Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago stands out, in my opinion, because it is a paradox. It is a Nineteenth Century novel written in, and adapted to, the Twentieth Century. It is a poem in prose. It supports Christian ideas without many over references to Christ. It rejects utopias without being overtly dystopian or anti-utopian. Ultimately, it is aesthetically pleasing without sacrificing the ideas that made novels like those of Dostoevsky popular.

I refer to Dostoevsky because Pasternak is, in many ways, a successor to Dostoevsky’s thought. Doctor Zhivago is, in substance, an answer and a continuation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Zhivago, which means “living”, would be translated into Greek as Zosima (if it were a name), which is the name of the saintly teacher of Alesha in Karamazov. Beyond surface associations of this sort, there is a deeper, stronger connection with Dostoevsky’s last work and Pasternak’s only long novel.

Specifically, Pasternak takes up the standard of Dostoevsky’s view of Christianity and its meaning for Russia and Russians. He also takes up the criticism of socialism and utopian thinking that Dostoevsky set forth in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. In the Soviet state that was built upon the Russian Revolution, as in the Grand Inquisitor’s prophecy of the future, good and evil were replaced by poor and rich, respectively. Under the banner of “Bread”, the hungry masses declared that wealth was evil and poverty was holy. Dostoevsky did not go farther than that (in The Demons he did say that a socialist state would turn on enemies, that it would always have enemies, and that this was because it had less to do with helping the poor or suffering and more to do with envy and punishment of the rich or the happy, but this theme was not developed as much in Pasternak’s work).

Pasternak patterns his work after Dostoevsky in his own idiosyncratic manner, however. His praise of Christianity is due to the fact that Christ made the individual valuable. Each life was a miracle and each person was to be accorded the freedom to choose how to live. The Old Testament miracles were all geographic and external. The New Testament miracles were personal. Thus, the individual is the focus of Christianity, and this destroyed the cult of god-kings and priest-emperors, the adoration of humans and the view that subjects of a king were nothing more than objects to be used, abused or disposed of at his divine will.

This view required that Pasternak discuss the Revolution and the Soviet aftermath in human, personal terms. Tsarist Russia isn’t Tsarist Russia; it is Antonina Gromeko. Russia itself is personalized. She’s a bit old-fashioned and perhaps has some odd ideas, but she’s still beautiful and regal. Yuri grew up knowing her and she feels comfortable and safe. She may not inspire him or touch him deeply, but he decides to build a future with her because he hasn’t found anything better. Like Yuri’s choice of the medical profession, he’s choosing something safe.

We know, though, that Yuri is filled with profound emotions. He is passionate about life, and his choice of the medical profession is a tortured way of sublimating his desire to live by helping others to live. He is vicariously living through others, but he really at heart is a poet, and to be a poet one must suffer and live one’s own life.

Enter Lara. Lara is the Revolution. Every place she goes, every thing she does, touches on the simmering cauldron of discontent. She is connected with Tiverzin, with Antipov and with Komarovsky, and all of them are about revolution (in their own ways). Tiverzin is the true proletarian, fighting for a better life, and probably represents the anarchists. Antipov is the idealist and is almost certainly a representativ of the Social Revolutionary party (the SRs). Komarovsky, spoiled, and pompous, is a Bolshevik through and through. He also represents Mayakovsky, whom Pasternak loathed at a personal level, and so much of his base hypocrisy and shameless self-prostitution are reflected in a variety of barbs that only someone who knew Mayakovsky would appreciate.

Lara, though, is the Revolution, and that means life and freedom. Yuri follows her to the front, entranced and hypnotized, and is passionately and madly in love with her. He throws away everything he knew – all of the old Russia and its safety are abandoned, and he knows that he ultimately has to let go of it – to chase after life and freedom. His first poem was written when he sees the candle in the window as Lara and Pasha are talking, which shows that the true poet, the person who lives and suffers, is born.

From that point on, the book becomes something akin to a Christian life of a saint or Pilgrim’s Progress, as Zhivago follows his life’s calling and suffers as people try to build a heaven on earth that they cannot build (the Grand Inquisitor warned they would blow up the temple of God and build a new Tower of Babel, yet it, like the original, would never be finished). Utopias are, literally, nowhere.

