Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak - Essay Example

Doctor Zhivago is an epic, a romance, and a history. It tells the story of Russian people forced to live through the many tragedies of the first halfof the twentieth century, and it tells of the emotional trials of love in its most complicated forms. It tells the story of a man torn between two women, set primarily against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution of 1917. More deeply, the novel discusses the plight of a man as his life is slowly destroyed by the violence of the revolution. The novel begins in 1901, sixteen years before the Russian Revolution. In the Czar ruled Russia of those days, land ownership was an important issue for intellectuals such as Kolya, who is also a former member of the Russian Orthodox Church. The discussion about land reform weighs heavily on their minds and takes place on the country estate of an aristocratic patron of the arts. Kolya is described as a future famous writer, and it is important to note the future that Russia and its upper class were soon to face: one in which people like the Zhivago's were to lose their possessions and their status under the new Socialist system. The second chapter elucidates the political implications of the strikes, and the various characters' involvement in them. Madame Guishar is called a member of the aristocracy, but she is dependent on Komarovsky for her well-being and financial stability. Lara feels that she is enslaved by the lawyer, and Yura immediately senses Komarovsky's power over her. The Guishar family is not enmeshed in the political changes taking place, but Lara's association with the young rebels and her family's fear of attack shows the all-encompassing power of the imminent societal changes rumbling below. There is a sense of impending and wide-sweeping transformation taking place, though some feel that the final resolution lies in the czar's manifesto. The connections between all the various plot lines seem to imply that there is no action that is not tied to others, and there is no life that stands independently. At the same time, Pasternak creates the sense that all of the diverse movements leading up to Madame Guishar's attempted suicide exist largely to bring Yura and Lara together. In the fourth chapter, many young characters of the novel find themselves in the throes of World War I, in which Russia suffered heavy casualties. The Russian army was ill equipped to fight on such a large scale, and many soldiers fought without weapons or shoes. The war was devastating, of course, not only to soldiers, but also to Russia at large. By the end of 1915, there were manifold signs that the economy was breaking down under the heightened strain of wartime demand. The main problems were food shortages and rising prices. Inflation rapidly forced down real incomes, and shortages made it difficult to buy even what one could afford. Shortages were especially a problem in the capital, Petrograd (formerly the City of St. Petersburg), where distance from supplies and poor transportation networks made matters particularly bad. Shops closed early or entirely for lack of bread, sugar, meat and other provisions. And lines grew for what remained. It became increasingly difficult both to afford and to buy food. Not surprisingly, strikes increased steadily from the middle of 1915. And so did crime. But mostly people suffered and endured--scouring the city for food (working-class women in Petrograd reportedly spent about forty hours a week in food lines ), begging, turning to prostitution or crime, tearing down wooden fences to keep stoves heated for warmth, grumbling about the rich, and wondering when and how this would all end. With good reason, government officials responsible for public order worried about how long people's patience would last. The war affects the characters in the novel in different ways. Pasha sees it as an opportunity to escape from his unsatisfactory marriage, Zhivago is called upon to apply his medical skills toward an unsavory task, and Misha finds himself contemplating his own position as a member of the aristocracy and as a Jew. Yury and Misha's conversation where they examine religion, focusing much of their attention on the Jews, is sort of a precursor to things to come in a disoriented Soviet Union. The question of religion will become more important after the revolution: Leninists attempted to do away with the traditional religious values held by the Russian people. When Lara hears patients shouting about revolution, she cannot understand the far-reaching implications of this announcement. However, we as can surely make out that Russia is to change forever, and though Lara does not know it, her life will change along with it. In the incident of the town, Zabushino, which became an independent republic for a short span of two weeks, partly on the strength of a story that the leader's assistant was a deaf-mute who had the gift of speech only in special circumstances, Pasternak makes us aware of the dwindling historical condition that Russia was in. The mystical deaf-mute in Zabushino demonstrates the chaos ensuing in the Russian villages. The villagers are willing to believe in legends and magical occurrences, and the young man takes advantage of their ignorance. Pasternak shows the helplessness of the situation in Zhivago's deep frustration by the haphazard managerial style of the local governments, something that makes him eager to leave for Moscow. He views the young deaf man with distaste, feeling him to be too arrogant and self-righteous. His own cynicism is growing. He