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mmzppz 's review for:
Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
One of my favorite scene in the book that will stay with me was when Dr. Zhivago is captured by a red army unit and finds himself in an engagement with them and a white army unit that is trying to flank them. Zhivago (who is a medic and not trusted with a weapon) has nothing else to do but lay low on the ground be a spectator. His conscience starts eating him up though and he feels wrong for just being a spectator as young men are dying so he grabs the weapon of someone lying next to him who is already dead. Zhivago tries to shoot at the white army soldiers but he isn't able to muster up the courage to do so as he sympathies with them as much as his own men. As a result he starts shooting at a small tree but one of the rounds does end up hitting and killing a white army soldier. After the engagement Zhivago sees the young man is still alive and nurses him back to health (lying to his men that he is a newly conscripted red army soldier). Later Zhivago lets him go knowing full well that the young man is going back to fight for the white army. It's a great example of the constant war inside Zhivago between his humanity and his duties. The book shows us the dystopian nightmare that man is capable of creating in this world but also man's firm resolve to not despair in his circumstances, to always hope and to act- as Pasternak puts it.