadorned (common) individual as complete, that her perfection is in simplicity....which is where we all begin. This natural state connects all.

So, the zen reference was more of a feeling I had whevever I read Zhivago's words. Trying to make sense of it on paper loses quite a bit in translation. I accept the others' more intellectual thoughts for and against a zen reference, simply because I can't debate a feeling.

betty

Hello Betty! I confess I know nothing about Zen, but your post inspires me to learn more, I loved your explanation of it and think it would help myself and anyone struggling to live a better life. What books should I read?

Did I answer the post about where we are in the book, or where we should be? Let us wind up Chapters 7 and 8 and begin Chapter 9 in quick order. I have a postit note on Chapter 9 that says "Great Chapter" so I'm anxious to reread it to see what impressed me.

We also should be discussing why this book was the source of such great turmoil in Russia and banned there? Any comments?

Betty - I had a feeling about the kind of response I would get from you, or that I was hoping for. Your wonderful post more than repaid me for the trepidation I felt in challenging you. Thanks. I'm enjoying the discussion more for having read it. Yes, after hearing your thoughts on it, there is a zen-like searching for the truth in Doctor Zhivago.

Ella - No, it was the first time to a Russian Orthodox funeral. Very impressive. And without seeming to be facetious, I felt like the person viewing the grand, private mausoleum of a distinguished man: It's worth dying for.

Here are a few descriptive words about a Russian Requiem Mass, and I quote: 'It is a popular assumption to associate the Requiem Mass with music of a somber and even depressing character. In the Russian Church rites, however, these mournful notes are largely tempered with an uplifting, consoling sentiment issuing from an unshakable faith in the ultimate righteousness and mercy of the world's Supreme Judge and Benefactor.'

'O Lord Give Us Peace... Give rest, O Lord, to the souls of thy servants and establish them in thy Kingdom. Have mercy upon us.'

Ella, I liked your observation: 'In a novel remarkable for descriptions of nature, but scarce in descriptive qualities of the major characters'...that's true. On the other hand, we get descriptions like that of Yuri:

'Everything in Yura's mind was still helter-skelter, but his views, his habits, and his inclinations were all distinctly his own. He was unusually impressionable, and the originality of his vision was remarkable.' p64

And Lara: 'For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.' p75

It's not that easy to give the right name to something, it seems. Or to tell it like it was, as Pasternak was trying to do.

I stopped at the library to return some books. Three of them, overdue four days. A fine of $3.00! Well, put the best face on it. The librarian looked sympathetic. It made me feel better, by saying I felt the fine to be for a good cause. Her beautiful reply: Yes, it's our only source of income!

They depend on it for new books! Is it that bad where you are?

Heavens, No! I'm aghast at the thought that our library would depend on late fees. Where do you live that times are so tough (haha). In the Columbus Metropolitan Library system, which includes most suburbs (of which Gahanna, my city, is one)we tax property owners and every time a new tax is requested on the ballot, it is passed. We seem to love our libraries! Thank goodness, although I cringe every time I see mothers checking out an armful of movies with their children instead of books. Everyone disagrees with me, but I believe that videos do not belong in a library.

We are entering the great love scenes of the book and of Yuri's life as we open Chapter 9 and discover Yuri's unfaithfulness to his wife. Pasternak, too, had a wife and a mistress that he loved equally. Is it possible? And would a woman's answer and a man's answer differ, do you think?

We might question as we read how the two women (Lara and Tonia) differ?

Too bad the congressman did not have only one other love! ...elizabeth

Ella - I'm pleased and delighted by your horror and dismay over our straitened circumstances. Hopefully others feel the same way. Contributions can be sent to Eatonville Public Library, Burnhamthorpe Road...I'm going to get tarred and feathered by my neighbors for this.

I must be more truthful, and boastful. We have a wonderful new neighborhood library, just opened, costing well over a million dollars, replacing an older one on the same site. Within a ten minute walk. With fine reading corners and computers with Internet hookups, you just may be getting my posts from 'The Club'. haha

Now, if I can only find my place. We're in chapter 9, say you?

Hahaha! Jonathan, I'm as gullible as I was at 13, believing everything I hear or read.

Have you or anyone any ideas about why this book was banned in Russia? Was it, perhaps, religious views or political views?

Where are you reading? In Chapter 9 there is this quote which must have angered a few of those in power:

In all this time something definite should have been achieved. But it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil....They aren't trained for anything else, they don't know anything except that.. And do you know why these never-ending preparations are so futile? It's because these men haven't any real capacities, they are incompetent. MAN IS BORN TO LIVE, NOT TO PREPARE FOR LIFE

That sums up everything that is happened in Russia over the years, do you agree?

And then this criticism of the current officials!

What is it that prevents me from being a doctor and a writer? I think it is not our privations or our wanderings or our unsettled lives, but the prevalent spirit of high-flown rhetoric, which has spread everywhere-phrases such as 'the dawn of the future,' the building of a new world,' the torch-bearers of mankind.' The first time you hear such talk you think 'What breadth of imagination, what richness!' But in fact it's so POMPOUS JUST BECAUSE IT IS SO UNIMAGINATIVE AND SECOND-RATE

Of course, Americans reading that can relate to all the pompous talk of our politicians - how much of such rhetoric from our presidents and politicians can you remember and how many did we believe, starting with the NEW DEAL, THE GREAT SOCIETY, THE SILENT MAJORITY - what was JFK's popular phrase? All the others? Do we pay any attention to those anymore or believe them? Nah! Nyet!

There are many thoughts and ideas such as these sprinkled throughout the book - note the many times Yuri speaks of the "individual" and his love of the land and independence at a time when communism with its collective enthusiasm was predominantly preached by its leaders.

OLLLY-OLLY-IN-FREE! COME OUT FROM WHERE YOU ARE HIDING ALL OF YOU!

When I told you about the new library in our neighborhood, I had no idea that it would lead to comments about the Yuriatin public library. Libraries are the same the whole world over, it seems. But our new one has such a 'clubby' atmosphere, that I, inadvertantly, lit up my cigar as I sank into the easy chair by the window, to continue with 'Zhivago'. Without really wanting a 'break', I was told to head 'out to the landing', by a nice librarian, without ever taking the handkerchief 'away from her nose and mouth'. It wasn't a cheap cigar either.

Pasternak makes an interesting use of the library in Yuriatin...as a place in which to find, and from which to see a real world as compared to the view given by the 'comments and explanations' on the outside. For example, Samdeviaton's statement: Marxism is a positive science, a theory of reality, a philosophy of life, etc. All those new ideas out there, on the streets, that come with revolutions and party lines. What the new Russia was asked to believe!

So the library represents Zhivago's need to find the truth. Is it melodramatic that Antipova has come there also seeking the truth? A kindred soul! Appeal enough, for Yuri, even without the dumbfounding realization that it was Antipova's 'voice he had once heard in a dream'.

And so the library scene becomes a fine setting for a discussion of the 'love' theme which Ella brought up. The appeal or role of Tonia and Lara in Zhivago's life. I was preparing some comments on the peculiarities of Pasternak's style...of confusing metaphors, unlikely similes, and outrageous cross-pollenization of imagery. Sometimes it seems to me that the KGB sleuths and censors would have no difficulty in spotting coded subversion in Doctor Zhivago. Writers get pretty good at that sort of thing. As an ordinary, unsuspecting reader, on the other hand, I am amused by such a curious view as the following, with which Yuri observes Lara, absorbed in her reading:

'How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing that even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes.'

I went to the kitchen to make myself a coffee, and found my wife peeling potatoes. (I love potato salad. She knows that.) I told her (she's a librarian!) that she was making it look as easy as reading Doctor Zhivago. A short, sharp discussion followed, leading to a better appreciation for Pasternak's comparison.

Is Tonia the potato peeler and the water carrier? And Lara the truth seeker? Two different types. A man would certainly like to find them combined in one. If it means one or the other, it's a dilemma!

From a woman's point of view...I had to think of Pasternak's interest in the Gospels, looking for new meanings; and I found myself dumbfounded when I remembered Jesus' characterization of the Marys and the Marthas of the world. It escapes my memory which one He would have choosing the better part; but I do remember wondering why He did not address man's complex nature and need for several wives. Now that's subversive and I'm not at all sure of my dinner.

Where to start about this strange, mesmerizing book? I've been busy with relatives, and, except for reading the postings (Fun!) I've been slow about posting myself. Ella asked some questions, for instance about the train ride to the Urals and whether it differed with the movie. (A few weeks ago we loaned Dr. Zhivago video from the library and still found it a marvelous movie) but its problem is that, despite the extraordinary length, it still can't do justice to the book. The train ride invokes the impression that all the people were doing was clean our their s... (excuse me, but what is the veiled term for this?) but that is only part of the story because the doors were locked the first night after the people entered the train. Afterwards it had regular stops, it seemed. The book tells about the people pulling together cleaning snow from the tracks, and helping to refuel the engine. To me it signified that in every situation people rally to try to make it work.

Why was the book banned? There must have been many reasons, but one of them is that Pasternak was approached by a Milan publisher about publication in the West. This was done before the hierarchy of the Writers Union had decided on publishing it in Russia. They were discussing the idea of an expurgated vision. When the news came out that there was a formal contract between Pasternak and the West this idea of shortened version was not possible any more, as the Italians would publish the full text and this might have been politically embarrassing for Russia. I picked this up in Guy the Mallat's 'Boris Pasternak' so don't quote me, it's on page 210.

I've been trying to keep up with the time schedule and reached chapter 13, where the meeting with Lara is going to take place. I was intrigued with the figure of Kubarikha, the 'cattle healer' or the 'witch', as she was called too. She was the woman who could heal, and several times in the book it was pointed out that Lara, also, had these qualities. This part of the book from p 355 and the following few pages, seems very important but I need to read it once more, and want to do that later. First I'll enjoy the get together with our relatives. ine

Why didn't someone stop me? You must all be laughing at me. Two pages farther along, when I resumed reading, and Lara shlepping two buckets of water from the well! And making it look easy. A good thing she had both hands free to hold the skirt between her knees, with that gale blowing. Does it seem to the rest of you, that Pasternak is always talking about the weather? Tolstoy was a family friend. Pasternak must have heard him say, as everyone knows he once said, that much writing about weather is an indication of writer's block, or something to that effect.

