Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, changed the face of Russian literature. Doctor Zhivago is the story of a man named Yuri during the political upheavals in Soviet Union due to the revolution. It was acclaimed to be successful due to its combination of lyrical, descriptive, and epic dramatic styles. It was translated into eighteen languages, and a big hit in western countries. At its heart, the novel is about the history of Russia in the early twentieth century, told through the viewpoint of a man who fights for freedom of expressing his ideas in a politically corrupt and heartless state. Yuri rebels against societal rules and take a journey to discover who he is and his philosophies in life. Like Yuri, Pasternak faces hardship. He…show more content… Famous for his earlier works, he was strengthened by the faith his readers had in him. Whenever he would read one of his writings, the people listening would help him in remembering the words and wrote letters of respect during the war. The government were scared his influences; due to the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union placed social and economics rules on all classes. Pasternak, as well as other Russian artists, feared the consequences of disobeying communist Russia. “From 1933 to 1943, however, the gap between his work and the official modes (such as Socialist Realism) was too wide to permit him to publish, and he feared for his safety during the purges of the late 1930s. One theory held that Stalin spared him because Pasternak had translated poets of Stalin’s native Georgia.” He was left in the middle, between following his own ideas and those of the all-powerful government; staying true to oneself was challenging when officials pushed for equal labor. Being part of the educated class, he also suffered from an internal conflict of doing right as well as an external…show more content… This was due to the fact many perceived it as a romance novel. During the time, many American literary works were romanticized, and so outside works were analyzed and branded with themes of love and yearning. Without any look into the cultural aspect, Doctor Zhivago was a novel about a man and his history of lovers. In the novel, he says, “Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.” Much like the events in his life, Pasternak touches on how one cannot know what life is until it is looked at beyond a materialistic or fabricated view. Everyone loved the relationship between the characters in the novel, but no one looked beyond it to understand the symbolism or the motifs crafted by Pasternak. His themes of and philosophy are key in the reason for writing such a piece of literature, and his fictionalized history serves a greater objective than to entertain the reader. Regardless of how the