tells Lara that they have all been reborn but with the knowledge that he cannot start completely anew. He goes back to Tonya in search of the familiar, comfortable love he enjoyed as a young man. In the seventh chapter, the train journey brings many different people together, and the Zhivagos are confronted with the awareness of being thrown into a new, unordered Russian society in which class and social standing are no longer certain or secure. Zhivago is not opposed to this in principle, but he finds himself in the position of a potential victim, as a doctor and former gentry. He meets Strelnikov (or Pasha Antipov) with a vague wonderment, and is enthralled with this rebel man and his accomplishments. Zhivago is also sympathetic toward the conscripts, who are being sent to labour camps to serve sentences for supposed treason against the new Soviet government. In the struggle for simple existence, the characters of the novel all find themselves in positions they could not have predicted. Strelnikov is a prime example of a young man who finds himself thrust into a position of power; while once he was an innocent student infatuated with a neighborhood girl, now he is a vicious leader in the new system. He is known by an alias that represents both his violence and power, and this new name allows him to cast the past aside completely. Only he is aware of his double life, and when he thinks about going back to Lara and Katya, he does so with the conviction that it can be done only when he has lived this new life out. In the eighth chapter, we find that the Zhivagos are again confronted with the past. They travel back to land once owned by Tonya's family, with the notion that although it is dangerous to admit to being related to former landowners they may be able to obtain some special treatment there. They find that it is difficult to hide Tonya's lineage and are received in different ways by the people they encounter. The most important person they meet, Mikulitsin, is at first put off by the Zhivagos' clear connection to the former gentry, but he relents and allows them to stay. Pasha is again mentioned obliquely. Mikulitsin also believes him to have been killed on the front, and it is clear that many people living in the Urals are familiar with both Pasha and his altar ego Strelnikov, without understanding their connection to one another. While at this point the action is focused on the Zhivago family, the mention of Pasha and his wife foreshadows Lara's reappearance in the upcoming chapters. In the ninth chapter, Lara knows that her husband has become the feared Strelnikov; her reaction is somewhat angry, yet it is tempered by her own practical nature. The relationship of Lara and Zhivago, through their conversation about Pasha, is placed against the broader historical circumstances of the civil war. In the first few years after the revolution of 1917, the conservative old regime, aided by international support, fought a war against the new communist government. The communist Soviets under Lenin were of course the Reds; the conservatives were the Whites. Strelnikov and Yury are Reds, and Galiullin a White. The way that politics and unrest infiltrates even the secret, personal affair between Lara and Zhivago is made concrete when Yury is conscripted by the Red Army while on his way to see Lara. Zhivago admires the ease and lightness with which Lara goes about her daily tasks, and it is with this ease that she accepts Pasha's (Strelnikov's) indifference toward her and her daughter. When Yury decides to cut off contact with her, too, she accepts the proclamation as inevitable. Given the drastic societal and political changes of this period, it was necessary for Russians to relinquish their attachment to institutions of the past. Lara and Yury both accomplish this, but nonetheless they cannot abandon their affection for each other. Zhivago sees his imprisonment in abstracted terms because he is not chained or jailed but still cannot escape. He is forced to serve in the army, and he will be killed if he rebels against this order, but he is not treated badly, particularly because Mikulitsin likes him. At the same time, he feels no special loyalty to the Reds, and he even helps to save and release a White soldier. Yury's captivity forces him to abandon his confused obsession with Lara. He makes little mention of Lara or Tonya, instead concentrating on the tasks directly before him. He finds life in the army difficult, but his constant struggle for survival makes it impossible for him to focus on a definite goal outside of the war. He does not understand precisely what is happening between the two armies--a symptom of the general chaos ensuing during this time of political upheaval in Russia. In Pamphil, Zhivago sees a man with compassion and humanity who has been driven to kill. He has seen the same instinct in himself, shown when he fired at the Whites because his unit was being attacked, despite international law forbidding his participation in battle. He remembers the killing at Biryuchi Station, and the consciousness that he is now in the presence of the man responsible must bring a new sense of circularity to his perceptions: He has encountered both killers and victims, and he knows them to be only very slightly different from one another in times of war. The atrocities of the Civil War between the Reds and the Whites grow on both sides, and Yury and the other soldiers are deeply disturbed by the bloodshed around them. At the end of the Civil War, Soviet Russia was exhausted and was near ruin. The droughts of 1920 and 1921 and the 1921 famine worsened the