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A review by korrick
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
1.0
Under the old order, which enabled those whose lives were secure to play the fools and eccentrics at the expense of the others while the majority led a wretched existence, it had been only too easy to mistake the foolishness and idleness of a privileged minority for genuine character and originality.If you're in any way interested in delving into "Western"/Euro + Neo Euro literature, be prepared for tons of Bible fanfiction. Some of it's pretty decent, like 'Paradise Lost'. Others attempt to be just as epic as its source material with uneven results, such as 'Joseph and His Brothers'. Still others read as if the author managed to inject the King James translation straight into their veins à la 'Moby Dick', and I'm sure the as of yet unread 'East of Eden' has its own singular contributions to make. But sometimes, you get something like this: a main character who, upon taking a glance at the modern United States, would probably blame the social unrest on Jewish millionaires and bemoan the nationwide oppression of white Christians, seeing as how the narrative uncritically casts him as a new Jesus figure and the child abuse survivor that he cheated on his wife with (and then cheated on in turn) as Mary Magdalene. Now, I usually don't care what roleplaying contortions the average author puts their characters; indeed, my constantly cross-referencing brain usually delights in ferreting out such subtle interplays that, at their best, both enhance an already venerable complexity and generate a novel masterpiece. However, Pasternak is far more interested in telling you of the ingenious marvels of his characters, themes, and love story than actually proving their right to be called such, and when such straightforward dictation is coupled with roiling antisemitism spewed out from the thoughts and mouths of both his beloved, starstruck lovers, it becomes little short of absolutely pathetic.
"...Incidentally, if you do intellectual work of any kind and live in a town, as we do, half of your friends are bound to be Jews...It's so strange that these people who once liberated mankind from the yoke of idolatry, and so many of whom now devote themselves to its liberation from injustice, should be incapable of liberating themselves from their loyalty to an obsolete, antediluvian identity that has lost all meaning, that they should not rise above themselves and dissolve among all the rest whose religion they have founded and who would be so close to them, if they knew them better.["]That's the Magdalene figure agreeably conversing with the Jesus figure for you and the death knell of this narrative's credibility for me. See, after running into an entire page of a similarly themed digression on Zhivago's part a hundred pages in wherein he called Jewish people an army that brought its agonies on its own head through holding on to their own identity and refusing to dissolve into Christianity, I voiced my trepidation. However, I was willing to keep going to see whether this message was in any way complicated, critiqued, or at least developed into something more interesting than that, if for no other reasons than Pasternak's Jewish heritage and my own commitment to finishing any work begun on this site. A hundred fifty pages later, I had run into nothing of the positive sort before hitting this blowhard chunk, after which I had little hope of doing anything more than trudging through the rest of it. Yes, diabolical historical events and multitudes of characters and dramatic narratives flung across sizable quantities of space and time, but if Yurii Andreievich Zhivago had just submitted to the majority ruled regime and gave up all his culture, ideologies, and heritage in order to fit in, he would have been just fine. Oh, was there a fear of recrimination no matter how much you hid your spots? Oh, are the Powers That Be building up kyriarchical systems that are uncannily zeroed in on you and your loved ones? Oh, do you draw strength a tad too much beliefs whose ancestral transcribers stretch back hundreds, if not thousands, of years to give it up entirely? If only there were a group who had enormous amounts of experience with such, with many members who have been present on the side of those fighting for their rights on many a historical plane. Oh. Wait.
"Of course it's true that persecution forces them into this futile and disastrous attitude, this shamefaced, self-denying isolation that brings them nothing but misfortune. But I think some of it also comes from a kind of inner senility, a historical centuries-long weariness. I don't like their ironical whistling in the dark, their prosaic, limited outlook, the timidity of their imagination. It's as irritation as old men talking of old age or sick people about sickness. Don't you think so?"
When at the beginning of the revolution it had been feared that, as in 1905, the upheaval would be a short-lived episode in the history of the educated upper classes and leave the deeper layers of society untouched, everything possible had been done to spread revolutionary propaganda among the people to upset them, to stir them up and lash them into fury.After reading Goldman's [b:Living My Life, Vol. 2|27699|Living My Life, Vol. 2|Emma Goldman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328865566l/27699._SY75_.jpg|15340500], it's impossible to defend what the Russian Revolution eventually became long before Lenin met his end. What I take issue with is how snidely this narrative mimics Trump in blaming the movement's initially righteous protest on "degenerate" (a fascist dogwhistle for anyone "memeing" these days), "anti-social" elements, as well as its absolutely baffling proclamation for Jewish people to erase themselves in the wake of the Holocaust. Now, it's easy to chalk this stance of mine up to my not having fond memories of any of the films, as well as the general fact of much of my sentiment being burned out of me a long time ago. Still, the flat characters that made tracking rather pointless the further the narrative moved from its bildungsroman beginnings, the repetitious dictation of how the reader should be thinking at such and such a time, the less and less credible glorification of a character who is so eager to pass judgment and so divested from the life that anarchists and socialists sought to figure out for the sake of all: the narrative was best in its descriptions of nature and extremely tedious outside of that. The usual comments about poor translations can be made, and I really did like Larisa/Lara Feodorovna Guishar in her initial incarnation, much as I felt generally favorable about others in their younger years, but this is not a work that needs my revisiting decades down the line. It was a good lesson, at any rate, when it comes to reading for the sake of diversity. The more popularly uplifted and classically lauded a work, the harder it is to tell when an author has something to prove.
In those early days, men like Pamphil Palykh, who needed no encouragement to hate intellectuals, officers, and gentry with a savage hatred, were regarded by enthusiastic left-wing intellectuals as a rare find and greatly valued....
...To Yurii Andreievich this gloomy and unsociable giant, soulless and narrow-minded, seemed subnormal, almost a degenerate.
"How splendid, " she thought, listening to the gun shots. "Blessed are the downtrodden. Blessed are the deceived. God speed you, bullets. You and I are of one mind."A nicely stirring quote. Too bad the rest of the work didn't follow in its footsteps.