Doctor Zhivago

The subtractive test finds a required spine and a great deal that could go. Required: the boy at his mother’s grave, his father’s suicide from the train that Misha Gordon witnesses, the candle in the window on Kamergersky Lane on the night Lara fires at Komarovsky, the front at Meliuzeevo, Varykino, the death on the tram, Lara at the coffin, and the poems, which are what the life was for. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what could go without the book losing a fact it needs: Liberius’s long harangues in the partisan camp, much of the talk among Gordon, Dudorov and Yuri, the Kubarikha episode, and a fair share of the Epilogue, whose story of Tanya the laundress restates by report what the novel has shown. Perhaps a sixth of the whole. The coincidences are not charged here; they are the book’s law.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: history made into a programme is the enemy of life, and a person keeps faith with life by attending to what history cannot administer, love, work with the hands, the seasons, a poem written at night. Strelnikov is the disclosure in a person: the idealist made executioner, the man who wished to remake life and has stopped seeing it, who shoots himself at Varykino after the one conversation in which he speaks as Pasha Antipov again. The book shows the revolution’s first purity and its corruption without caricature, and it shows what the private life costs too: Yuri’s passivity, his failure toward Tonya, his decline in Moscow. Held off the top because the disclosure is often stated in talk rather than shown, and the book’s idea of life is asserted against politics more than tested.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The book rises often, and its height is in nature and in the fusion of nature with feeling. The ceiling of the prose is the winter at Varykino: the house under snow, Lara and Katya asleep, Yuri writing by lamplight while the wolves gather on the ravine and become in his poems the enemy at the door. Others: the train east through the Urals, the spring thaw, the rowan in the snow that Yuri addresses as Lara, and Lara’s lament over his coffin, among the great laments of the novel. The poems rise more often than the prose: “Winter Night”, with its candle and the shadows of crossed arms and legs on the ceiling, “August”, where the poet foresees his own funeral, and the Passion poems that close the cycle. Held below the top because the prose between the summits is uneven, and the sublime is sometimes signalled by the narrator rather than earned by the scene.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Part built, part evoked. Built: the Christian frame bears the weight of the poems, where Hamlet on the stage of history becomes Christ in Gethsemane, the actor praying that the cup pass from him, and the cycle closes with the Passion, so that Yuri’s life is read as a sacrifice. The two Magdalene poems make Lara a Magdalene, and “A Fairy Tale”, on St George and the dragon, turns the rescue of Lara into legend. The candle is built: seen from the street, written into the poem, standing at the end in the room where Yuri lies. Evoked: Lara as Russia, a reading the book invites and leaves as atmosphere, and Evgraf, the half-brother who appears from nowhere to save Yuri, a guardian the book never quite makes structural. The archetype holds in the poems more fully than in the prose that leads to them, and the axis falls a tenth short of the gate.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is the Russian novel of Tolstoy, the novel of history and private lives; against it in 1945 stood the Soviet novel of socialist realism, whose rules the book refuses at every point. Its hero is a doctor and poet who will not serve; the revolution is weighed and found wanting; the Gospel is the frame. The stake was the highest a novelist of the century placed. Pasternak gave the manuscript to Feltrinelli knowing what it could cost, and it cost him the Nobel Prize, which he was forced to decline, and his place in the Writers’ Union. The turn of form is real but smaller: a lyric poet’s novel built on coincidence and recurrence rather than causality, ending in its hero’s poems, a turn that looks back to the nineteenth century’s shape as much as forward. The stake is near the top; the departure of form is not, and the axis scores them together.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The form’s one great decision bears the weight: the novel ends in the poems, and the prose turns out to have been the life from which they came. Change that and the book stops knowing what it knows, that a life lost to history survives as art, that the winter at Varykino, the candle and the Moscow years become “Winter Night” and “August”. The second decision is the coincidental plot: lives cross by chance across the whole of Russia, and the form says what the book believes, that providence works through accident and history’s design is not the real one. Below that the form is often a container. The episodic middle could be arranged otherwise without loss, and the passing of years in Book Two is told in summary that another shape would have served as well. A book whose crown is formally necessary and whose body is in parts conventional.