Reading Dr. Zhivago

I enjoy Russian Novels. I think more than any other writers they simply understood the great storytelling capability of the novel. They are epic in every way, in both page count and narrative, I have re-read War and Peace (Not to brag, I read it first when I was eighteen and I needed to re-read it some years later to decide if I really liked it or whether it was just teenage intellectual pretension, happy to say it was better the second time) and Anna Karenina and will probably tackle the Brother’s Karamazov again soon. If it wouldn’t burden him with a lifelong risk of teasing and having to explain his name I would probably name my first born Alyosha. 

So recently staring at my face in the window of the used book store that I frequent was a very renaissance version of Dr. Zhivago. Now I’ve seen the film and I’ve recently been debating with a friend whether it is a more romantic movie than “Love Actually”. I’m not going to rehash that argument here, but let’s just say watch both and you will might get a glimpse into the difference between romanticism and sentimentalism (perhaps a future post). 

There is, as is typical of the Russian novel, lots going on and I could probably write a book about the book, and Boris Pasternak writes with such poetic ease that I wish he would never stop writing, but I am going to hone in on a particular thought which is not even the main point of his book but helps to develop his theme of revolution and has intrigued me enough to spend some thinking about it. 

The book takes place in the foment of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Civil War and the gentry have been taken down a significant notch from where they had stood prior to the revolution. Zhivago upon his return to a Moscow in mid-revolution comments on his friends and acquaintances which I will quote at some length

"His friends had become strangely dim and colourless. Not one of them had kept his outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid his memory. He must have over-estimated them in the past. 

It had been easy enough to do so, as long as the order of things had been such that people with means could indulge their follies and eccentricities at the expense of the poor. The fooling, the right to idleness enjoyed by the few while the majority suffered, could itself create an illusion of genuine character and originality.  

But how quickly, once the lower classes had risen and the rich had lost their privileges, had these people faded! How effortlessly, how happily, had they given up the habit of independent thoughts - which at this rate could never in fact have been genuinely theirs!" 

I am struck by this quote for a number of reasons and I think this blog shares a theme with what BP is expressing. Who are we when we are stripped of the comforts of our existence. Would we still maintain our character? And while we may, or may not, experience upheaval like the the Russian Revolution and our way of life may not come to end in our times, it is a relevant question, because it asks who we are when stripped of the outer circumstances of our lives. 

I have always been fascinated by this idea of true character being revealed in adversity. In the Gone With the Wind I was always struck by the fact that Ashley Wilkes the son of the leading family in the region was destroyed and became a shell of a man when the world in the South collapsed and Scarlett picked up the pieces of what was left and built something new. Prior to the civil war Ashley was educated and measured man and Scarlett was brash and impetuous; when the world collapsed all of Ashley’s learning was unable to help him survive in a new reality, but Scarlet’s spirit caused her to soar and thrive. Similar to Zhivago’s friends, Ashley had become “dim and colourless” without the trappings of civilized southern society. 

Who are we without our iPhones and our gadgets and a corporate world that rewards some pretty unusual behaviour and where selfishness poses as post-modern self-actualization. If civil society collapsed who would we be. I like to think, and admittedly I am blinded by love, that all of my friends have bigger characters than their paycheques, but truth be told none of them have been put to the test to my knowledge, nor have I. Who among us would survive as independent thinkers and who would fade into the woodwork? It’s a scary thought and hopefully none of us will ever have to contemplate it.