The Novel

Author: Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)

First published: 1957

The Film

Year released: 1965

Director: David Lean (1908-91)

Screenplay by: Robert Bolt

Starring: Geraldine Chaplin, Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay, Omar Sharif, Rod Steiger

Context

Both the novel and the film versions of Doctor Zhivago were significant at the time of their release partly for providing inside views of the birth and development of the Soviet Union, the communist regime that replaced Czarist Russia following World War I. The revolution of 1917, followed by several years of civil war before the Communists finally gained complete control, resulted in a sprawling dictatorship that dominated much of Europe and northern Asia. The Soviet Communists sought world revolution, supposedly to free workers everywhere from capitalist domination. By the early 1940s, however, the Soviet Union, ruled by the tyrant Joseph Stalin, was fighting for its very existence. It had been surprise-attacked by Nazi Germany, ruled by the fascist tyrant Adolf Hitler, Stalin’s one-time foe, then ally, then foe again. From 1941 to 1945 the United States and other capitalist Allied nations joined Stalin to defeat Hitler in World War II. After that war’s end, however, a Cold War soon arose between the western democracies (especially the United States) and the Soviet Union, eventually aligned with Communist China.

During the immediate postwar period, Russian author Boris Pasternak began intensive work on the novel Doctor Zhivago. Like many Russian intellectuals, he had first sympathized with the communist revolution and supported the czar’s fall. But soon, he and many others began suffering under Stalin’s bloody dictatorship. By the time Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published, in Italian, in 1957, the Cold War had the real potential to devolve into an nuclear holocaust. In fact, it almost did so, in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis.

For all these reasons, Americans and others in the west were eager to read books (and see films) about the rise and evolution of Soviet communism and about the lives of people trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Western publication of Pasternak’s novel—which was banned inside the Soviet Union—was thus considered a provocation by the Soviets. When Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was told he could never return to his homeland if he left to accept the prize. He therefore declined it. In 1960, he died. Not until the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was on its last legs, could the novel finally be published in Russia and Pasternak’s son finally retrieve his father’s Nobel Prize.

Both on the page and on the screen, therefore, Doctor Zhivago was interesting partly because it seemed politically timely. Both works showed the nature and value of mere existence for people who had had to endure the loss of political, social, moral, intellectual, and personal freedom. By the time the book and film were released, the world had suffered through two massive wars and seemed faced with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Individual bravery and integrity, the consolations of personal love and loving family ties, and the sheer strength of human nature when faced with severe physical and psychological threats are all key themes of Doctor Zhivago, both as fiction and as cinema.

Film Analysis

Director David Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt faced a daunting task in trying to squeeze the complicated plot of Pasternak’s massive novel into a film—even with the three-hour running time of the final cut. While the title character, played by Omar Sharif, remains central, the filmmakers inevitably jettisoned various plot developments and major characters (such as Zhivago’s close boyhood friend). They also radically revised the book’s structure, particularly by treating the main plot as a flashback reported from the perspective of Zhivago’s Communist half-brother, General Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guinness). He tells one of Zhivago’s grown daughters (Rita Tushingham) about the parents she never knew: her dashing, romantic, poetic father and her beautiful, captivating, heroic mother (Lara, played by Julie Christie).

Their tale is both tragic and inspiring. Yevgraf begins by describing the death of Zhivago’s mother when Zhivago was still a young boy; the absence and death of Zhivago’s father; the privileged life Zhivago enjoyed while living with wealthy friends of his mother; and his love for and eventual marriage with Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), their attractive daughter. Yevgraf also recounts the tragic life of the beautiful Lara, whose widowed mother, a dress-maker, is romantically involved with a wealthy, well-connected cynic named Victor Komarov-sky (Rod Steiger). Komarovsky soon seduces the teenaged Lara. When Lara’s mother learns of this affair, she tries to commit suicide but is saved by a prominent physician who, coincidentally, is Zhivago’s mentor. Zhivago meets Lara for the first time while accompanying the physician on this emergency call. He sees her again later, at a high-society Christmas party, where she arrives with a gun and tries to kill Komarovsky, who has recently raped her, but only succeeds in wounding him. Having destroyed her old life, she marries a young, idealistic revolutionary named Pasha (Tom Courtenay), who has long loved her.

Lean depicts ruling-class extravagance and brutal czarist oppression, but he shows disaster truly descending on Russia during World War I. Practically all the major characters suffer not only during that war but also during the ensuing revolution, the resulting civil war, and the final establishment of Communism. Pasha volunteers and is soon apparently killed (although he later reemerges as a brutal revolutionary nicknamed “Strelnikov”). In the meantime, Zhivago, serving as a frontline physician, accidentally encounters Lara again. Although searching for Pasha, she soon begins assisting Zhivago as a nurse. Love develops, but their true affair only begins later, after both have moved east, away from Moscow. Zhivago, torn between his love for his devoted wife and little son and his secret passion for Lara, eventually loses touch with the now-pregnant Tonya when he is kidnapped by partisans needing a doctor’s services.