Could it be that, does it seem to the rest of you, that Pasternak, himself, isn't always certain of what's ahead? That he hesitates, as if treading water. I was so upset, I put the book down. Does Lara then go on to cook a dinner for Yuri? There has to be more to the novel than this. Let's keep reading.

No, of course not, Jonathan...about the laughing at you...but you've put words to how most of us feel at one time or another when we change our minds a day or two after writing a "masterpiece." I think it's Ginny (or?? yeah, I think Ginny) who writes things like "changing what I think," or "oops, nevermind about what I thought yesterday." What was the discussion a few months ago when 10 or so of us, in mass, gradually did an about-face? It was a powerful discussion. (Sorry, J., you'll have to do better than that to make us laugh.)

The weather, or more specifically the storms. Surely, there are whole papers written on just this...Pasternak's storms in Doctor Zhivago. I loved them, loved them, loved them. I'm a sucker for rain, thunderstorms, snow, etc., anyway, so his wonderful, powerful descriptions were a joy to read. I'm sure the symbolism of the storms was at a different level than my thoughts while reading of them, but here is some of what came to mind often....Zhivago's oft repeated theme "the rest is out of our hands," what life throws at us is not within our control; that practical needs are a high priority in a country of such extreme weather (the Russian weather affected Napoleon, Hitler, etc.); that nature is beautiful, alive, powerful; that emotions are powerful and can be dangerous, all-consuming. Everything Russian has always been fascinating to me. Also myterious. For some reason, the extreme weather adds to this mystery.

A scene in the book that was copied closely in the film is the Yurii/Lara goodbye scene. She is ironing white clothes with an old fashioned iron. I don't know why I particularly love the choice of her activity...the very physical work of using a very heavy solid iron before it cools, then switching to another iron that has been waiting in the hot coals. The hot steam rising from the clothes. It is a difficult parting because they are in love, but both married to other people. This goodbye scene makes the next meeting in the library all that more poignant. Is it a year later? Two years? This is where I wish for a timeline. (One thing I never realized from the movie, but the book makes clear...Yurii knows that he could run into Lara in this small town, knows that this was her destination when he last said goodbye to her.)

betty

Our Dr. Ella reports that she is having awful computer problems and hopes you all will continue your splendid (truly wonderful) discussion till she can get back in here.

Hello there First Mate Jonathan, how lovely to see you again, all that swinging you did from the mast in The Ancient Mariner seems to have sharpened your wit, hahahaha, you all make a dazzling company here, I wish I had been able to join you, but have contented self with reading your posts.

You all do know that our Sarah, of this discussion as well, is a busy bee training for the Triathlon (sp) which consists of swimming a mile (that's 22 laps of an Olympic pool) running 6 miles and bicycling 24 miles all in one day, all in the aid of charity, which she has to train for after hours, she works full time as a judge: what a company you all are, how exhilerating.

ginny

. . . . and woefully behind in her reading!

May I ask a few questions/make a few observations about earlier parts of the book? For example:

Early on, Pasternak says this of Father Nikolai (Yura's defrocked-priest-uncle): "Soon he was to take his place among contemporary writers, university professors, and philosophers of the revolution, a man who shared their ideological concern but had nothing in common with them except their terminology."

I wonder if by pointing this out Pasternak is subtly - or even unconsciously - telling us of his own failings. The revolution, presumably, was for the benefit of the masses, and not the elites, and his own critique of it was the result of the class he occupied. Had he been a peasant/railroad worker rather than a contemporary writer, perhaps his views would have been different. It seems that this is always what happens with revolutions in countries with masses of poor people - the elites initially support the concepts intellectually, but quickly realize that they are precisely the people the revolution wants to take things from. Innocent, good people get swept up in the wake, but because these communist/socialist movements are concerned more with masses than individuals, these sacrifices are accepted. I think of the Latin American models of revolution - Cuba, Nicaragua - and each bears these same characteristic.

For example, when the seamstresses at Madame Guishar's factory strike, she takes it personally. They, on the other hand, see it as an issue of following the movement, rather than an issue of hurting one fair (?) business owner:

"What has happened?" asked Madama Guishar, hurrying in.

"They're calling us out, Madam, we're on strike."

"But . . . Have I ever wronged you?" Madame Guishar burst into tears.

"Don't be upset, Amalia Karlovna. We've got nothing against you. We're very grateful to you. It's not just you and us. Everybody's doing the same, the whole world. You can't go against everybody, can you? "

They all went away, even Olia Demina and Fetisova, who whispered to Madame Guishar in parting that she agreed to the strike for the good of the owner and the establishment. But Amalia Karlovna was inconsolable.

"What black ingratitude! To think that I was so mistaken in these people! The kindness I've lavished on that brat [Olia]. Well, admittedly she's only a child, but that old witch [Fetisova]."

"They can't make an exception just. for you, Mother, don't you see?" Lara said soothingly. "No one bears you any malice. On the contrary. All that's being done now is done in the name of humanity, in defense of the weak, for the good of women and children."

Madame Guishar ultimately tries to poison herself in response.

Therein lies the key battle in these socialist revolutions, I suppose - between the individual and the "collective."

I sensed another commentary by Pasternak about the often ridiculous factions that can develop among idealogues (on either end of the political spectrum) when "[s]oon after the manifesto of October 17th several revolutionary organizations called for a big demonstration." The demonstration leaders received a message from sympathizers that Cossacks were waiting to ambush the profession farther down the street. And here is the funny/ridiculous part: "An argument began about the best building to go to. Some suggested the Society of Commercial Employees, others the Technical School, and still others the School of Foreign Correspondence. While they were still arguing they reached the corner of a school building, which offered shelter every bit as good as those that had been mentioned."

I found this hilarious. What difference did it make in a situation of immediate danger who occupied the building - as long as it offered shelter? And yet, in the midst of chaos, people still argued about trivia such as this. Talk about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic!

On an entirely different subject, what do you make of Lara's dream while she's in the midst of the sexual relationship with Komarovsky. She is in agony about the humiliation to which he subjects her, and wonders "[d]oes one always humiliate those one loves?" Then we learn of her dream: "She was buried, and there was nothing left of her except her left shoulder and her right foot. A tuft of grass sprouted from her left breast and above the ground people were singing "Black eyes and white breast" and "Masha must not go to the river."

What is Pasternak trying to tell us here?

And finally, I somehow loved this description of the friendship between Anna Ivanova - wife of Alexander Alexandrovich, professor of chemistry, one of the Gromeko brothers with Tonia and Yura lived for a time - and her bosom friend Shura Shlesinger. "In times of sorry or anxiety the two friends lightened each other's burdens. They did this by saying unpleasant things to each other, their conversation becoming increasingly caustic until an emotional storm burst and soon ended in tears and a reconcilation. These periodic quarrels had a tranquilizing effet on both, like the application of leeches for high blood pressure."

Haha - do you know anyone like this? I certainly do.

Here are the results of some serious research, which might be helpful to the discussion of Doctor Zhivago, having to do with, or to determine, the overall theme of this sweeping novel. Neil Cornwell went looking for the views and opinions of those who are qualified to speak out on such things. He published his findings in Perspectives on "Doctor Zhivago". To my mind the variety of themes only adds more interest to Pasternak's book. I've taken the liberty of adding two, of which Cornwell might not have been aware. An additional estimation of the book, not mentioned here, speaks of the critical or appreciative 'role of the reader' as an ingredient in cetain literary styles. It seems to me, but I'm not certain, that the phrase 'role of the reader' has a technical meaning in literary criticism. But there can hardly be any doubt that it is the intention of some authors to challenge their friends and reviewers with a book which just crys out: make something of it. Here are the themes:

Stormy weather, and its attendent moods...(betty gregory)

A commentary on the conduct of revolutions, and their attendent absurdities...SarahT

The contrast between the two characters - Zhivago and Strelnikov/Antepov - is the central ideological theme of the novel...(Max Hayward)

Doctor Zhivago is not about the Revolution; it is about how and why poetry is written...(Helen Muchnic)

This bulky novel-chronicle is above all a poetic biography of one individual...(Victor Erlich)

'The instinct for life', would seem to be the governing theme, for...(Henry Gifford)

It is the predicament of man, and man's life on earth that is the central theme of Doctor Zhivago...(Henrik Birnbaum)

The significance of the history of Russia in the twentieth century is its central subject...(George Gibian)

The cardinal theme is the struggle of the individual consciousness for truth against tyranny...(Mikhail Kreps)

There is a fair consensus of critical opinion regarding death and resurrection as the principal theme of the novel...(D K Danow)

The hagiography of a poet...(A K Zholkovsky)

And finally from another source, from one who knew Pasternak personally and had interesting things to say about him...Nadezhda Mandelstam, in her book Hope against Hope (a very interesting memoir): 'As regards his novel, Doctor Zhivago, the idea must have come to him well before the war - every time we met him he told us he was writing a prose work "about us all." As one can see from the novel itself, the basic idea may have changed in the course of the years, but it was a time in which people were always frantically changing their minds, never sure who was right.'

And I just can't resist including this, recorded as part of a conversation Alexander Gladkov had with Pasternak: 'On that beautiful summer morning in the peaceful, familiar countryside near Moscow his forebodings of troubles and persecutions to come seemed to me the product of excessive imagination.'

I've lost my place again. Where are we in the book?

In the middle.

GREAT list, Jonathan!!!

Jonathan, your list is a treasure! I counted 10 (interlocking) themes, and it shows how complex this book is. I'd like to add the eleventh:"The earthly, historical, spiritual and mystical love for life."

Sarah, good luck with your triathlon, and how great to keep in touch with us at Dr. Zhivago's corner. Your idea how the key issue in socialist revolutions might be: the battle "between the individual and the collective." made lots of sense. I also liked your remark about how people sometimes act hilarious in situations of immediate danger by, in the midst of chaos, to argue about trivia: "Talk about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic!"

Betty, every time you write about storms, I'm right with you. I feel the strong northern (dike-destroying) wind raging along Holland's coast and I think of the 2 ½ year we spent traveling around in a Volkswagen camper, crossing parts of Europe for 8 months, and later Canada and the US, visiting 20 states of your beautiful country. I think of the remark of a Texan in Mathis, who owned the camping where we overwintered two years in a row. He had just shown us some pictures of damage done by a hurricane years ago. "Tail ends of hurricanes fill up empty lakes," he remarked and since the lake (Lake Corpus Christi) was very low that year, he added, somewhat cryptically I thought, "We need another hurricane." It seems as if the descriptions of the storms was to indicate that they unleash an enormous energy of powers and remind us of our own psyche, as if these events involve ‘creativity being born', reshaping the land and the lives of men.

