I have always hated the old cliché that says that the book is better than the movie. Certainly, there are millions of books that are "better" than their movie adaptations. But we're talking about two different genres. Apples and oranges. And when they're both done well, and with art, why compare? This post will refer to both the book by Boris Pasternak (or at least its English translation) and the 1965 film, directed by David Lean (whose previous film was Lawrence of Arabia) starring Omar Sharif and Geraldine Chaplin, and both are wonderful and different.
Dr Zhivago is my father's favorite film. Over last Thanksgiving, we watched it together and I realized why. The film version is just a huge, fairy tale-like, brilliant synthesis of the story capturing the more melodramatic and less grim aspects of the novel into 3 hours on the big screen.
After seeing the film, I knew I had to read the book to even more fully appreciate the story of the Russian poet doctor.
Zhivago is a derivation of the Russian word meaning life and the story of Doctor Zhivago is a fanfare for life itself in the midst of the chaos that man creates for himself on this earth with his civil war and politics that destroy him and those around him.
Zhivago, the poet, is a spark of of humanity in a land where the revolutionary intent itself is an original action worthy of art, but then becomes a parade of automatons, of bad decisions, of inhumane consequences. And what is beautiful is that life overcomes despite all the horrors.
For Dr. Zhivago, Yura or Yuri, art is life. And that's how he makes it through the horrors that Russia is suffering. He realizes that "art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and always creates life."
Dr. Zhivago's story is one of history happening to him. Surrounding him throughout his personal story, we see Russian history happening. The Revolution. The Civil War between the Reds and the Whites and all the other factions. Zhivago finds himself part of the Russian story. He goes out on the front of World War I as a doctor and then comes back to a Moscow in the throngs of revolution and starvation. He escapes with his wife to a bucolic existence in a town far off in the Urals only to be kidnapped and to serve as a doctor and a prisoner for Red partisans. Dr. Zhivago lives history, like all of us. But his is a story of life itself as he is so close to all of the horrors taking place around him. It's sad and beautiful. And is life itself.
"Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies."
The story of Dr. Zhivago is one of fateful meetings, chance encounters and re-encounters of characters years later in different circumstances. You get a sense of how the revolution and war and history, life itself, has changed them and how they have survived despite it all. Some characters die, like Pasha, only to be reborn as fearsome military heroes in Strelnikov. Nobody can forget Strelnikov with "his great moral purity and sense of justice." And with each meeting of Lara, all of which happen serendipitously, Yuri's love grows for her, even while he is still in love with his wife.
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| Strelnikov's Train |
The original exuberance for the Revolution can be felt in lines from like "Just think what's going on around us! And that you and I should be living at such a time. Such a thing happens only once in an eternity. Just think of it, the whole of Russia has had its roof torn off, and you and I and everyone else are out in the open! And there's nobody to spy on us. Freedom! Real freedom, not just talk about it, freedom, dropped out of the sky, freedom beyond our expectations, freedom by accident, through a misunderstanding [...] Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and she can't find rest [...] The revolution broke out willy-nilly, like a sigh suppressed too long. 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, the sea of spontaneity. [...] These days I have such a longing to live honestly, to be productive. I so much want to be a part of all this awakening."
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| Cossacks and Revolution in the Streets |
But then we see the horrors of the revolution, which can never sit still and enjoy what it has accomplished without causing more upheavals and violence and death: "it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil, they aren't happy with anything that's on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves." It's all more complicated than what it seems. "It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up!" And mixed up it gets. Everybody has reason to be afraid, even the heroic Red army hero Strelnikov.
Strelnikov is the very embodiment of what a Russian could be in this time--a Red army hero sentenced to death because of his success, because of his devotion to the very cause that the Reds celebrated. His third death in the novel--the real one--is just the epitome of tragedy and there we see Russia die a little.
