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Summary: THE LAST CHAPTER
Review: I read and re-read this book during my course and I didn't like at first but later I fell in love with poetry of Zhivago(Pasternak) which is the centre of the book.Seems so hermetic and far from the plot and yet it explains it perfectly.Every rhyme is an echo of lines in the novel and it has so many levels of reading and interpretation that you just can't but explore them from day to day.His poetry is incredibly rich both in human and evangelic direction.To be read in Russian otherwise translation takes everything away.I really do recommend it.
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Summary: Doctor Zhivago
Review: Doctor Zhivago is a beautiful book about life, love, war and peace set during the Russian Revolution of 1917. The novel follows the intertwined lives of Yurii Andreievich Zhivago and Larisa Feodorovna Antipova as well as tracing the course of the civil war/Bolshevik revolution. By the end of the book I truly cared for Yurii and Lara. Dr Z is a great love story and also an educational book about Russian history and culture in general. The first 150 pages are rather slow reading and the long names are at first impossible to keep straight, but stick with this book. It'll be worth it. ( I would rate this book 4 and a half stars if possible-half a star less than perfect because of the confusion over names)
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Summary: The D.H. Lawrence of Russia
Review: Actually, making that comment insults Pasternak beyond belief. While DZ is sometimes fantastically rich in its imagery, it rarely evokes much emotion for the contrived characters; (...) I have never read a more beautiful nature description than the "spring passage" in all of Russian literature this century. Pasternak is obviously a talented writer, but the long treatises on the place of Jews, the messages of Jesus (and so on and so forth), are just forced and too abstractly intellectual to take a natural place in any prose, much less a text which is already sorely lacking in 'real' people in the first place. A great book, but falling far short on certain fronts.
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Summary: A Great Love Story of the Russian Revolution!
Review: The story of one man's struggle to love two women set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolutiion. To quote Omar Sharif, "Once you get past the first hundred pages and figure out all of the names," it's a great book!
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Summary: A Book To Read and Re-Read
Review: This book may be confusing, but the author never intended this to be a straightforward novel about life...he was indeed trying to capure life in all it's spontaneity with imperfect characters amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution...Pasternak is not attempting to paint a full canvas here but providing us with sketches that try to capture scenes from life much the way poetry does...there is something almost mystical about the book...certian details about the passing world described around the endearing yet weak characters...I also recommend "My Sister Life" which is a collection of Pasternak's poems...which will show you that perhaps Pasternak is at heart a poet...who wrote this remarkable book
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Summary: The best book about Russian revolution!
Review: I really mean it! It is the best book ever written about that dark period of time. At last I found a novel that shows not only Lenin and his helpers but ordinary people(not heros!), their lives and sufferings during the Great Revolution. Five stars. If I could, I'd give it six! Really, a masterpiece of Pasternak. Unfortunately, there isn't any other novel written by him.
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Summary: Zhivago is life and art
Review: Before anyone should decide whether or not Doctor Zhivago is a good book, they must look into themselves and see what it is they are about, what they love, and what affects them. As with any book, there are going to be those who feel that Zhivago is horrible because famous and illustrious novelists (like Mr. Nabokov) did not agree with the approach Pasternak took to writing his novel (but Nabokov also criticized Dostoevsky's books for quite the same reasons, so does this mean that Crime and Punishment and The Idiot and Karamazov are not artistic novels?). Before anyone decides to defer to Nabokov's opinion, he should realize why Nabokov said those things. Reading a Nabokovian book is so much different from Doctor Zhivago. Nabokov's novels are well planned out, with biblical, Shakespearean, and Poe-etical imagery aplenty. His language in general, in every novel, short story, and poem, is spectacular and to be worshipped. His themes dealt with extraordinary events in common life. Nabokov is an artist in the sense of a Renaissance painter.But Pasternak is not that way, almost quite the opposite. He set out to write a great novel, and I suppose he has done so in many circles of readers. And of those, I am sure that many think the book is great because of the epic events (the revolution), the epic characteristics (the journey), and the eternal themes (love and war, death and separation). But what great book by Tolstoy doesn't have those? What I see with Doctor Zhivago is the way Pasternak treats everyday, common place events. This is the best book, the only book, I have read to take normal events, ones which I see myself going through everyday, and put them into words that are poetic, flowing, and so representative of the truth. The characters may not rival those of Dickens, or the plot may have loopholes and deadends which scream at you HORRIBLE, but those are not the only, or even the most important, characteristics of a novel which defines its greatness. For this book to be considered art, it shouldn't be looked at with a mathematician's eye, quantifying how many cardboard characters there are, how often Pasternak expounds his own philosophy in similar ways with different characters, or how many times a chapter pops up which is totally different in style and format to the rest of the book and detracts from the novel's flow. Art is not an additive process, but something that occurs inside of the reader, viewer, or listener. And for a book in the last half of the 20th century to create that makes it special, and something to be respected. At least for me. This book has done more inside of me than any other. Not because of its flimsy characters or loose plot arrangement, but because of how it describes life with the poet's simplicity, and creates art from such a simple life.