Jonathan, you wrote about Lara's dream as a young girl when she was involved with Komarovsky: "She is in agony about the humiliation to which he subjects her, and wonders "[d]oes one always humiliate those one loves?" Then we learn of her dream: "She was buried, and there was nothing left of her except her left shoulder and her right foot. A tuft of grass sprouted from her left breast and above the ground people were singing "Black eyes and white breast" and "Masha must not go to the river". I forgot about the dream, and was puzzled over an observation of Yuri on page 361. "Lara's left shoulder was half open, like a key turning in the lock of a secret safe, the sword unlocked her shoulderblade, and, opening in the cavity of her soul, revealed the secrets she kept in it...." He thinks of that dream when the ‘cow healer' has just recited a poem that seemed to be aimed at Yuri, although she is not aware of him watching her. The effect of her words prompts Yuri to decide to flee the partisans. I wished someone knew how to explain dreams.

By now you must be tired reading this lengthy piece, but I'm stuck in the (air-conditioned) apartment as the temperature is 33C, 91 Fahrenheit. UGH. Ine

I have not read this book – just remember the crush I had on Julie Christie when the movie came out!!! I see that ine has remarked on Sarah’s “battle between the individual and the collective.” A major, major theme in Gao Xinjian’s Soul Mountain (the Prized Fiction selection for September).

Charlie

I am way behind in the reading of this book, but I'm finding it's a wonderful way to read because when I come to a place you all have discussed I pause where I might not have paused before and I think of all that was said. It's very enlightening. I hope someone will explain the dream of Lara's and the sword in her shoulder reaching to her soul, etc. before I get to it. ...........elizabeth

A miracle! My computer got fixed by a "nerdy" neighbor just as I was getting ready to put the tower in the car to take to a Gateway Store. Wonderful to have computer literate neighbors! And great to be back and see that you are all still here and posting. Thanks to all of you!

Sarah, I do hope you come in soon again although we know how busy you are and for such a good cause (the proceeds are to go to the Lymphoma Society) - much more important that you do that. We can carry on here - and we must be doing that soon, dear people!!! How far behind are we, I don't want to look at that heading! I will not let that interfere with all the great posts -

INE - I love long posts such as yours, but feel helpless in translating that dream into words. I read that part twice and whatever Pasternak meant by putting that into the book will forever remain a mystery, at least to me.

But that is what is so marvelous about this book - the mystery of it!

And, BETTY, thanks for posting, we all agree with your astute observations about the weather, the constant and beautiful descriptions of the weather. I have a little different "take" on it. Storms in the book often equate with either violence of the war surrounding them or a storm will preface some powerful and dark scene.

And, JONATHAN, thanks for contributing all those "themes" in the book, everyone a truth which just continues to astound us with Pasternak's brilliance - the very fact that there are so many layers in this book to uncover. Perhaps a 3rd or 4th reading would bring still more insight. I was struck by your reference to "resurrection" and rebirth - are they one and the same? No, I don't think so - but the rebirth (human) and the renewal(spring) are examples of how he intertwines the human spirit with the vegetation of life.

SENIORNAGLES! Stay with us all the way to the end of the book! Do you think we'll make it? Hahaha

We know that Yuri is capured by a cavalry unit to replace their doctor who was killed. Let's try to get through the next 2 chapters quickly, okay? THE HIGHWAY and THE FOREST BROTHERHOOD chapters.

I'll be back later and hope to be reading some of your great thoughts on those two chapters tonight!!!

From Hingley's biography of Pasternak:

/Doctor Zhivago's principal aim is to convey its creator's conception of all that is most positive and worthwhile in human existence. Natural beauty, the love of man and woman, family life, religion, the art of poetry - here are the major themes. They are powerfully developed in the course of the narrative, and are closely interwoven with each other....The nature descriptions have much in common with Pasternak's writing as it developed from his earliest days. There are more animated storms and suns, there are comparably vivid evocations of snow, spring floods, trees.....The novel has been acclaimed as one of the most beautifully orchestrated love duets in all of Russian fiction, and as containing one of the most profound descriptions of love in the whole range of modern literature.

Chapter 11 is very touching, very sad, - the description of the young boys' "enthusiasm and reckless courage" in responding to their duty in the army, Yuri's aiming his gun at the tree, the Ninety-first Psalm found in 2 young dead soldiers' pockets and Pamphil's hallucinations, his will-of'-the-wisp.

Veterans' stories, but not told by a veteran. Pasternak was never in the war.

What did you make of the chapter?

THE ROWAN TREE

A quick search on the Internet provided these two links about a Rowan Tree of Chapter Twelve. I'm sure you'll enjoy them, as I did, and I hope you are able to hear the music with the lyrics of the song!

http://www.angelfire.com/wi/rowanstreeoflife/tree.html


http://www.contemplator.com/folk4/rowan.html

Are you in this chapter yet? Does it seem to you that on comparison Yuri felt loving care and concern for Tonia and their children, but nothing like the PASSION he reserves for Lara! He is blindingly jealous of her - she's perfect, flawless, Mother Russia-incomparable, crazy, irresponsible, adored! And on and on! The depths of his passion are limitless!

INE
It's still a mystery to me - can anyone unlock it?

Ella, your quotes from chapter 11 on the sad description of the boys in the war.....reminds me what a wonderful job Pasternak does in presenting war not as impersonal countries losing or gaining land, but as one sad, wounded soldier at a time, with a history and family. What is truly remarkable is that the author pulls off using a propertied and elite Yurii as someone who has much to lose during this revolution....in other words, we are all at risk in war. And underneath our political or social stations, we are all human.

-------------------------------------------

Doctor Zhivago may have been the first prompt I had that love isn't neat and tidy. I think I saw the movie when I was a freshman in college and I was shocked that Yurii could love two women...and that I didn't think he was wrong. Fast forward to that wonderful line in the movie Moonstruck...."love breaks our hearts," and "ruins everything." So, Pasternak was so ahead of his time writing a love story of complexity and writing it convincingly. I can't think of a book/movie since that has more persuasively told of complicated love, can you?

but this is a crazy book; for the same reasons, perhaps, that it might be a swell book for someone else. Most likely, that you're shaking your heads and thinking: we're not discussing the book at that level. Such a simplistic evaluation. Bear with me. I'm new to Pasternak and I find Doctor Zhivago a very unique reading experience. But it's the unconventionality of Pasternak's narrative style. It's moving at times; but also exasperating at times.

It takes a real effort to recognize and appreciate the importance of symbols in the book. Right? So much depends on that. For example: Lara as Mother Russia. Imagine my surprise when a friend, trying to remember, suggested: wasn't Lara the vamp in the story? Back to square one.

And what does Pasternak have in mind, when he trys to pass Zhivago off as a doctor? Doctor Zhivago is no credit to the medical profession, despite his brilliant diagnosis of a liver ailment...once, long ago. He seems more like what one would expect a Russian Hamlet to be, but somehow different.

There's more than enough in the novel to excite the wildest speculative fancies, or to be taken in by the poet's fanciful, descriptive powers. On the other hand, there was Stalin, in 1934, enquiring about Pasternak's views on Mandelstam, the poet. But hanging up on him, when Pasternak expressed his willingness and eagerness to come to the Kremlin to continue the conversation. About what else, Stalin asked. Pasternak: about life and death.

Betty would find a timeline helpful. Isn't that asking too much of a poet who once, early in the Revolution, threw open the window of his study and shouted to the children playing in the street: what millenium is it out there? The timeline problem is described by Max Hayward as 'another striking aspect of the disruption of reality in a revolutionary epoch in the blurring, in retrospect, of chronological distinctions.' And I was putting it down to poetic lisence.

I love to ask, where are we in the book. 'In the middle'. I liked that, Betty. You meant it figuretively, didn't you? It fits the nature of the book. And the plight of this reader. By the same token, it seems very appropriate, in discussing this novel, to be reminded of an earlier incident; or hear of another's anticipation on being told of interesting events farther along. Interesting, what others find interesting.

'...this extraordinary book, so full of internal contradictions, so uneven and unneccessarily complex.' Alexander Gladkov

That kind of sums up for me Part 16 of Chapter 9, the four most sensational pages of fiction it has ever been my pleasure to read. Sensational in the best, all-encompassing, artistic and literary sense of the word. Is this the true picture of a man in love, or the work of an excessively creative, poetic imagination. I find Yurii a somewhat pathetic figure, with his anguish and torment. Obviously in moral extremity. What he wouldn't do to prove his love for Tonia, even to tearing 'apart with his own hands anyone who would hurt her pride'. At the same time he finds himself in the awkward situation of 'preferring' another woman. Enamoured, it seems to me, would be more accurate. Sufficiently, for him to be 'crushed by the weight of his guilty conscience'. Granted, that this sort of thing happens in the lives of human beings, it still comes off looking a little adolescent...the way Pasternak writes it up. And without ever really having good reasons why Yurii should feel such a 'love' attachment to either Tonia or Lara. It seems real enough; but a bit coincidental as well.

What really strikes me about Yurii's ride between Yuriatin and Varykino is the wild kaleidoscope of jangling sights and sounds and a thousand other things, in the text beginning with 'as the sun went down'. Picturesque beyond description.

'...the forest was filled with cold and darkness', but Yurii is 'sweating'. Mosquitoes 'humming sadly'. With sympathy? Yurii timing his slaps in one with 'the heavy thud of hoofs on the squelching mud'.

And what have we here? The crackling salvoes of the horses breaking wind, followed by a nightingale singing, which sets our desperate lover to singing: 'Awake, O my soul, why dost thou slumber?' After all, it is the eve of Easter Sunday!

A horse breaking wind proves to be the 'unexpectec circumstance' which results in Doctor Zhivago's being 'struck by a very simple thought', offering a way out of his anguish. In a trice, Tonia is forgotten. The way back to Lara takes no longer than it takes to flip the pages of a book past one's thumb.

With that things really start happening. A deafening shot, an echo of the salvo heard earlier, and the flying horse and rider are suddenly confronted by a school boy, a cavalier, and a fat man. 'Don't move, Comrade Doctor'.

