Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney

    This is a hard book to evaluate. I did not like it nearly as much as my other work of Russian literature, War and Peace. Doctor Zhivago was similarly difficult due to having so many named characters with so many different names, but it lacked something greater that War and Peace had. Doctor Zhivago feels bleaker, and with fewer likeable characters. I found Yuri, the main character, to be pretentious and selfish. He goes off on these long soliloquies and the whole thing feels like Pasternak writing himself into the book and being obsessed with his own genius. Very full of himself for a guy who is barely able to feed himself by the end of the book.

    Part of the reason the book was so dark and depressing was that the commentary is that the old order in Russia was bad, but the new one was even worse. It covers a really dark time in Russian history, so the whole book is really depressing from the 1905 Revolution through World War Two. All the passages I highlighted are depressing. Things like, "All around, people continued to deceive themselves, to talk endlessly. Everyday life struggled on, by force of habit, limping and shuffling. But the doctor saw life as it was. It was clear to him that it was under sentence. He looked upon himself and his milieu as doomed. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. Their days were counted and running out before his eyes." I would say the only happy passages are describing nature or his love for Lara, the woman who he cheats on his wife with. So the whole leaving his wife and children over and over to be with Lara wasn't super pleasant in that context. 

    I'm not sure whether or not I was supposed to like Yuri by the end of the book. My dislike of him tarnished the end of the book for me because I was just sick of this guy. Doctor Zhivago was well-written and especially interesting for its criticisms of the Soviet Union, but those criticisms are less profound when the whole world agrees with them now. Doctor Zhivago the character "seemed always to be in a hurry to decide that he was not getting anywhere, and the spoke with too much conviction and almost satisfaction of the futility of undertaking anything further." There it is- he's just a boring guy. The book itself feels like it's lost some of its edge without the looming Soviet Union trying to suppress it.

Miscellaneous:

• A quote about art that I liked: "Only the familiar transformed by the genius is truly great."
• Another quote, that wraps up Lara's story: "One day Larisa Feodorovna went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north."