disaster. War Communism saved the Soviet government during the Civil War, but much of the Russian economy ground to a standstill after it. Private industry and trade was proscribed, and the newly established (and barely stable) state was unable to run the economy on a sufficient scale. In the novel, the most severely affected by the Civil War is Pamphil, who kills his wife and children out of fear and a feeling of torment. Yury is shocked by the event but sees it in the context of the war and feels he understands it somewhat. Yury does not take Liberius' declaration of victory as the truth, and he also does not feel very strongly about the outcome of the war. He wants to be near his family and Lara, and he feels guilty about having to be apart from them for so long. In the rowan tree he sees not only Lara's physical form but also the pristine beauty and innocence that have been denied to him since the start of the war. Yury Zhivago, by this time, has lost all of his youthful idealism, and his attention is focused only on survival, passion, and loyalty. He no longer contemplates religious or political questions, and he sees himself stripped clean of all those pretenses by the harrowing experiences of the war, which was fought over differing interpretations of those very questions of politics and religion. Zhivago goes to Moscow because it is his home, and he finds that some of his friends are still there. He is not an old man, but his heart is weak, and he views himself as being near the end of his life. He marries again, though not formally. Vassya believes that Zhivago has not tried hard enough to be reunited with Tonya; Misha supports this sentiment when he tells Zhivago that he is acting badly toward both Marina and Tonya. It is Lara that Zhivago truly loves, and he has already banished her from his life. After Zhivago's death Lara happens upon his funeral by chance, as so much of their relationship has been. In death they seem fated to meet, even as in life. She mourns him and their lost life together. She is angry that he abandoned her in the way that he did. And though Zhivago abandoned her in hopes that it would bring her safety, Lara's disappearance destroys that hope. Zhivago's abandonment of her was fruitless. The last sentence of chapter 15 is one of the most poignant sentences of the novel: Lara is "forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north." It is the cold indifference of the line that gives it such power. The most tragic result of the tragedies that took place during Lara's lifetime, the tragedies that were so influenced by the transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union, is the dehumanization of everyone, including Yury and Lara. The Epilogue exists both to shed light on the events taking place in Russia after Zhivago's death and to suggest that, although Zhivago and Lara both die, their legacy lives on in their child. Gordon and Dudorov, meanwhile, grow old as friends. They respect Yury's memory and even preserve his writing for him. They go on living, while he takes up a new existence as a deceased tragic hero, driven to despair and death by his flaws and his passion. Tanya lives a difficult life, beginning with her childhood separation from her mother. In her, Gordon and Dudorov observe all the effects of revolution and war. Tanya, a child of the intelligentsia, is forced to live among people who have no respect for the things that her parents held dear and no true affection for her. She wanders the country with the same desolate aimlessness that came to possess her father. Just as Zhivago was reared by his uncle, so it is Yevgraf who promises to save Tanya from her orphaned, lonely fate. Stuck on the boundary between her anguished past and a hopeful future, Tanya represents both the tragedy of her era and the hope of a new beginning. The novel shows how Zhivago's idealism and ideologies stand in brutal contrast to the horrors of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent Russian Civil War. A major issue of the book is how the Bolsheviks, the Rebels and the white army destroy the mysticism of things and idealism. Yuri, by means of his experiences, which included witnessing cannibalism, dismemberment, and other physical and psychological horrors being perpetrated on an innocent civilian population, suffers from intense disillusionment. He becomes a living encyclopaedia to the pains of revolution, to the history of change. Like the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Pasternak makes Zhivago feel the "pity of war"- a stark reality which not only deadened men's sensibilities but also their sensitivities and their souls. Dr Zhivago remains a quiet protest against a mechanised society that the erstwhile Soviet Union was amounting to. It silently sang the dirges of a society that was converting man into an integer and society into an almanac of mindless violence. It is a historical account of a discourse that would ultimately terminate with the breaking down of the Iron Curtain in the 1980's. Works Cited T.N. Dupuy, The Encyclopaedia of Military History (many editions) Harper & Row Publishers. DK Atlas of World History, 1999, Dorling Kindersley Publishing. Pasternak, Boris (1983). Pasternak: Selected Poems, trans. Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, Penguin Gatrell, Peter. A Social and Economic History of Russia's First World War (2003), Penguin Hosking , Geoffrey. Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917, HarperCollins, London, 1997 Sakwa, Richard . The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union 1917-1991. London: Routledge, 1999 Read More