All that action in four pages! And more, much more. Now, what's this about a Rowan Tree?

HI BETTY AND JONATHAN! Neither of you have any idea of how happy I am to look in this discussion and see that you are still here and posting! My heart just flutters (see how easy it is to make someone happy? haha), but I confess (and you may know this), that I do not ordinarily lead a discussion of fiction - particularly one of "classic" literature or whatever category this book falls into, and this has been a difficult book, not only to read, but to attempt to lead those who are more familiar with fiction and certainly more erudite in interpreting this book! I want to thank all of you who are being faithful and want to tell you that you are all - Ine, Marvelle, and others - that you have made this discussion a great experience for me, you are all SUPERLATIVE posters and I hope we meet again (but you will have to read nonfiction if we do - a plug here is in order. In September will be ICE BOUND and in November will be JOHN ADAMS, so join us.)

With one confession down in print, I'll make another! It is quite an affront to an author of the stature of Pasternak to fault the writing, and, in particular, from such as myself who has had very little experience in critiquing great literature. (I'm of the type who reads thrillers when I'm alone and relaxing) But I will dare to do anyway.

Several scenes have not rung true for me, particularly, the last one being the "sad descriptions of the boys in the war." Too much coincidence that two dead boys would have the same psalm in their pockets - that seemed contrived to me. Perhaps I'm letting the thought that Pasternak is not speaking from experience here influence me, I don't know, but all the same I know when my emotions are being tugged at and they weren't there!

Although I agree, BETTY, that "Pasternak was so ahead of his time writing a love story of complexity and writing it convincingly." On that, I can agree, but, golly, you should read a biography of Pasternak whose two loves in reality had very different endings!

INE, somehow the whole of my last post was lost and you may be wondering what I was talking about. In the ROWAN TREE chapter, (my page 367) a witch is telling a long story (can anyone make sense of this?) and once again we encounter the strange business of the shoulder of a woman being opened and here a measure of corn or a squirrel or a honeycomb spilled out! Whew!!!! We need Barbara here to make some sense of that. But two paragraphs down Yuri is remembering his dream which I believe had you puzzled - AND ME!

JONATHAN, asks this question of all of us:

And what does Pasternak have in mind, when he trys to pass Zhivago off as a doctor? Doctor Zhivago is no credit to the medical profession, despite his brilliant diagnosis of a liver ailment...once, long ago. He seems more like what one would expect a Russian Hamlet to be, but somehow different.

Exactly! But Yuri is both a doctor and a poet! Only we see more of the poetry than we do of the doctoring don't we, and that possibly could be because Pasternak was a poet - and, certainly, Yuri is more of an observer of events than a participant. Only as a poet do we see Yuri in action!

And what a remarkable statement, Jonathan - "Is this the true picture of a man in love, or the work of an excessively creative, poetic imagination. I find Yurii a somewhat pathetic figure, with his anguish and torment."

Pathetic figure - yes, ME, TOO! If I were writing such a book would I make my hero such a man? But then I'm not a poet or Pasternak.

LITERALLY, JONATHAN, AND OTHERS, WE ARE ON OR BEYOND CHAPTER 12.

To those who think Zhivago comes across as too weak....Pasternak intends this, presents him as feeling powerless. In Chapter 6, Sections 2,4 and 5, a theme of powerlessness: "The rest isn't in our hands." (This repeated thought of Yurii relates to how little control we have over life...and after that, it is out of our hands.) Section 4 quote, just as Yurii arrives in Moscow from the front, "....he did not know where to escape from his forebodings of disaster and his feeling that despite his striving for the good and his capacity for happiness, he had no power over the future."

A more complete picture of how ungrounded or ineffective he felt, along with how he viewed being a doctor, is in Section 5 of Chapter 6:

(Just returned to Moscow the first time.) "All around, people continued to deceive themselves, to talk endlessly. Everyday life struggled on, by force of habit, limping and shuffling. But the doctor saw life as it was. It was clear to him that it was under sentence. He looked upon himself and his milieu as doomed. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. Their days were counted and running out before his eyes.

"He would have gone insane had he not been kept busy by the details of daily life. His wife, his child, the necessity to earn money, the humble daily ritual of his practice---these were his salvation.

"He realized that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future.......and as though for the last time, as if in farewell, he avidly looked at the trees and clouds and the people walking in the streets, the great Russian city struggling through misfortune---and was ready to sacrifice himself for the general good, and could do nothing."

(Same page,regarding the hospital staff.) "The staff had already divided up into camps. To the moderates, whose obtuseness made the doctor indignant, he seemed dangerous; to those whose politics were advanced, not Red enough. Thus he belonged to neither group, having moved away from the former and lagging behind the latter."

In Chapter 14, Tonia also speaks to this view of Yurii...from her letter that was left for Yurii: "....your great gifts and intelligence which, as it were, have taken the place of the will that is lacking."

Now that I've actually copied all this, it strikes me that his indecisiveness or powerlessness is reflected in his behavior with Tonia and Lara. Hmmm. I had been thinking more of his strength of feeling for them both, not of his inability to choose. However, maybe these two views are not in conflict.

Back to my former comment about Pasternak's being "ahead of his time" in writing of complex love....oh, surely not. And ridiculous. Pardon me, Shakespeare, et al. The timely impact on my understanding was in my heart. Given the 1918 setting, one of my favorite times in Russian history, the dramatic impact of the movie, Pasternak's beautiful prose, the "breaks our hearts, ruins everything" love story remains the most meaningful...to me.

betty

In chapter 9's battle scene, Yuri is caught in the field, watching the behavior of the young men whose response to duty, as they understood it, filled them with an ecstatic bravery, ‘unnecessary, provocative and defiant', walking upright, neither running nor throwing themselves on the ground, although the terrain was irregular enough to give them cover. The bullets of the partisans mowed them down....The dead tree could have given them shelter and a surer aim, but even if they glanced at it ‘fighting the temptation to stop behind it for shelter and a surer aim', they cast the thought aside and walked on. In other words, they were in a moment of euphoria or rapture. They purposely forgot about the insight of the saying: WAR TEACHES PRACTICAL WISDOM - the urge for self-preservation, the innate desire to stay alive.

Yuri cannot restrain his feelings any longer when Siberius starts another dialogue: (P288)... ‘Reshaping life!' he answers ‘People who can say THAT have never understood a thing about life - they have never felt its breath, its heart - however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material which needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be moulded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my inept theories about it.....'

Guy de Mallat, in ‘Boris Pasternak' writes about this passage: ‘Pasternak calls life an autonomous and original force, irreducible to categories, be they political, industrial, or economic. The phenomenon of life is both solemn and intoxicating;... a gift. It is a flow that cannot longer be countered, a flow impossible to contain, an upsurge that sooner or later breaks and swallows up the petty barriers erected against it....'

Love has many facets. I once read a reference to THE JEWELED NET OF INDRA, the metaphor for Oneness for the Buddhists:

'... At each intersection of this infinite net lies a shining jewel. Each jewel contains reflections of all the other jewels, and each of these reflections contains an infinite number of reflections, so that every point in reality reflects every other point. This Buddhist image anticipates the holographic mode ... that suggests how each part of the universe may communicate with every other part by the resonance of patterns....'

Perhaps we find the answer to our question: ‘How could Yuri love two women?' in these above observations. What would happen if we borrowed the saying ‘War teaches practical wisdom (the need for self-preservation, or the innate desire to stay alive) , for the saying:. LOVE (life) teaches practical wisdom (our traditional kind of‘love and marriage)? These two points reflect in two others, the rapture and ecstacy of this gift of life, the principle of self-renewal and transfiguration. For example Yuri's love for Lara, and Vincent van Gogh's love for the prostitue Sien.

That was h a r d w o r k..... Ella, you say you're not used to leading a discussion of fiction, and I say: it never showed. You're a marvelous leader with loads of info. Thanks!

PS Oh yes, Ella, I agree with you, I also gave up puzzling about the cow healer and the dreams. Yuri, whose feelings for the supernatural were developed, as he felt forebodings strongly, probably wanted to convey some of these transcendental values in those scenes, and dreams, but I wished his editor had convinced him to leave that part out.

One can't help wishing that Lady Carolina Nairne had written chapter 12. Written in the mood of her lyrics to the Rowan Tree, the chapter would have been a pleasure to read, and not this witches' brew of horrors and hallucinations among the Whites and Reds. But then the setting is a strife-torn Russia, when even 'in the winter sky above the glade, the black and white clouds, hemmed in by the treetops, reared and piled and toppled as chaotically as the cows', and not the pleasant English or Scottish countryside.

Thanks for the link, Ella. The melody alone is enough to make one forget for a moment, the madness and mayhem of civil war, and the marvellous, incomprehensible revelations of his inner self, as experienced by Yurii.

What more could he expect, lurking in the presence of his 'rival', the witch Kabarikha, listening to her songs and her spells, watching 'her from the back of the crowd, where she could not see him'. Mesmerized. And the reader, too, gets caught up in the magical shenanigans and dark sayings of this weird sister, leaving him baffled and distraught, unable to think of anything intelligent enough to post to the discussion.

'...a period of disturbances - anxieties, uncertainties, confused, threatening situations, and a number of weird incidents'. Pasternak is certainly a master of understatement; just as he is superlative with his irony, when he adds: 'All this was counter to the intentions of the partisan command, working havoc with the plan made by Liberius'.

Some excellent books are badly written. I suspect this is one of them...said from a general reader's point of view. But there are also those among the literary cognoscenti who have described Doctor Zhivago as a 'flawed masterpiece', an 'unsuccessful masterpiece'. The weak and often unsatisfactory dialogue, for example, which Betty mentioned, comes to mind. A masterpiece, nevertheless.

Thanks Ella, and Sarah, for leading the discussion of this unusual book. How difficult it is to post something, without the feeling that one is doing it off the top of one's head. (I'm speaking for myself) And thinking of leading, I'm reminded of that postal exchange between parent and child. The longing mother: why don't you write? Child: I don't know what to write. Mother: Well write and tell me so...

So my advice to others: write, even when you have nothing to say. haha. It may jog someone else into saying something profound. Even something ridiculous, or not apropos. Pasternak is doing it all the time.

Needless to say, all this was written and posted before I had read the great posts from Betty and Ine. Since then I've changed my mind about some things.

