In Doctor Zhivago, the sense of bewilderment the characters have, their understanding of their living through such a historically significant time, their struggle to retain a sense of normality, and their fears for the future, are marvellously realised and struck me powerfully. Reading about war and revolution and politics is often a very impersonal experience, with people becoming mere statistics and case studies rather than thinking, loving, emotional human beings with ambitions and dreams and fears, swept up in something they have no power to control. What has struck me the most so far is the sense of the value of the individual soul in the face of massive, historical, cataclysmic events. However, gradually, as I worked my way into the tale Pasternak weaves, I began to understand more of what this book was his attempt to achieve, and though I could easily list its many flaws, which in a conventional novel, would be its downfall (such as the terribly clunky dialogue, which I don’t think is a translation issue), it somehow manages to rise above them all to produce an effect so engrossing and so powerful that I have struggled to put it down. There was also a lot of confusing activity and seemingly random incidents and characters introduced, all of which left me reeling and wondering where the story I remembered was. As with every Russian novel I’ve ever read, the first few chapters were marked by my complete inability to remember anyone’s name, and frequent flicking back and forth between the pages to ascertain who was who and what relation they had to the other characters. There has been no romance, no tinkling sleigh bell rides, no momentous and heartbreaking moments.

Well, at the half-way point, I have to say, it’s been a very different experience to the one I was expecting. Subsequent viewings of the film have engraved the legend of this romantic story, set across the sweeping mass of rural Russia during the most turbulent time in modern history onto my heart, and so it was with trepidation that I opened the pages of this new translation, fearful of whether it would live up to the memories I had created of my first reading. The very first image painted in Doctor Zhivago is of snow and barrenness and mysticism and this condensed, vivid picture of the spirit of Russia and its people is what captured my heart from the minute I opened the book. I think this is because I read it shortly after going to Russia, and experiencing the beautiful bleakness of its landscape and the almost magical, fairytale architecture of its golden onion domes and riverside pastel palaces, falling into dignified ruins. Doctor Zhivago, though, has long stayed with me. Sadly I have forgotten the details of most of what I read then, as I raced my way through Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Pushkin and Gogol and everything else I could get my hands on at the library without pausing to take stock of their content. They fed my turbulent, romantic soul and made me feel wonderfully literary and intelligent and mature. When Frances mentioned the Doctor Zhivago readalong with the new translation, part of me wanted to hold back from reading what I was sure would be a difficult book to write about, but then I realised how ridiculous this was, and began to get excited about re-reading one of the books that defined my late adolescence.Ī rather earnest teenager, who was far more into books than boys, I began the Russian classics at 16. I was fine churning out 3,000 word essays on the big cheeses of English Literature during university, but condensing these thoughts and impressions into a blog post often feels insurmountable. I have been, I admit, frightened to read epic classics since starting this blog, for fear of not being able to write about them with any depth or meaningful insight.

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