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."