Pasternak’s “Christianity”, however, is closer to what he tells his aunt when she is afraid of death. There is no death, he says. He isn’t espousing orthodoxy, or the Christian religion. He values Christianity for its focus on the individual, but his doxology is in his long monologue that there is no death.

There is, however, a great deal of misunderstanding and misguided notions, a fact that is signaled by the constant misstatement of peoples’ names. Zhivago first ends up in Meluzeevo, which is emblematic of rural or peasant utopias. It is here he takes his swipes at Tolstoy, Saint-Simon and Fourier. Meluzeevo shows the crudeness of the peasantry. There are good people, yes, but they aren’t the people to be running a country. They’re superstitious, envious and spiteful. They kill their officers and don’t listen to anyone. There is no order and nothing gets done. In Zybushino, there is the power of Blazheiko (the name comes from the word for “blessing”), a bizarre mix of Christianity, superstition, mysticism and ignorance. Zhivago does not see anything good in these experiments, and even sees the patent falsehood of the experiments in his encounter with the famous deaf-mute on the train afterwards.

Moscow, Yuriatin and Varykino show a variety of more urban experiments. Moscow is the direct critique of Marxism-Leninism, while Yuriatin and Varykino attack Campanella, More and a host of other utopian thinkers. Yuriatin, though, holds a special place for Zhivago as its name is associated with his – Yuri (a form of Georgi, or George). It is no wonder, then, that he finds Lara in Yuriatin. At the same time, however, he is afraid to live. He is distracted by all the utopian experiments and lets himself get tied down in the past (Tonya). For this he is punished, and spends time in inhuman, animal-like conditions with the partisans. It is probably a metaphor of the Gulag, the ultimate result of all the social experiments. The soldier who shot his officer in Meluzeevo, Panfila Palykh, is there, as are people he met in a variety of different places. They are all in the Gulag because Pasternak’s statement is that ultimately, all of these social experiments lead to suffering, misery and inhumanity to one’s fellow man. In trying to build heaven on earth, we succeed in raising Hell.

Instead, the individual should stop trying to make a paradise and just LIVE. Live, and love, and be free. If each individual made their own lives better, rather than complicating them with grand plans that are unattainable, we would slowly make the world a decent place or, at the very least, not so bad.

When Zhivago returns from his punishment (a spiritual punishment for Zhivago personally as well as a moral lesson about utopias), it is too late. Lara is gone. The Revolution is over. His distractions caused him to lose the moment. All that is left is a grey, dehumanizing and humiliating society, where the ignorant servant Markel is the master, and Zhivago marries his daughter Marina. Zhivago settles for the shattered, ruined, oppressive Russia that remains because it is better than death. However, life becomes a torment for him. He is ridiculed and mistreated, and only after he dies is he honored. The honor can be seen in the return of Lara, the phantom of his life and his love.

Something does survive, though. His daughter is the beginning of a change for Soviet Russia. She’s not particularly well-educated because the Bolsheviks destroyed the past. However, she is doing what Zhivago couldn’t really do – she is living and enjoying life. She isn’t bothering with utopian experiments. She’s fighting a war, and knows she could die any day, but she is living.

Pasternak’s moral is that our personal lives are a great treasure, greater perhaps than the “big ideas” that people fought over. This is how he stands the Nineteenth Century novel on its head. The “big idea” of his novel is that the “big ideas” distract us from our happiness and life. Live, he says, and realize that there is no death. Live and be happy.

And how he says it! Dostoevsky wrote intellectual novels with some nice emotional bits. Pasternak, however, appeals not to our heads, but to our hearts. It is the emotional decisions that matter most in Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak tells us to follow our hearts, and he writes in such a way that we can only read the novel if we listen to those emotions. There is poetry at the end of the book for a reason – this novel is the work of a poet. I am not sure if the poetry comes through in the English translation, but it is there in Russian.

So, then, this is why I like Pasternak. He holds in contempt those who would build grand schemes and treat people like objects to be used, and glorifies those who live, and love and hope. I think that makes for great reading.