![]() ![]() Owing to the author's independent-minded stance on the October Revolution, Doctor Zhivago was refused publication in the USSR. ![]() And these individual things have since become of concern to all, and their works, like apples picked while they are green, have ripened of themselves, mellowing gradually and growing richer in meaning. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II. ![]() Pushkin and Chekhov, right up to the end of their lives, were absorbed in the current, specific tasks imposed on them by their vocation as writers, and in the course of fulfilling these tasks they lived their lives, quietly, treating both their lives and their work as private, individual matters, of no concern to anyone else. But rather than have an affair with Lara, Zhivago stays true to his wife Tonya and heads back home when the fighting is over. Laras husband Pasha has gone missing in the war and is presumed dead. Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky looked restlessly for the meaning of life, and prepared for death and balanced accounts. While serving in the war, Zhivago meets a nurse named Lara Antipova and falls in love with her. It isn’t that they didn’t think about these things, and to good effect, but to talk about such things seemed to them pretentious, presumptuous. What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their modest reticence in such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation. ![]()
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