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| Strelnikov himself |
Pasternak's very candid portrayal of the civil war that takes place after the revolution made it impossible for him to publish his novel in Russia in 1956. When he eventually did get the novel published in Italy and then won the Nobel Prize for it, he did not attend the ceremonies for fear of reprisal by the Soviet government. Fortunately for him, he was dying of cancer and it wouldn't be nice of them to torture a dying man. Even still, publishing it was an act of bravery.
When, by chance, Zhivago scores a duck in a Moscow that is literally starving during the beginnings of the civil war, his family has a party but it is like a betrayal. "You could not imagine anyone in the houses across the street eating or drinking in the same way at the same time. Beyond the windows lay silent, dark, hungry Moscow. Its shops were empty, and as for game and vodka, people had even forgotten to think about such things. And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka. And this was most vexing of all."
The citizens of Moscow are ripping out fences and benches for firewood and it becomes hard to find one's way around the city as pieces of it are crumbling away. And Dr. Zhivago runs into a centenarian woman digging for mushrooms in the city. "And it's true, you know, the town is getting to be like the woods. There's a a smell of decaying leaves and mushrooms."
As the city crumbles, history seems to be happening around them and still there is jubilance. "This is history. This happens once in a lifetime. Put on your coat." With so much life happening in the city--gun battles, skirmishes, etc.--Dr. Zhivago, though, can't even go out to get basic supplies like milk. "All life in the city was suspended until the situation would be definitively clarified." He reads the official announcement that Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established in Russia.
A new page has been turned. The revolution and its effects are brilliantly described. "And the real stroke of genius is this. If you charged someone with the task of creating a new world, of starting a new era, he would ask you first to clear the ground. He would wait for the old centuries to finish before undertaking to build the new ones, he'd want to begin a new paragraph, a new page. But here, they don't bother with anything like that. This new thing, this marvel of history, this revelation, is exploded right into the very thick of daily life without the slightest consideration for its course."
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| Love in the time of war |
Perhaps the best descriptions are of the landscape and those horrible Russian winters, made even more horrible by the misery taking place around them. "Winter came, just the kind of winter that had been foretold. 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. There were three of them, one after the other, three such terrible winters, and not all that now seems to have happened in 1917 and 1918 really happened then--some of it may have been later. These three successive winters have merged into one and it is difficult to tell them apart. The old life and the new order had not yet come in contact. They were not yet openly hostile to each other, 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."
Nobody really does trains quite like Pasternak or David Lean, director of the 1965 film, for that matter. If you've seen the movie, you'll never forget the trains moving through epic snowy landscapes with large firs (filmed mostly in Canada with city scenes in Casillas, Spain) and scenes of destruction along the way. I would say it's some of the most spellbinding cinematography in film history. The novel even includes a section describing how all of the 300+ passengers on the train spent 3 days digging the train out of snow. It's just bigger than life.
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| Trans-Siberia |
The film hits hard. The score and original music by Maurice Jarre stays with you for a long while after watching. There is something about Russian music and I'm not just referring to the great composers. Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky. I remember being in a den of iniquity in a port town in the tropics, experiencing a bacchanal of epic proportions. And it was raucous beyond belief. A keyboard, a guitar, some trumpets, an electric bass, some girls dancing and singing, belting out some cumbias. And then some drunken Russian sailors strolled in and they were bigger than life. There weren't that many of them, but all of a sudden, they belted out in song, each with a bottle of vodka in his hand, and they were much louder than the artificially amplified cumbias. So much louder that patrons were moving outside. The Russians were bigger than life, had so much soul. It was an indelible experience.
There is something deeply poetic about the bigger than life aspect of Russia that Zhivago's story captures so well.
It's like an old Russian folk song that "is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song's sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words."