And the reader, too, gets caught up in the magical shenanigans and dark sayings of this weird sister, leaving him baffled and distraught, unable to think of anything intelligent enough to post to the discussion.

Hahaha! Jonathan, I love your sense of humor and the chance to smile - gosh, how we need that in this book!

I emailed our resident expert, Barbara, about the witch's story as it seems important to the book - after all, Yuri dreamed it in one chapter and here again we see the witch embellishing it and I just had to know something about this tale. Barbara's too busy with her real estate business at the moment to drop in, but here's what she said:

I would say the part that needs to be translated is the Corn, Honey, and marten fur. The other part sounds to me like the casket is a container, therefore the women is a container for either corn , honey or marten fur - hmmm corn is food, honey is sweetness and marten fur is warmth and therefore the man must be like a knight to open the woman's natural characteristics - why the shoulder blade I do not know but woman was supposed to be made from a man's rib which is a bone.

Ok according to my book on symbols - a forced growing of grain in the spring are used in funeral cults and mourning rites in the Eastern Christian Holy Week ceremonies, whereas usually corn is a fertility symbol. Corn and wine is similar to to bread and wine.

Honey is rebirth, virility, fertility and vigour with an aphrodisiac Quality. The earthly ministry of Christ, the sweetnes of the divine worked a food for the gods. Nothing about either fur or martens fur nor anything about the shoulder.

Aha! The knight represents the journey of the soul through the world, with its temptations, obstacles, trails, and testing proving character and the development towards perfection. An initiate".

She also said "There is a whole cargo of myths and tales that are part of the Russian heritage that we in the West are not familiar with. As I understand it, the Russian language did not support the writing of a novel till about 1830 and all literature prior to that time were epics based in myth and the stories of the Russian history. Most of the authors of Russian novels received their education in Europe and therefore combine the Western form of a novel with their historical background."

Isn't that great! That interpretation of Yuri's dream and the witch's tale makes sense to me - how about you? I like the fact that "woman" is a container for food, warmth and sweetness, okay, I'll go for that. Much better than this: "And many other things there are, such as stones raining from heaven, so that a man may go forth out of his house and the stones rain upon him."

The poor men, being stoned from heaven!!!! Beware! Hahaha

I have a question for all of you - shall we continue on as we have been doing - by chapter - or shall we just comment on the book as a whole? Has everyone finished it? I'm very willing to continue by chapters as I love reading your comments! I'll leave it all up to you!

I would prefer to leave the discussion unstructured. I think the author would have liked it that way. With everyone passing along their ideas on whatever catches their fancy in the book.

Speaking of humor...has anyone found even a trace of it in the book, in Pasternak's style...anything at all, to serve as comic relief? It seems to me that I have read somewhere that Pasternak was accused of having written a parody of Bolshevik communism. Isn't humor a part of parody?

Barbara's help with interpretating the witch's tale and the dream is very suggestive. We can sure use all the help we can get on that one. Thanks.

We'll be bicycling this weekend, trying (little) parts of the Canada Trail, very sedate and senior-like, but fun. See you on Monday! Have a good weekend, ine

ine - as a Canadian, naturally, I'm curious, when you say that you'll be cycling on the Canada Trail. I'm not sure, now, why I was under the impression that you are posting from the Netherlands. Is the Trail part of the Holland/Canada friendship bond which came out of WWII? Do you cycle the Trail sedately by choice, or are you held back by rules? Just checked your email address. The Trail must be in Canada!

We're all envious of the fun you will be having.

Ella's e-mail peaked my curiosity - so here I am with a quickie - the stones falling from heaven although sounding just awful are symbolically not bad at all - according to my trusty copy of An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C.Cooper Stones represent stability, durability, reliability imperishability; the eternal, the indestructibility of the Supreme Reality. Stones, rocks mountains, trees or groves represent the cosmos in its entirety.

Spherical stones depict the moon, the feminine principle and all lunar goddesses.

The stone axe is an aniconic representation of divinity, or supernatural power. The Lapis exilis is the stone whose power restores the life of the phoenix and is sometimes called the Grail and can confer perpetual youth on those who serve it. Thunder stones or hail represents the power of thunder and lightening that cleaves and breaks. And of course we have the hidden stone as the prima materia or Philosophers' Stone, the supreme quest, the reconciliation of all opposites, the attainment of unity, regaining the center, the mental and moral wholeness of man, the liberated unified self.

Betylic stones denote a place of indwelling divinity, the dwelling place of the sun spirit, the meeting place of heaven and earth, the sacred holy ground - they are also prophetic stones that speak, the oracle such as Delphi.

The stones that have fallen from heaven can either be the dwelling place of the divinity or its aniconic representation. All nomadic and hunting tribes stones are "bones of Mother Earth." In Christianity stones are the foundation, indestructibile and symbols of Sts. Peter, Allphege and Stephen. There is the "hard stone of truth" - Hermes is a god of stones and the baetylic stone of Jacob was a meeting place of heaven and earth and of communication between them.

Quite a bit more about stones but that is a good start.

Heaven and earth represent spirit and matter, the father and mother - the heavens are sometimes depicted as a dome, usually blue stone sometimes black. And Rain is devine blessing, revelation, the decent of heavenly influence, beatitude, purification - All sky gods purify with rain.

Puts a different picture on the attempted stoning of Mary Magdeline doesn't it especially if you read the Bible with a symbolic interpretation.

A woman with a bandaged eye or eyes or veiled denotes the Jewish Symagogue. All woman are representative of the Great Mother the feminine priciple the lunar, receptive, protective, nourishing. Lots more about women.

That was revealing, Barbara, about symbols and dreams, and about your symbolical interpretation about stones, them falling from heaven. I suddenly remembered that, long ago, I jotted something down about stones - At the time I didn't give the source, but I think it was the beginning of a children's story:

'Once upon a time', the old woman started her story, 'at the beginning of our earth, the planet was one boiling sea of melted rock. That's why we cherish rock so much, life originates from it. Not only the continents and the mountains, but the trees, the oceans - and our bodies. All people who came before us, our forefathers are in the rocks. If you begin to think of all who have helped you in this life, you start with the stones, because without them we would not have been here....' Neat, he?

I also tried to find meaning in what Kubarikha, the gypsy was saying: She offered a whole set of instructions on witchcraft to Agatha, and Yury listened spellbound. Among other things she said: ... I can cut away the footprint of any man ... and that man - whoever he be, ... will follow you step by step wherever you go. And: ... You see, Agatha, my dear, you have to know everything - (359)

She points to two twigs that the wind has tangled together. She calls it a garland that the water spirit started weaving for her daughter. When people came along, the spirit left it half done, but ....she'll finish it one of these nights, you'll see...and then...'

Then there was the old Russian folk song Kubarikha was half singing, half speaking, when everyone had left, and Yuri listening from a hiding place. The last four lines are:

I, a soldier, languish in captivity,/Homesick, I-poor soldier, kept in foreign parts./I'll escape out of my bitter durance,/I will go to MY RED BERRY, my fair love....

It was surprising that Yuri, having tried to flee three times, and still thinking of it once in a while, succeeded after he'd heard the gypsy's intonation These people have a six sense, and even if Yuri thought she didn't see him, she must have been aware of his presence.

Then when he decides to escape he tells the guards that he wants to pick some ICED BERRIES from the rowan tree. (368)The guard lets him go and ‘... the rowan tree holds out two white branches WELCOMINGLY. Yuri mutters senselessly: ‘I'll find you, my beauty, my love, my rowan tree, my own flesh and blood....

(Talking about the translation: what about the word 'welcomingly', does it strike anyone as odd too?).

Jonathan - Yes, you're so right - there is not much humor in the book, but perhaps since we're alerted to it we'll find some, although why have to search for humor? What a surprise to read that you are also a Canadian! Where do you live? We live in Guelph, and bicycled the Trans Canada-trail from Fergus, circled part of Lake Bellwood, and arrived in Bellwood. The nice part of these railroad tracks-turned- bicylepaths is the flatness! ine

Thanks you very much, BARBARA, for taking time from your busy life to help us out here! This is not my thing - symbolism - as I've said before, but that's not too say I don't enjoy it.

STONES!!!

Who would have known all of that? "Spherical stones, the stone ax, thunder stones, the Philosopher's Stone, etc."

And the story INE told, repeated in part here:

That's why we cherish rock so much, life originates from it. Not only the continents and the mountains, but the trees, the oceans - and our bodies. All people who came before us, our forefathers are in the rocks. If you begin to think of all who have helped you in this life, you start with the stones, because without them we would not have been here..

reminds me of our native Indian culture. Didn't they worship the stones, the oceans, the trees, as they believed those objects embody the souls of theirs ancestors?

In my book, INE, that quote regarding the rowan tree holding out two branches, here is how my book reads - "It was half in snow, half in frozen leaves and berries, and it held out two white branches toward him." It does not say "WELCOMINGLY" - which sounds very odd to me, also.

Immediately after the witch's tale we read the narrator of the story who has this to say:

"Yuri……was sufficiently well read to suspect that Kubarikha's last words repeated the opening passage of an ancient chronicle, either of Novgorod or Epatievo, but so distorted by copyists and the sorcerers and bards who had transmitted them orally for centuries that its original meaning had been lost."

Anyone heard of those two chroniclers? Perhaps they are the legends that Barbara was talking about, too ancient to have been written down.

This was brought up once before but I don't believe anyone has dwelt upon to any extent (I think I wondered about it), but I would like your comments. Does the love Yuri has for Lara differ in any aspects from the love he has for Tonia, his wife? Can a man love two women?

Perhaps my question should be stated a bit differently? Why do you think Pasternak made his hero, Yuri, such a weak fellow if this is an autobiography? Is this how Pasternak saw himself? INE, does your biography say anything about this?

JONATHAN commented earlier about Yuri being such a weak man and Betty had this to say: "it strikes me that his indecisiveness or powerlessness is reflected in his behavior with Tonia and Lara."

And Yuri says "....why should Lara be expected to prefer his weakness and the dark, obscure, unrealistic language of his love?"

Yes, indeed why? There were strong men in her life, Pasha, Samdeviatov, Kamarovsky, and even the latter fellow, although he was a terrible fellow in many ways to have "taken advantage of a minor" - (which I know is an old fashioned way of expressing rape, but it wasn't exactly rape either, was it?) Lara thinks perhaps there is something in her loathing of the man that keeps her in subjection to him, strange - strange - strange.

