I know this post is not ‘on topic’ in these days of Islam casting its shadow over the Western society but it is tonight I am watching Doctor Zhivago.
I remember reading the book by Boris Pasternak in 1980s, as a teenager. I got only about 70% of it because I was too young. Despite the fact that I was living in deep communism. I guess that was the reason I understood even that much of the story, at the tender age of 14… Never mind the love story – it is the backdrop that interests me. The Russian Revolution of 1918.
The film shows the destraction of an individual, educated and sensitive, a doctor and a poet. Not a perfect human being by far, who loved his country and saw it and his life rent apart by a brutal change, his loved ones in danger and all he treasured destroyed.
Let me relay some snippets that I found memorable.
Zhivago’s house in Moscow has been taken over by the local Soviet run by two sour-faced comrades. They tell him, reproachfully, that there is room for 13 families there. He says: In that case, this is a better arrangement. More just…
Doctor Yuri Zhivago was a member of the Russian intelligentsia and believed that there was a need for reform of the country. At the start, he saw the Communist Party as performing a deep operation cutting out a cancerous tumour. Today he probably would be reading the Guardian or the New York Times calling himself a progressive. A bleeding heart liberal, perhaps. But Pasternak puts the Zhivago character through the reality of a dystopia coming true.
There is a conversation between Doctor Zhivago and Strelnikov, a commander of the Red Guard of legendary reputation, the scourge of the country.
Strelnikov: Are you the poet? I used to admire poetry, it’s so personal, the flight of affections and humanity. Personal life is dead in Russia. I can see how you could hate me.
Zhivago: The fact I hate you, does not mean I want to kill you.
And later in the same conversation:
Zhivago: You burnt the wrong village.
Strelnikov [agitated]: A village is burnt, the point is made.
Yes, I remember the stern self-righteousness (or more accurately a psychotic moral high-ground), the fragile power that many experienced until they were the next batch to be devoured by the monstrous system. The glorious Party, the Workers, the Justice, Equality and the Better Tomorrow… airbrush the Gulags and you have the Guardianistas…
And then there is the nihilism of the ‘revolutionaries’.
Tonya’s (Zhivago’s wife) father: They shot the czar and all his family… [exclaims] What’s it for?
Zhivago: To show that there is no going back…
A young boy is found dying in the field after the attack of the partisans who kidnapped Zhivago for his medical expertise. The boy dies while Zhivago looks sadly on unable to save him. A partisan says:
It does not matter.
Zhivago: Did you ever have any children?
Partisan: I once had a wife and four children. None of this matters.
Zhivago: What matters, commander?
Partisan: Tell me, I have forgotten.
Towards the end of the film, Zhivago’s brother says of Lara, his lover:
She vanished and died somewhere in one of the labour camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid…
Watching the film reminds me of what an unqualified and unchecked evil the Soviet Revolution and communism was. Horrific in its suppression of the individual, ruthless in its ritual extinguishing of the human spirit and freedom, terrifying in its imposition of the most toxic variety of dystopia, arrogant in its denial of reality and brutal in the execution of those who dared even breathe against it. Evil, pure evil that will never be fully understood by those who have not experienced it.
Yeah, I should have gone out on Saturday night…
Thanks for the post Adriana. I’d be very interested in seeing a lot more from you on what it was like for you.
“Zhivago: You burnt the wrong village.
Strelnikov [agitated]: A village is burnt, the point is made.”
A comforting thought for Brazilians in heavy coats.
Yup, I can definitely see the connection between someone stupid enough not to stop when called upon to do so by armed police and the razing of the wrong village in the name of a totalitarian ideology.
Zhivago is a love story in the romantic tradition placed against a backdrop of the period when “the personal life is dead in Russia”. I saw it with my future wife when it first came out, and have loved it, and the musical score, ever since.
One of the crassest falsehoods that collectivists spout is that their system is somehow more spiritual and fulfilling to the soul than the crude mercenary life in a capitalist system, as if the sole purpose of working for a living was the collection of money, and not the enjoyment of using it to raise a family and live in a manner one chooses.
Some may find the story depressing and tragic, and, indeed, it has powerful tragic elements in it, but I have always found Zhivago to be inspiring. It is the story of a man who lives his life as fully as possible in pursuit of what he finds important to him. At the end, he dies trying to catch up to Lara, just as he had lived, chasing his heart’s desire.
He never surrenders.
I might have “gone out on a Saturday night,” too, forty years ago. When I was a kid, our folks were movie nuts, and they used to take us to the movies all the time. I still remember looking at the theater as we were driving past and my mother asked my brother and me if we wanted to see that. Having no earthly idea what it was about at age nine, I shrugged it off. It was a long time before I finally saw it, and it was worth the wait.