What is great about Zhivago's story is that it's apolitical at its heart. Great art loses power when it becomes too political because, as the epigraph to this post from Tolstoy indicates, politics passes. Everything is politics, but it's such a fleeting, shortsighted element of human beings. Politics is so far from the truth. Zhivago makes this point when someone calls Marxism a science: "Marxism is too uncertain of its ground to be a science. Sciences are more balanced, more objective. I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics doesn't appeal to me. I don't like people who don't care about the truth." Indeed, "what's going on isn't life--it's madness, an absurd nightmare." Even though it might be inevitable because "gluttons and parasites sat on the backs of the starving workers and drove them to death, and you imagine things could stay like that? Not to mention all the other forms of outrage and tyranny. Don't you understand the rightness of the people's anger, of their desire for justice, for truth?"
It's a time when just knowing--no, just thinking--about someone who might be on the wrong side of the war is enough to arouse suspicion and brings thoughts of the firing squad. A time when feeding yourself and keeping warm by stocking your house with firewood could be and is illegal, but nobody can really keep track of all the laws.
And during the civil war, "White and Red atrocities rivaled each other in savagery, outrage breeding outrage." We witness really grim scenes of torture by the Forest Brotherhood. Zhivago spent 18 months on the front, kidnapped by the Red partisans, and eventually deserts on skis in a moment of inspiration.
What Dr. Zhivago sees on his long walk back to Lara, in his attempt to get back to his family, is just absolutely devastating and about as good as it gets in literature: "For almost half his journey on foot he had followed the railway track. All of it was out of use, neglected and covered with snow. He had passed train after train abandoned by the Whites; they stood idle, stopped by the defeat of Kolchak, by lack of fuel, and by snowdrifts. Immobilized and buried in the snow, they stretched almost uninterruptedly for miles on end. Some of them served as strongholds for armed bands of highwaymen or as hideouts for escaping criminals or political fugitives--the involuntary vagrants of those days--but most of them had become mortuaries and mass graves for the victims of the cold and of the typhus raging all along the line and mowing down whole villages. That period confirmed the ancient proverb, 'Man is a wolf to man.' Traveller turned off the road at the sight of traveller, stranger meeting stranger killed for fear of being killed. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The laws of human civilization were suspended. The jungle law was in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of cave dweller." The images of trains buried in snowdrifts across all of Siberia are like paintings that stick with you forever.
And when Dr. Zhivago finally reaches Lara's house, her letter left behind, with rats crawling over the apartment, it's just unreal. He has to read the announcements on the wall with the Red propaganda that he needs to read to know all the rules that could break him later. "Only once in his life had this uncompromising language and single-mindedness filled him with enthusiasm. Was it possible that he must pay for that rash enthusiasm all his life by never hearing, year after year, anything but these unchanging, shrill, crazy exclamations and demands, which became progressively more impractical, meaningless, and unfillable as time went by?"
Pasternak keeps revisiting the horrors caused by the revolution. "No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries."
Tonia, his wife, has been swept away from him, exiled in Paris, with his son and his daughter, who he has never met. Tonia's letter to him is devastating and aches with the reality of separation.
But Dr. Zhivago is able to find a tiny bit of brief happiness with Lara in an abandoned house in Varykino, a village far off in the Urals in Siberia. He finds happiness in Lara, who is like "a spring evening. The air punctuated with scattered sounds. The voices of children playing in the streets coming from varying distances as if to show that the whole expanse is alive. And this vast expanse is Russia, his incomparable mother; famed far and wide, martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored, Russia with her eternally splendid, and disastrous, and unpredictable adventures. Oh, how sweet to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life!"
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| Varykino |
The happiness lasts for a short few days and then we have more death and misery amidst all of the horrors. But how Dr. Zhivago makes it, how we all make it through the miseries we have to face each day, is through art. Dr. Zhivago scribbles a note to himself "reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."
Sure, the Hollywood film is more a love story and the book itself more a recounting of Russian history with all of its tragedies and one man's tragedy in the attempt to not merely exist but to live through it all. But both are a story of life itself. Of the beauty of making life art and art life.
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