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The evidence is mixed and real. The book has drawn sustained re-examination for nearly seventy years: as a cause of the Cold War, as a religious novel, as a novel of the poet’s vocation, and since 2014 in the documentary history of its publication, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée’s The Zhivago Affair. Its poems are read and set on their own, and “Hamlet” and “Winter Night” are among the best known poems of the Russian century. It yields on return in the poems, in its network of recurring images, the candle, the rowan, the train, the snow, and in the questions it leaves open about Yuri’s passivity. The return is less rich in the prose itself, whose ideas are stated rather than buried, and much of what has been written about the book has been about the affair rather than the novel.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is the Russian novel of the twentieth century and, as the book entered the world, the European and American novel of the Cold War. The intrinsic force is moderate. It showed that the large novel of history could be written in Russian against the state’s account of that history, and that a lyric poet’s prose and a cycle of poems could carry it; but its method renewed the nineteenth-century form more than it reorganised possibility, and the more formative Russian prose of the century, Bulgakov’s, Platonov’s and later Solzhenitsyn’s, took other roads. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as an event the reach is very large. It made the publication of forbidden Soviet literature abroad a practice, opened the road tamizdat took, and stands behind the reception of Solzhenitsyn and Grossman in the West; David Lean’s film of 1965 carried it to an audience few novels reach. Reach as event outstrips reach as method.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over sixty-nine years in print, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as Pasternak finished it. The thirty years of suppression in the Soviet Union are charged lightly, since the Russian text circulated abroad from 1958 and in samizdat, and was published at home in 1988. Presence: wide and continuous, in print in many languages since 1957, translated afresh into English twice, by Pevear and Volokhonsky in 2010 and by Marian Schwartz in 2011, and carried by Lean’s film and by later adaptations for television. Fabric: the Cold War cause that first carried it has passed, and the book is still read; its surface is not fixed to its moment. The figure sits at the top of the usual band for its span and a tenth below the widest, because much of its presence runs through the film and the affair rather than through the reading of the novel.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged on the original as far as translation lets it be seen; the sound of the Russian sentence and the metre of the poems lie beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. The command is uneven, and the unevenness shows across translations. At its height the prose is a poet’s: nature seen exactly and in motion, weather and season rendered as events, the winter at Varykino and the journey east. The poems are the work of a master in full command, short lyrics in strict forms whose making bears weight. Against that: characterisation thin outside the three central people; many characters who speak in one voice, the author’s; years passed over in summary; coincidence the reader feels as the author’s hand at least as often as providence’s; dialogue that states ideas rather than dramatising them. The poems hold the axis where it stands; the prose alone would stand lower.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the chronicle of the Civil War in the partisan camp, with its executions and its political talk, and the twenty-five lyrics of Part 17, with their gardens, snow and Gospel. They obey one law, the law the book states and shows: life is a gift that comes by chance and is kept by attention, and history, which claims to govern it, does not. The coincidences obey that law. They are the book’s providence, and in a book that holds providence they are no breach. Where the law bends is in register: the satiric and political pages, the long conversations and the Epilogue’s flat report sit in a different key from the lyric centre, and the reader hears two instruments. The range is very wide, and the joint between its parts shows.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Held, not listed, across thirty years of Russian history in one life. Consciousness, in Yuri’s perception and his poems. The family: the Gromekos, Tonya and the children, the Antipovs, Lara’s daughter Katya and the lost daughter Tanya. Love, in three marriages or near-marriages. Work: medicine at the front, in typhus Moscow and with the partisans, and the work of the hands at Varykino, the planting and the wood. The state and history: 1905, the war of 1914, February and October, the Civil War, the New Economic Policy and its end. The sacred, in the Gospel frame and the poems. The natural order, everywhere. Art, as the end of the life. Yuri’s perception joins them. Held a step down because society beyond the central lives is drawn thinly, and the peasantry and the city are seen more than inhabited.

Score: 8.8 / 10