-------------------- [excerpt, Doctor Zhivago - Pasternak - 1957] ----------------- This was Yura's second trip with his uncle to Duplyanka. He thought he remembered the way, and every time the fields spread out, forming a narrow border around the woods, it seemed to him he recognized the place where the road would turn right and disclose briefly a view of the six-mile-long Kologrivov estate, with the river gleaming in the distance and the railway beyond it.
But each time he was mistaken. Fields followed fields and were in turn lost in woods. These vast expanses gave him a feeling of freedom and elation. They made him think and dream of the future.
Not one of the books that later made Nikolai Nikolaievich famous was yet written. Although his ideas had taken shape, he did not know how close was their expression.
Soon he was to take his place among contemporary writers, university professors, and philosophers of the revolution, a man who shared their ideological concern but had nothing in common with them except their terminology. All of them, without exception, clung to some dogma or other, satisfied with words and superficialities, but Father Nikolai had gone through Tolstoyism and revolutionary idealism and was still moving forward.
He passionately sought an idea, inspired, graspable, which in its movement would clearly point the way toward change, an idea like a flash of lightning or a roll of thunder capable of speaking even to a child or an illiterate. He thirsted for something new. ---------------------- [end, excerpt] -----------------------------
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---------------- [excerpt, The Zhivago Affair] ----------------- Pasternak was lost in thought. Chukovsky, Pasternak's neighbor, thought he had a "somnambulistic quality" -- "he listens but does not hear" while away in the world of his own thoughts and calculations.
Pasternak had an uncompromising certainty about his writing, its genius, and his need to have it read by as wide an audience as possible. The writer was convinced that Doctor Zhivago was the culmination of his life's work, a deeply authentic expression of his vision, and superior to all of the celebrated poetry he had produced over many decades. "My final happiness and madness," he called it.
Both epic and autobiographical, the novel revolves around the doctor-poet Yuri Zhivago, his art, loves, and losses in the decades surrounding the 1917 Russian Revolution. After the death of his parents, Zhivago is adopted into a family of the bourgeois Moscow intelligentsia. In this genteel and enlightened setting, he discovers his talents for poetry and healing....
Upon his return to his family in 1917, Zhivago finds a changed city. Controlled by the Reds, Moscow is wracked by the chaos of revolution and its citizens are starving. The old world of art, leisure, and intellectual contemplation has been erased. Zhivago's initial enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks soon fades. ------------------------------------------ [end, excerpt] -----------------
{The Zhivago Affair, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée. Vintage Books, Random House, New York. 2015.}
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