Sometimes we go up

[muckefuck]

I finished reading Doctor Zhivago (well, except for the poems) at about 5 a.m. last night. Not because I couldn't put it down but because I woke up unexpectedly and was looking for a way to get back to sleep. All I had left at that point was the epilogue which, if it had looked that engrossing, I would've finished before going to bed in the first place.

It's definitely a book I want to discuss with someone who's read it. (Perhaps with Tuppers, who gave it to me? He was MIA at New Year's and hasn't been in touch since, so I'll be damned if I'm the first to get in touch.) Some parts are still unclear to me, such as Zhivago's motivation for returning to Moscow rather than accompanying the love of his life to Primorye. I'll also probably want to reread it on of these days after I've gotten a better grasp on the events of the Russian Revolution, which provide the backdrop.

I was surprised how much difficulty I had forcing David Lean's movie out of my head while I read it. I remember it having a huge impact on me when I first saw it at age seventeen, but that's rather to be expected and I didn't realise quite how firmly certain images and developments had stuck in my head until I tried to dislodge them. (I don't recall having the same difficulty with Berlin stories vis-à-vis Cabaret, another film I discovered at that impressionable age, but I rather suspect this will happen to me in spades when I come around to rereading Lord of the Rings again.) However stunningly handsome Omar Sharif was, he's not a good match for Zhivago as Pasternak describes him (contrasting him to his part-Kirghiz half brother). Similarly it was difficult to develop an appropriate attitude toward Komarovsky when Rod Steiger's embodiment of him became fuel for my erotic dreams for a sizable chunk of my young life.

At first I thought the film differed not only in excising almost all of the politics (as is standard operating procedure when adapting romantic epics) but also in placing the love story so very much front and centre. It doesn't really take over the narrative reignsrains of the novel until about two-thirds of the way in, which may be one of the reasons I was making such slow progress for a while. The early chapters are more episodic as we are fed backstories for lesser characters who eventually get folded into the main plot. While reading them, I chattered a lot to monshu about adjusting to Pasternak's "rhythm". You expect a thunderbolt when Zhivago meets Lara, but their interest in each other is presented so surprisingly obliquely that without prior knowledge you wouldn't attach much importance to it.

Apparently he got some flak for the succession of coincidences which keep bringing his cast back together. Perhaps it helped knowing about this feature going in or perhaps this is an area where having the movie in mind actually helped, since it's a familiar conceit in film where there's more need for economy in personalities. In any case, I got so inured to it that when I hit the truly outrageous coincidence which caps the final chapter, I took it completely in stride.

In Russia, Pasternak is best known as a poet and that shows in the richness of his descriptive passages. But there's also a lot of philosophising, and that's where I felt my reading was too cursory to do the work justice. He has pretty big chubby for Orthodox Christianity, which made sense once I learned he was the descendent of converts. The poems in the appendix in particular are shot through with religious imagery, scriptural references, and quotations from the Orthodox liturgy, which also have a habit of turning up throughout the body of the novel.

I'm also only a scant few pages from the end of a collection of Turgenev's shorter fiction and I haven't really decided whether to go back to Sketches at that point or begin something completely different. As I mentioned before, I am getting back into Irish at this point, so perhaps there's a sign I should open Irish Literature Month somewhat early.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

It doesn't really take over the narrative reigns

Et tu, muckefuck?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

My bad; I'll change it to rains forthwith.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

is this a Pasternak joke, I wonder? I'm also wondering how his Orthodox Christianity colours Zhivago's and Lara's extra-marital relationship. Why doesn't Yuri go with her?

I'm confused by another thing, but it's difficult to approach. Maybe because it's massively presumptuous of me to even try to engage you in conversation about it. So please understand before I say it that I do not mean to challenge you, judge you, criticize you, tell you what to do or in any other way interfere with your life, and of course I'll understand if you choose not to answer. I am a reader asking for clarification, nothing more.

OK. I'll be damned if I'm the first to get in touch is a sentiment that's utterly alien to me. I really don't think I've ever had that thought myself and I wouldn't anticipate it in anyone else. If I want to talk to someone I contact them, if I have nothing to say or I'm wrapped up in other things then time will go by without contact, but that doesn't mean the person is not in my thoughts or I'm communicating by not communicating or anything of the sort. So my question is, do you expect that this person knows you're waiting for him to contact you? Is there more going on here than mere radio silence?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

You're right, there is a whole history here, one of which only dribs and drabs have percolated through to LJ. It's an interesting question, though, and deserving of its own post.

Lara and Zhivago's guilt over their affair is never really cast in religious terms. There's a lot of talk about "duty", but the context seems to be social. And he genuinely loves her and feels tormented about betraying her. Same goes for her and her husband.