I'm not sure if I'm getting my questions across, or just babbling, but as Jonathan said once before SAY SOMETHING, ANYTHING!!!

This book is so bewildering, that even 'something' or 'anything' plain and simple is hard to find.

Maybe it's all the symbols, which I find a bit much at times, that end up making me smile at Pasternak's exertions to find meaning and significance in a world of revolution...or is it the evolution of his artistic, creative self.

We can see how complicated it is with the help of Barbara's post on the symbols to be found in stone. Something as solid and real as stones, when they are made to fall from heaven...and thus destruction...what a cataclysmic reversal it must seem to one familiar with the Psalms, and more used to saying 'The Lord lives, blessed is my rock' (Ps18:46). It makes it even stranger, ine, with your story about stones giving birth to us all.

And strangest of all is the mind of Doctor Zhivago, who seems unusually sensitive with his ability to find or imagine interpretive symbolization in every thing he sees or thinks. A strange example of this comes up when Yurii observes the school-boy with the bloodied head, and the cap which refuses to stay in place. Ramming it back on constantly, served only to disturb the bandage and the wound. 'In this absurdity', says the author, 'so contrary to common sense, the doctor saw a profound symbol'. And he does make good use of it.

I find some humor in Zhivago's way of making too much of something. At the beginning of chapter 9, Yurii begins to keep a notebook. He and his family have arrived in Varykino with next to nothing, and now have to fend for themselves, like true pioneers. 'What happiness, to work from dawn to dusk for your family and for yourself, to build a roof over their heads, to till the soil to feed them, to create your own world...'. All well and good when he compares himself to Robinson Crusoe. But his endeavour takes on a greater proportion. What he is doing is an 'imitation of the Creator of the universe'! No, it's even more than that. He's doing, he tells himself 'as your own mother did, to give birth to yourself, time and again'. I find the irony humorous when he follows all this with the statement: 'The town recluse whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco doesn't know the strongest drug of all - good health and real necesity'. Can't you just see Pasternak musing and sweating at his desk?

And humorous, too, if you'll forgive me, is the strange use Pasternak makes of Doctor Zhivago's need of a haircut and a shave. Talk about getting the latest news from your barber or chauffeur. Pasternak has much to relate in chapter 13. Much of it is extremely interesting and well written. But I find the barber-shop episode an amusing example of Pasternak's amateurish solutions to his lack of the skills of a good novelist. He's trying so hard, and it shows.

What in the world does he have in mind when he infests Lara's rooms with rats? Even making one the custodian of the key. That's such obvious symbolism. Of a macabre kind, but what?

ine - we're neighbors! I'm just down the road from you, in the west end of Toronto. That's beautiful rolling country around Guelph. Guelph is such a fine old town. Meet you at Tim Horton's for a coffee sometime, at the corner of Hwy 6, and...I'll have to check my map...Only kidding, of course. May your Muse continue to inspire you.

Hi Jonathan!

And you managed to find humor in this book! You're a wonder.

Do either of you know Pat Scott who lives in Guelph and is a host on Seniornet? I've met Pat several times at Bookfests and at the Toledo Trotters - see Geographic Communities on Seniornet and then go to Ohio. I'll make a clickable later if need be, but a few of us around Ohio and MI (and Canada) have met at the intersection of Rt. 20 and 23 in Perrysburg, OH (south of Toledo a bit). We would love for you two and your friends to join us. This June we didn't make it for all kinds of reasons, but will try again.

As we are nearing the end of Pasternak's "musings and sweatings" shall we once again approach the question of whether, in our opinion, this book deserves the Nobel Prize? Were they influenced by the hardships of the Soviet Union at the time and this personal story of the revolution coming out of the Iron Curtain? What other Nobel Prize winners have you read?

after I have finished the post. We discussed a recent Nobel Prize winning book not too long ago - here is a clickable to it:

"Book Club Online: Blindness ~by Jose Saramago~ Prized Fiction" 12/7/00 7:25pm

That book takes the prize for the weirdest book I have ever read! Did any of you read it?

Also, here is a list of Nobel Prize winners in Literature and you can read the short description of why the book won (1958) I do agree with the lyrical poetry - we all quoted from lovely sections of the book that impressed us with their beauty.

http://www.almaz.com/nobel/literature/literature.html

Yuri had been living with his uncle and aunt since he was 10 years old, so Tonya and he grew up together, and felt very comfortable with each other.. It's at her deathbed that Anna, Tonya's mother, tells them: "If I die, stay together. You're meant for each other. Get married. There now, I've betrothed you". Dramatic stuff for two such young people, and so they did. Yuri's love for Lara was one of these 'across a crowded room' moments, and although at first they were reluctant, in the end the pull was too strong for them. As Yuri said a few times in the book: "The rest isn't in our hands." So, is it a matter of ‘comfortable' and ‘passionate' love? (But I'm sure it's more complex than that).

Was Yuri a coward? Guy de Mallat, the biographer of the library book I have, has spent 20 years on researching and interviewing and his book has a wealth of information. He writes in his introduction: "... I have become increasingly aware that, while Pasternak was a being of flesh and blood - and to that extent alive, credible, and close to our all-too-human passions and weaknesses - the internal spiritual harmony he achieved was less than Goethean, or even less than Tolstoyan. I have not been overly pious, nor have I considered excluding or downplaying facts that may well jostle the undiscriminating admirer of Pasternak. This the reader will discover that Pasternak was intensely aware OF HIS OWN STRANGE LACK OF WILLPOWER. His impressionability was a necessary prerequisite for his aesthetic perception and his elaboration of art forms, and what he himself viewed as his excessive sensitivity and attachment to "places ... trees ... people" at times "took the place of work" and ‘of any other sustained endeavor.' In another part of the book he describes Yuri's life in Marburg Germany, where he studied philosophy for a few years. It's mentioned briefly that he was attracted to the 'dark, and obscure life' of the inner city. I can't find the passage any more, so if I find it I'll give you his own words.

Ella, is your copy of Doctor Zhivago also a soft-cover one? I'm intrigued with this strange word, the only word what's different in the passage of the ‘iced berries' "....and it held out two white branches TOWARD HIM", and mine says WELCOMINGLY. There have been other instances where I found surprising words. Do we have the same translators (mine are Max Hayward and Manya Harari).

Jonathan, I agree, Yuri seemed to be quite an irrational type, and a mystical dreamer. Mallat mentions that Pasternak himself , in a letter to a friend, wrote that he admitted his weak willpower, and wrote that there must be "a great deal of the feminine, of the passive" in his character - alongside an active and industrious attitude." I missed the part where Yuri infested Lara's rooms with rats. Only found the section where he plugged holes to keep the rats out. Imagine being almost neighbours!

All of us Canadian SeniorNet friends should try to join Ella and friends in Ohio when they meet! ine

Sarah, I was so sorry to hear about the death of your Aunt Mary. She was the one you had mentioned was so ill, I know. A friend of mine, my little brother's best friend, died this past weekend, so I've been thinking a lot about my brother's sadness in losing someone so close. My thoughts are with you. Take care of yourself and let us know how you are. Love, Betty

Sarah, I add my condolences to you for the loss of your aunt Mary. I've only known you a few months, but those months mean a lot on SeniorNet where friendships are formed amazingly fast. I hope to hear from you how you are doing, and also how the triathelon is developing. Take care, ine

Ine, my copy of the book is a hardcover and translated by the same two people, published in the English translation by Wm.Collins Sons & Co.Ltd., London, 1958, and it is remarkable that these two sentences are different isn't it?

Last evening I finished Chapter 13 and the sad letter from Tonia in which she says "your great gifts and intelligence which, as it were, have taken the place of the will that is lacking."

In the heartbreaking letter she also comments on Lara whom she got to know fairly well and who helped her with the birth of her child (the child that Yuri almost forgot he had somewhere, I can't remember where I read that). In speaking of Lara she states she is my exact opposite. I was born to make life simple and to look for sensible solutions; she, to complicate it and create confusion.

There is the difference between the two women, indeed! And while reading that, I couldn't help but wonder which kind of woman am I - I am certainly not one to create confusion, I hate confusion in life, don't you, although it comes without our bidding at times.

Did you wonder while reading why Yuri did not take the opportunity presented by Kamarosky to join his deported family in Paris? Was it because of his distrust of the man or the possibility of leaving Lara caused him too great anxiety and despair?

Their return to Varykino in Chapter 14 is a respite from the revolution; Yuri is taken with a desire to write and his poem "Winter Night" is mentioned as one of the poems he put to paper by candlelight. Here are a few stanzas of the poem:

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over,
Snow swept the world from end to end.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

As during summer midges swarm
To beat their wings against a flame,
Out in the yard the snowflakes swarmed
To beat against the windowpane.

The blizzard sculptured on the glass
Designs of arrows and of whorls.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

Two tiny shoes fell to the floor
And thudded
A candle on a nightstand shed wax tears
Upon a dress

It snowed hard throughout the month
Of February, and almost constantly
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

And while writing his poetry in the evenings he hears the wolves -The wolves he had been remembering all day were no longer wolves on the snowy plain under the moon, they had become a theme, they had come to symbolize a hostil force bent upon destroying him and Lara and on driving them from Varykino.

It is either the weather or nature in some form that causes the darkness in his soul, as it was in Pasternak also.

I'll finish this chapter today and start on the conclusion. Where are you?

'And it (the rowan tree) held out two white arms toward him'. I too am missing the word 'welcomingly' in my edition of Doctor Zhivago. Pantheon, 1958, the Hayward/Harari translation. The quoted line is followed by five more lines describing Yurii's compulsive, physical reaction, and ending with his passionate words: 'I'll find you, my beauty, my love, my rowan tree, my own flesh and blood'.

And yet, on the previous page, Yurii is also overwhelmed by equally strong feelings for his other love, this time for Tonia. 'Memories of his dear ones filled his mind and crowded out all else'...followed by a paragraph of frightening images of Tonia sinking into, and struggling through a blizzard of snow.

Ine, I liked your ideas about the question of two simultaneous loves, one 'comfortable' and the other 'passionate', the latter being of the 'across a crowded room' variety. That phrase in a beautiful way, no doubt, brings back romantic memories for everyone.