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Summary: Really confusing story
Review: I had always wanted to read this book, when I did I was very disappointed. I thought that the book was very confusing and I couldn't sit down very long reading this book before falling asleep, even if it was in the middle of the day. Lara made me sick, I couldn't stand her. I felt sorry for the entire Zhivago family. There were a few parts in the book that were good, but not many. If you want to have a good nap in the middle of the day read this book.
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Summary: Doctor Zhivago is passionate and is a poetic genius.
Review: Doctor Zhivago is so much more than what words can express. A love so strong, a war so wrong and a poet of deep passion. Discriptive words from Pasternak opens your mind to a world of greatness and sadness.
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Summary: A Middlebrow Masterpiece.
Review: Let's get something straight: "Doctor Zhivago" is a didactic--not an artistic--novel; that is, "Doctor Zhivago" is a vehicle for Pasternak's ideas and not his art. And, as ART this pretentious lecture is an utter flop. Also, "Doctor Zhivago" is quintessentially monologic rather than dialogic, all important characters speaking with the same tiresome voice--Pasternak's. But don't take my word for it, consider the following, more weighty, evaluations: * "Doctor Zhivago, a feeble production, though an important one." --Georgy Adamovich * "The novel `Doctor Zhivago'...is unworthy to stand beside Pasternak's own earlier work" --Andrew Field * "DOCTOR ZHIVAGO--which may brim with human interest but is wretched art and platitudinous thought." --Vladimir Nabokov * "From this [artistic] point of view Zhivago is a sorry thing, clumsy, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite characters." --Vladimir Nabokov * "[Doctor Zhivago is] flat, clumsy, labored, and embarrassingly crude." --Isaac Deutscher * "Pasternak's novel [Doctor Zhivago] is evidently the work of a poet untrained in the disciplines of novel writing, impatient of all restraints, incapable of keeping his characters in exact focus, and strangely incompetent in his management of many of the episodes in the novel..." --Robert Payne One glaring shortcoming in the writing is its uniformly weak characterization, and Pasternak admitted this much himself. (Lara Guisher's ridiculous introduction as "the purest being in the world," p.25, makes me cringe every time I read it.) Pasternak fancied himself a philosopher, and under the ponderous weight of Pasternak's dopey philosophy his characters become mere mouthpieces for his ideas. Forced by the pressure of his underlying doctrine, a dizzying parade of characters pop in, sputter out some philoso-babble, and then disappear. Ironically, for a writer who preached the primacy of the individual, Pasternak's characters appear as banal, paper-thin caricatures. Like all purveyors of didactic fiction, Pasternak's literary calculus is dominated by the equation "character=idea," a proven artistic failure. The corncobby Zhivago is nothing more than a poorly disguised stand-in for Pasternak, whose inability to create a complex, original character, combined with his superficial attempts to dissociate himself from the bumbling doctor, left poor Zhivago without an identity--a common problem with self-indulgently autobiographical pseudo-fiction. Again, I'm not alone in my basic opinion: * "[The characters] lack vitality, they are contrived." --Anna Akhmatova * "The main figures aren't alive; they're made of cardboard, and the most cardboardy of the lot is Doctor Zhivago himself." --Lidiya Chukovskaya * "Doctor Zhivago himself is neither a Zhivago nor a doctor: that is, he has done nothing to earn his surname (a variation of the Russian adjective `zhivoy,' alive) because he is so lifeless..." --Ronald Hingley The narrative is another weakness. The mawkish evocations of love are so saccharine my eyes would roll like the tumblers in a slot machine. Worse still is Pasternak's propensity to tell the reader explicitly what to think of a given character (or, equivalently, idea) before he elaborates in journalistic fashion. Other passages are simply pathetic (e.g., "...the man screamed, and with one great shudder he gave up the ghost," p. 118). The poetry may be excellent, but unfortunately poetry does not translate. The lines "To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing" from the poem "Explanation" are delightfully bad in any language, however. In "Doctor Zhivago" Pasternak's philosophy of life is not so much lived as it is ponderously pontificated in a tiresome series of "impromptu lecture[s]," "wordy dissertation[s]," and journal transcriptions. The actual ideas are mostly muddled and derivative, but who really cares? Literature (art in general) is not about advancing philosophical ideas, social or political causes, nor is it concerned with crypto-symbolic mumbo jumbo; philistines see art in this way. The artistic experience is always undermined by expositions of naked ideas and socio-political generalizations, which is why didactic fiction, in general, fails as art. (by the way, didactic novels are middlebrow rather than highbrow.) Everyone quoted above was, to my knowledge, an admirer of Pasternak's early poetry and some even found something of redeeming value in this book. Sure, there are a few--a very few--splendid passages which elevate "Doctor Zhivago" to the very top of the literary trash heap, but most of the book is so poorly executed that it serves best as a case study in bad literary technique. A novel should be judged as a whole--and here I differ with Pasternak's views on art which are inartistically reported in the book--all the constituent details and particulars orchestrated according to an original style so as to evoke a unique experience. When the details stink, the whole invariably stinks. Zhivago stinks. Period.
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