When he finally escapes and begins looking for his wife and children, he learns that they have been exiled. But he does meet Lara again, and they enjoy a brief, precarious bliss. Eventually the hard-edged Komarovsky shows up and tries to persuade them to flee further east with him, to safety. Although Zhivago refuses, the pregnant Lara goes, intent on protecting the child she is carrying—the child who is later tracked down, as an adult, by Yevgraf. Zhivago himself has one more chance encounter with Lara when he is older, worn down, and extremely weak. He sees her walking in a Moscow street, but unfortunately, she does not see him. When he tries to chase her, a heart attack kills him. Lara does, however, briefly attend his funeral, as he has become a famous poet who has written a whole series of popular poems about her.

The film above all is a love story. Although the character of Zhivago is sometimes condemned as a self-centered philanderer who cheated on a loving, loyal, intelligent, and beautiful wife, the complexity of the romantic relationships is realistic and compelling. Zhivago has also been criticized as passive, but he does display physical strength, bravery, and endurance, especially when he trudges for months across grim frozen landscapes driven only by a passion to return to his long-lost wife and child. Furthermore, virtually all the major characters are sympathetic, rounded human beings whose motives and behaviors seemed both comprehensible and morally complicated. Even the obvious villains—Komarovsky and Strelnikov—cannot be dismissed as mere brutes. Steiger as Komarovsky, in particular, is a fascinating rogue: suave and cruel, abusive and eloquent.

The film’s physical settings are as vividly memorable as the characters. The diverse landscapes and changing seasons become characters in themselves: the early beauty of snow-covered Moscow; the blood-covered streets of the capital after imperial troops cut down peaceful protestors; the depressing makeshift hospital, packed with wounded soldiers; the endless, unforgettable train ride in a stinking cattle car, into which Zhivago and his family are packed with scores of other suffering people; the stunning speed of the short, clean, bright-red train that races by, carrying the fearsome Strelnikov. Perhaps above all is the haunting beauty of the snow-and ice-saturated dilapidated mansion where Lara and Zhivago enjoy a few weeks of fragile, loving peace together before Komarovsky reappears.

Lean effectively employed similarities and contrasts of all sorts. The movie both opens and closes with scenes of Yevgraf talking with Zhivago’s daughter. Early in the film, Zhivago sits next to Lara on a streetcar, not suspecting her later significance in his life, and near the end he sees her again from yet another streetcar, just before he collapses, dead, while trying to pursue her. Sharif changes from a fresh-faced, bright-eyed young man to a wrinkled, worn-down, worn-out old man whose heart is broken both symbolically and in fact. Similarly, Pasha changes from a young, determined idealist into the dreaded, hard-hearted killer Strelnikov. The film shows history’s often tragic impact on individuals, but it also shows the courage and resilience some people muster to cope with tragedies they cannot escape.

Love is a major theme of the film, but the love presented is not sappy. It is instead hard-won and difficult to preserve, and the film manages to present characters who seem ethically complex: Zhivago both loves his wife and cheats on her; he both loves Lara and knows that his love in some ways is wrong. Lara deceives her mother with her mother’s boyfriend but still manages to seem, especially by the end of the film, like a young woman who learns from her mistakes. Even Komarovsky has his good points, especially near the end, when it is he who prevents Lara and the baby she is carrying from being slaughtered, whatever his darker motives.

But the film, importantly, resists any easy, happy ending. Tanya, the now-grown daughter of Lara and Zhivago, may have some hope of happiness in her future, but she probably will never experience the kind of opulence and prospects her father enjoyed when he was her age. If the movie ends with a shot of a rainbow, that shot is simply one last reminder, by Lean, that nature can be beautiful even when humans make a mess of their own and others’ lives.

Significance

Lean’s film at first received chilly responses from prominent reviewers. Many attacked him and Bolt for treating a major historical period as mere backdrop to a love story. They thought the movie simplified the book’s plot, structure, character, and themes and showed more interest in panoramas of stunning landscapes than in insightful treatment of larger issues or complex characters. The film was often condemned as sentimental. But the public soon disagreed. Helped by a twenty-minute cut from the first version of the film, an expensive publicity campaign, and a brief, recurring musical motif that became an earworm, Doctor Zhivago became, and has remained, one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

In the twenty-first century Doctor Zhivago is considered a classic and remains popular with viewers. Critical opinion has improved not only in the West but also in Russia, and the film has been both shown and taught since the fall of the Soviet Union. In some ways, the movie has fared better than the book: few literary critics now regard Pasternak’s novel as nearly as important as it first seemed, and it is probably more often the film that leads people to the book rather than vice versa. Although at first regarded by some critics as too romantic and insufficiently historical, Lean’s movie now seems anything but naïve in its depiction of the ways historical change can crush the lives of individual persons and of whole societies.

Further Reading

Bibliography