Can a man (Yuri) love two women at the same time? Pasternak would have it so; but not without a great deal of torment and inner conflict. When he allows Yuri an experience of love with one, it is followed or preceded, at no great distance, usually, in pages, by thoughts about the other.

Conversely, can a woman (Lara), without being conflicted, love, or more interestingly, it seems to me, and this is really 'complex', for sure, enjoy simultaneously, in an equally profound way, the experience of being loved by two men?

Pasternak, we should remember, discovered his new love in Olga Ivinskaia when he was fifty-six, and just really beginning to write his famous novel, which, as one biographer, Lazar Fleishman, says, 'placed him in an excruciatingly moral dilemma'. Yes, one can, it seems, love two; but it's 'more complex', as you say, than 'comfortable' and 'passionate' separately. Have I got that right?

Ella, you wonder about the 'difference between the two women' and quote the categorical statement of Tonia's from her letter: 'I was born to make life simple...she, to complicate it and create confusion'. She's wrong. Lara is the inspiration for the men in her life. Her husband leaves her to go out and change the world. Then he'll return. Yuri, even more passionately, will create a monument, 'a work that will endure and be worthy of you. I'll write your memory into an image of aching tenderness and sorrow...I'll trace your features on paper as the sea, after a frightful storm has churned it up, traces the form of the greatest, farthest-reaching wave on the sand. Seaweed, shells, cork, pebbles, the lightest, most imponderable things that it could lift from its bed, are cast up in a broken, sinuous line on the sand. This line endlessly stretching into the distance is the frontier of the highest tide. That was how life's storm cast you up on my shore, O my pride, that is how I'll portray you'.

And Yuri (Pasternak) has the resources. How can one help but be astonished by them? Zhivago thinks about his writer's atelier, in moments of inspiration, as 'a banqueting room of the spirit, a cupboard of mad dreams, a storeroom of revelations'. (chapter 15:10) A writer's life doesn't get any better than that, the confusion notwithstanding!

Ella, your hating confusion is laudable. I'm with you, when you say 'don't we all hate confusion'? I'll suggest that every woman is, or would like to be simple and sensible in managing her affairs. But every woman is some man's femme fatale, with consequences that not infrequently make for complications and confusions? The trouble lays with Yuri, not with Lara. Tonia is heartbroken and jealous. She's known it all along. Remember the first letter, which Yuri received from her at the war-front?

And Yuri is jealous of Komarovsky. For that reason alone, I think, he would not accept any offer from him. And of course he wronged Lara long ago. Yuri dislikes Komarovsky for that. Wasn't that part of Lara's fate, just for being Lara? Komarovsky was no less bewitched by Lara, uswillingly, on Lara's part, than Yuri was. But I think, Ella, you have said the same thing in a different way, in an earlier post.

I'm beginnig to think I'll read this book a second time, to get it right...

Thanks loads, Jonathan, for that post. I've read the book twice and haven't got it right yet, but it is better the second time around. This is a book that lends itself to rereading as many times as you can possibly find the time to do. More comes through - the poetry, the lovely descriptions, the loneliness of Yuri, even when he is with one or two of his loves.

Off to the dentist, but I'll answer your post and make a few observations when I return.

Jonathan, you said, "Lara is the inspiration for the men in her life" and, also, "The trouble lays with Yuri, not with Lara." I have a different picture of Lara than you do, and interestingly, it may be a "male/female" thing, I don't know. But the very fact that there are three men in Lara's life, all loving her, desperate to do anything to please her, never forgetting her no matter what has transpired in their lives - married men, ambitious men, sensitive men, makes me wonder how Lara has attracted them and what she does in return? Sexual favors, perhaps? She undoubtedly is a dazzling and bewitching beauty, but beyond that she doesn't try to send them away does she? She uses them. Kamarosky comes to rescue her, Samdeviatov illegally supplies her with provisions, and Yuri, well, Yuri, one pities him. I do. Note that Yuri even suspects Lara's behavior with men as he says something about Lara's "rashness as a woman." I'm not sure where that is but I do remember it.

Ine, what is your opinion of Lara?

Ella, first of all: my paperback of Dr Zhivago was also published in the English translation by Wm.Collins Sons & Co.Ltd., London, 1958, but first issued in Fontana Books, 1961. Since that year there were 19 ‘impressions', is that the word? I have the 19th impression March 1968.

Ella, I liked your clickables about the Noble Prize winners, and you asked about ‘Blindness' by Jose Saramago. I wished I'd been there to join in the discussion of that book. Yes, it was a frightening allegory, and reminded me somewhat of ‘1984' by Orwell Did you ever read his little book ‘The Tale of the Unknown Island'? It's like a fairytale; and very original and tender.

You asked if Pasternak deserved the Noble Prize. He certainly was an exceptional writer, but it might have been (partly) a political move, because he wrote a personal story of the revolution in Russia. (Just an observation about the ‘movie versus the book': The farther we advanced the less I thought of the two wonderful stars Omar Sharif and Julie Christie really BEING the characters in the book. Those characters took on their own life, a ‘deeper version' than the movie perhaps?)

Ella and Jonathan, I liked your last postings enormously and especially Jonathan's observations about Yuri and his love for two women, as you wrote: '...but not without a great deal of torment and inner conflict....' However, like Ella I have a different picture of Lara than you, is it the "male-female" thing? In my younger days, and in a ‘comfortable' marriage with young children, I would have condemned Lara, and perhaps would have fought for my marriage like a mother who defends her small children with unsurpassed fervor. But today, ‘wizened like firewood' (I read that expression somewhere) I've learned to be more tolerant, and not to judge so quickly, to stretch ‘morally'. Some of our children went through the agony of separation and divorce, and some of them remarried, quite successfully, some have good friends of the opposite sex and we parents learned along with them.

We seniors come from a generation with very distinct roles for males and females. Our marriages were the ‘comfortable' kind and, as I see it now, we were quite possessive in our controlling wedlock. Jonathan, you wrote ‘every woman is some man's femme fatale' - that rings so true and my question is: in how far have the roles of men and of women changed in the years after we were ‘in our prime', and how much in our relationships is natural and will never change?

Betty - where are you? What are your thoughts?

Not having joined y'all in this read I am not as steeped in the story - I do remember reading the book years ago before the movie. It was a hot item I think it was the early 60s. I remember several of us reading it at a time when the Cold War or rather just the concept of Russia as a Communist state seemed a frightening aspect of life.

I always thought that the two women represented Russia - the motherland - both had children - one left the country as we in the West in the 60s thought was the only reasonable choice and the other had a child of the Revolution.

Tonia seemed to me to represent reality - where as Yuri, the poet, could note the frozen place that Russia had become and liken it to snow with the candle, the light in the darkness of life; the candle lit at death illuniating darkness and representing the light in the world to come; dripping wax, the life-substance that is pliabial. He observed life but really did not have a mission to save the past or engineer a future. Tonia was all about the past, an innocent that lived her life in all its tradition and was trying to not so much as make sense of the change as adapt the change to her base belief in her role based in past tradition.

The father of Lara's child is a simple man who wanted his truth or version of justice and was wounded not only by those that carried out the orders of the powerful wealthy but wounded by the fact that the woman he loved was sullied by a powerful and wealthy man. He was simple and focused on creating a Russia that ennobled the worker, the average citizen. He rose to power fighting the old traditional system and coupled with modern mother Russia spawned the future.

Lara, unlike Tonia, worked along side the men of action and developed skills taking care of herself and her child in the infancy of this new Russia. The new Russia seemed to helped develop who she was rather than she trying to adapt the new to who she was.

Reading the book from this view, for me the morals of Lara was not in question. All the characters represented to me a picture of what was happining in Russia at the time. Birth is messy and yet the imbilical cord needs to be cut. Tonia to me was like the imbilical cord to old Russia where as Lara was birthing the new Russia.

Ine, no, I have never read "The Tale of the Unknown Island" by Orwell, but I've made a note of it and dropped it into my Library bag which goes everywhere with me. The only one of Orwell's I have read is "1984" and I would like to revisit it to see if anything he predicted has come true. I am reminded of his happy drug, Soma, if my memory is not failing, whenever I see the proliferation of drugs to avoid the stress of living - the anxiety drugs, the drugs for children who are hyperative (as if they shouldn't be!).

This weekend I am driving downtown where our Main Library is (not very much traffic down there on weekends) and I'll pick up a copy of the movie of this book (our Library has 3 copies) and view it. I had forgotten who played the female leads, but have never forgotten Omar Shariff and I'm anxious to see if his portrayal of Yuri is anything like the book. What did you think?

Hahaha, "wizened like firewood" - an excellent description of myself. Sometimes I can't believe it is me in this body that is so old and I don't care for it all. Yes, we were rigid in our ideas of marriage and bringing up children - it was shameful to have children out of wedlock or live with a married man. Yuri had guilt about loving Lara and living with her; however, I don't remember reading that Lara did. Yuri's guilt did not prevent him, however, from living with another woman and bearing children by her in the concluding chapter of the book! Did you get the idea that Lara had a child by Yuri and deserted it, possibly because she was ill and in the hospital? That was all very vague in the conclusion.

Actually, I think the book should have stopped with Chapter 14 as we do not need to read about the further degradation, deterioration and decline of Yuri both in health and moral character. That is, of course, my opinion, obviously Pasternak felt a need to bring it all to an end.

BARBARA! Thank you so much for coming into our discussion and bringing such insight as this:

I always thought that the two women represented Russia - the motherland - both had children - one left the country as we in the West in the 60s thought was the only reasonable choice and the other had a child of the Revolution

Marvelous! I do agree with that and also with your statement that Tonia was all about the Russia of the past, Yuri could only light a candle to illumininate the darkness that was the present Russia, but Lara was the one of the three who was working to engineer the future - "birthing the new Russia"

If you haven't read the book since the 60's you have a remarkable memory! That's wonderful and, again, thanks!

That's Lara's exclamation when she learns of the conversation between Zhivago and Strelnikov, whom chance had brought together and after which Strelnikov shoots himself.

One of the more curious things about the book has to be how often things happen by chance or coincidence. Most of the time it's a dubious narrative technique, which often leaves the reader annoyed. Right? But if it's a matter of divine intervention, or fate, or a matter of expecting the unexpected in revolutionary times, why it will in no way "jostle the undiscriminating admirer of Pasternak", as Ine quoted in a post.