Pasternak’s is one of the very few novels that I keep on a list of “to-do” books.
“I am the only free man on this train. The rest of you are cattle.”
You wrote this and never mention Gitmo, Abu Saddam or Barney. I’m shocked.
/sarc off
I never understood why the movie started with what is the epilogue of the book. (The book starts with the funeral of Yuri’s mother and tells the story in a more or less straight line.) That, and the pretentiousness of Omar Sharif as Zhivago, put me right off the movie.
Blame the victim some more, why don’t you.
Simply following the example of you and your lefty friends.
You should be gratified.
I’d be interested in hearing more of those experiences too.
Great post.
“Evil, pure evil that will never be fully understood by those who have not experienced it.”
How very, very true !
Completely off topic comments deleted. Feel free to not come back.
“H Bosch” — your technique would be more effective if you stopped occasionally to wipe off the spittle and take a breath.
I loved the book but the film really riled me. The ending made me want to throw things at the screen – with Lara’s grown-up daughter pluckily facing the glorious future with a young engineer against the backdrop of a hydro-electric dam – that’s what all the previous suffering was for, you see, the dead people and the one’s with their lives ruined were just the price that had to be paid for progress. Nothing in the novel suggests this crass thought – it was just tacked-on vacuous third way rhetoric. I’m surprised it didn’t irritate you more … perhaps I’m just particularly irrascible
Off topic yet again. Deleted yet again.
La marquise.. you are right, there was much that could (and did) irritate me. The film is as insightful as it is pompous at times.
And you are right on the money with the last scene too, the glorious dam in the background, with the young ‘engineer’ managing it all. Blah blah blah. They both ‘ride off to the sunset’ in their overalls. Yuck.
My post was a deeply personal outburst of emotions and impressions that I had while watching the film last night, where those irritations were minor compared to the what I was trying to get across. But get me on another day… 🙂
I enjoyed reading your post very much, Adriana. You were there and we weren’t. You better than most of us posting here, can understand the roadmap. I too would like to read more.
Evil, pure evil that will never be fully understood by those who have not experienced it.
True.
But still one of the greatest movies ever.
H. Bosch:
get a clue.
I’m surprised more people haven’t made the connection between fundy Islam and Sovietism. Their world, if they ever got it, would possibly be even more starkly evil than the Soviets’. The stakes in this war are higher than most people, brought up on the soft fuzzy harmlessness of “socialism”, recognize.
This war IS the over-warm end of the long cold war, (which is why the left-leaning intelligentsia are on the other side).
My favorite line in the film is from the character Sir Ralph Richardson played. He hears a burst of gunfire coming from the street outside and in exasperation says, There they go again! I wish they’d make up their minds which gang of hooligans constitutes the government of this country!
A great book, yes; must re-read it – haven’t done so since it came out in 1958.
But what about Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”? – there’s something again.
The upbeat ending of the film (as distinct from the book) may reflect the hope in the West that Khrushchev’s “Thaw” was working. He came over to the US when Eisenhower was President (1952-1960) for a visit which went down quite well, despite his “We will bury you” remark. Lara’s daughter (was it?) would be the right age, as a teenager, for that time.
Of course, things got worse after that, culminating in the Cuban Crisis and continuing with Vietnam . . .
I’m surprised that none of the posters here haven’t mentioned the remake of the movie. Much darker and more tragic, since it ends with Lara’s arrest and her attempt to let her son (by Yuri) escape. Or the irony in that Lara, who is a nurse, helps deliver Tonia’s baby while Yuri is kidnaped into the Forest Brotherhood partisan band.
It is true that Pasternak’s theme was that the Soviet Regime had crushed the personal life under the political. In the book, Pasha Antipov, now under his nom de guerre of Strelnikov, loses his power and finds Yuri while searching for Lara. Even in the Omar Sharif movie version, Komarovsky relates to Yuri that Strelnikov under interrogation after arrest refused to answer to any name but Antipov. He had attempted to return to the personal life he had helped to stamp out, just like Yuri’s brother Yevgraf, who was searching for his niece after having served in the secret police.
Pasternak never lived to see it, but what really happened in the USSR was the reverse of what he wrote about. By the 1970’s Russian cultural observers such as Medvedev reported a “turning inward” among their countrymen. Their government was all-powerful in their country, hopelessly corrupt, and immune to change. You can’t change it much less improve it so don’t bother trying. Just concentrate on your personal life, there is no hope in the political life.
“But, what if everybody felt that way?” Everybody DID feel that way and when they looked at Soviet rule in 1989, they all said, “To hell with it.”