Accepting this possibility helped me to cross a barrier of disbelief and doubt, about many things in the book. If one accepts Pasternak on his own terms, the book becomes an almost unalloyed pleasure. Before my conversion...I can't remember now where in the book it happened...I was convincing myself that Doctor Zhivago would probably not even find a publisher today, not to mention a Nobel Prize.

It was, I believe, unrealistic of Pasternak to think that he could write a successful novel...a political one at that...in which the Russian Revolution and civil war would serve as a backdrop. If anything he(Zhivago) shied away from the war and revolution, whether in a Galician village, or a hamlet in the Urals, a Siberian backwater. The 'days which shook the world', in October, 1917, he spent secluded in his rooms in Moscow.

As for conventional literary aspects of a novel, like characterization and plot, for example...unless he's writing in a 'minimalist' genre of some kind...they're practically non-existent. I can't think of any other novel in which the characters would be more likely to complain to their author of being inadequately portrayed or employed.

But as an attempt, by a poet, to play, consciouly and deliberately, the historic role assigned to him, by one of his own, naturally, as a 'legislator of the world', Doctor Zhivago comes off as a smashing success...for the poetically minded. Include me among them.

I guess it was chapters 14 and 15, which did it for me. Every scene and every thought catches my imagination. Taking a page from Pasternak's book, I'll say that Doctor Zhivago is like a huge spider web. Hang around too long and you really get enmeshed. I've often heard them in the wilderness, but the next time I hear the wolves howling, I'll wonder...what dire, calamitous fate awaits me!?

Good posts, all. I'm absorbing them.

Just a quick note to correct something I wrote in my last post. I was not very clear, but "The Tale of the Unknown Island" is by JOSE SARAMAGO, and I'm sorry I was careless there!

I agree with Jonathan: all the last posts are marvelous, and I also need time to digest what's said. (I got a big kick out the spiderweb image, Jonathan!) ine

Thanks for asking, Ine. I'm over here, not quite two decades later, witnessing a Jewish boy escape from late 30s Prague. He is leaving behind a large family and will be in New York City worrying himself sick every day over his family's safety, or lack of it. He's an excellent sketch artist and trained as a small boy in another art, escape. He and a Jewish boy from New York will soon be the creators of comic books (funny books) whose hero will help people escape from the clutches of evil Hitler. And land a few #&*)%@#%$&^*#&-es, too.

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I agree with what Barbara wrote, that no blame goes to Lara for behavior of others. A woman's behavior does not cause men to behave certain ways. Lara was married to Strelnikov (Pasha), had been abused as a child by Kamarovsky and was in love with Yurii (she did not permit a sexual relationship to begin until their second encounter).

I agree that Tonia represented the old way and Lara, the new.

It's interesting that two people had the affair, Yurii and Lara, but we only raise the "morals" issue of one. To view men as not able to control themselves while under the influence of women is an insult to men, I think. This is one of our oldest habits, though, to think of a woman as a corrupting influence and a man as the object of corruption. To my ear, that makes a man a complete idiot, a child, and neither is true. Besides, women and men are far more complex and fall into more categories than good, bad (for women) or seduced, not seduced (for men). I do wonder about Pasternak allowing Lara and Yurii to wait until the second encounter to begin a sexual relationship. Was that technique? A way to soften the blow for the readers? Or was that part of an authentic evolution of their relationship?....as if, in revolution and civil war, anything could be judged as purely authentic or wise or right or wrong.

betty

I liked Ine's use of it so much, I would like to use it myself as an occasion for a post.

hi Betty - I agree, also, no blame attaches to Lara for the actions, great or small, good or bad, done for love of her. I hope that nothing I said gave you a different impression. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lara was a caregiver, and who needed one more than Yuri? She was quite thrilled with the love she got in return.

The statement early on in this discussion that 'Pasternak resented being born a Jew' intrigued me no end; and I wondered if the novel would reflect that. Feelings about being Jewish are expressed by Misha Gordon when he talked about being 'liked only by a few and, moreover, loved by no one'; and several episodes of anti-semitic activities or feelings are related, as we have seen. Pasternak, as we know, thought of himself as a Christian, however unique or distinctive; and was drawn to the rites and liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. Allusions to Christianity, in one way or another, are fairly frequent in the novel, aren't they? For purposes of argument I identify Pasternak with Zhivago.

Without being Jewish myself, I am fascinated by Pasternak's Jewishness; and I have the feeling that in the end he could not bring himself to deny it. Some accounts say he was baptized. Others say he was not. In death, however, he inevitably returned to his roots, by foregoing a christian burial. On the pretext that the money would ensure the education of his children 'it had been decided to dispense with a church service'. 'In these hours when the silence, unaccompanied by ceremony, became oppressive as if it were an almost tangible privation, only the flowers compensated for the absence of the ritual and the chant.

I find that significant and endearing. Was Pasternak finally frightened by the symbols he always sought and found in everything?

In a different vein, 'it remained a crime throughout the 1960s to read the book (Doctor Zhivago), and a number of people paid for doing so by spending several years in labor camps'. By the same author, W Bruce Lincoln, from his recent book Sunlight at Midnight, this good example of biting humor as commentary on life in the Soviet Union:

'A joke that made the rounds soon after the Soviet Union started to let Jews emigrate in the late 1970s focused on Leningrad's many shortages. "Why do you want to leave?" an official at the visa office asked a Jew who was applying for permission to go to Israel. "Because there's too much happiness here," he said flatly. "I can't stand it." "What do you mean,'too much happiness'?" the puzzled official replied. "How can there be too much happiness?" "Well when my wife needs a pair of winter boots, we look and look for weeks," the applicant explained. "Finally we hear about a shop that is selling boots 'under the counter,' as it were. So we buy them, even though they cost us more than a month's pay. And we're so happy. Then we want to buy a goose to celebrate the New Year. After days of looking, my wife finally finds a scrawny chicken. It's not exactly what we wanted, but we're happy to have found something. Then our son needs medicine. We can't find it anywhere here, so I go to Moscow and I finally find some on the black market there. Again, we're so happy. I can't stand any more of this happiness," he concluded. "That's why I want to emigrate!"

As you will note, I put a snapshot of Yuri (Omar Shariff) writing his poetry by candlelight in the heading - that lovely poetry - have you read much of it in the back of the book? You will find there is his love in just about every one of them - love of nature, love of woman.

What has been amazing to me is that a number of us have been so engrossed by Pasternak that we have turned to biographies of this author for more information. I love that and thank you all for quoting from them.

Here is one last poem by Pasternak that is in the biography written by Hingley (1981) and reflects Pasternak's thoughts near the end of his life.

Fifty years' memories recede.
The tumult of their thunder dies.
This century has come of age.
It's time to let the future happen.

Catastrophies and revolutions
Don't clear the path to life's renewal
As do the insights, squalls and bounties
In one man's incandescent soul.
--------Boris Pasternak, July 1958

On a hot lazy Saturday afternoon, I watched 3 hours of the movie of this book - the 30th Anniversary Edition with a documentary at the end and I don't know what to say. It was both wonderful and awful for me; wonderful in the sense of the lovely scenery and the sense of being there, but awful because it put altogether different images in my mind than what I have envisioned in reading the book.

As I've said before I saw Omar Shariff as I read the book, so it came as no surprise that he was marvelous in the role. I did not like the females at all - I had forgotten them from years ago when I first saw the movie. In fact, I had forgotten most of the movie. Geraldine Chaplin and Julie Christie were not Tonia and Lara to me, that was terribly emotional after reading the book twice and knowing them intimately in my imagination. Pictures are not always worth a thousand words. In fact, the book was so much better for the vagueness, the indistinctness, the dreamlike aspects of it, that I'm almost sorry I saw the movie, except for the lovely music, the costumes, the sets, the cold, - you felt that - David Lean did a magnificent job of directing the whole thing.

He purposely made the love scenes take place in the darkness and the cold, and the brutal killing in the warm light of day for the contrast which I thought brilliant. But this half brother, who hardly makes an appearance in the book until the epilogue (I believe) narrates the whole thing and tells us much too much about the story. And Komarovsky calls Lara a slut and slaps her ! No, no! And Lara tells Yuri that she is bearing his child. No, No! It's not true, I wanted to shout, it wasn't in the book!

Facts:

• Omar Shariff is of Egyptian descent and I want to know more about him
  
• The film was not allowed to be shown in Russia until 1994
  
• The woman with the baby that Yuri pulled into the train really fell and mangled her legs, but David Lean used that bit of film anyway despite objections from the cast
  
• Carli Ponti bought the rights to the book because he wanted Sopia Loren (his wife) to play Lara but he needed a large studio like MGM and they did not want her
  
• The ice palace was made from beeswax and then frozen
  
• The film was made for the most part in Spain but a few sections were made in Finland about 10 miles from the boundary of Russia where the book was banned at the time
  
• The movie won 6 academy awards but did not win best picture - that was won by Sound of Music
  
• To show Omar Shariff as a poet he was directed not to say anything, just for most of the film to observe and he protested to David Lean, who told him that those who do the speaking will not be remembered but you will - HE WAS RIGHT, I DID!
• No balalaikas could be found to play in the orchestra until someone discovered a combo in a Russian church in America but none of them could read music; however the orchestra leader just mouthed the beat

This was one of the best discussions I have ever been involved with for many reasons - your marvelous posts, the different insights I gained from what you had to say and the book! It deserved two readings, I could read it again and still gain more from it. I loved it! Thank you all so much.

I'm going to leave this discussion open for a few days so all of us may add more comments if we would like to. Thanks again!

Thanks, Ella, for a great discussion, and especially for those fine last posts. Thanks everyone. It was a lot of fun.

Jonathan

Ella, Too bad we all couldn't have seen the movie at the same time. I felt like you, the characters in the book meant a lot more to me than in the movie.

I did like the last scene in the movie where the daughter of Yuri and Laura is walking away with her partner. She has the balalaika slung over her shoulder, and her friend says that the girl is a real musician. We're left with the feeling that this strong love between Lara and Yuri will endure in their daughter.

I've enjoyed the discussion immensely and thank you for the information and questions you prepared. All your posts were so helpful.

Thanks all of you who participated; it was lots of fun. ine

Five gold stars for keeping on keeping on, Ella, and for getting us to the ground safely. I'll fly with you anytime!!!

betty