Yesterday, on a quiet Saturday afternoon found me finished with my weekend round of planting the sixteen new rustic pots that I carefully placed (and Kim even more carefully adjusted in their placement) along the stone Patio wall on the north side of our barbecue area. It was then that Kim told me that Doctor Zhivago was on Turner Classic Movies. I have become so used to on-demand streaming of movies that it unsettled me to be told that there was something on TV that was just starting and would continue rolling onward whether I was choosing to be ready to watch it or not. I actually found that created a sense of urgency in me to either get with the program or step off and admit that I was not prepared at the moment to commit to the 3 hour and 17 minutes classic released in 1965. Stop and think about that for a moment, that movie was made 60 years ago, based on a novel by Boris Pasternak, a man born in 1890, more or less when my grandfather, who died in 1963, was born,
Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow into an artistic family of Russian-Jewish heritage. His father was an acclaimed artist named Leonid Pasternak and his mother was a renown concert pianist named Rosa Kaufman. His home life surrounded him with the literati of his day with people such as composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aleksandr Skryabin as well as writers Rilke and Lev Tolstoy. Pasternak had a happy childhood, being brought up by prominent intellectuals in a cosmopolitan atmosphere. His own life was something like that of Omar Sharif’s in the movie with him studying at the Moscow Conservatory, publishing a collection of poems and working at a chemical factory in the Urals during WWI. Obviously, all of those experiences were eventually used as material for his novel Doctor Zhivago. There must have been something in the water back in the early 60’s because two of my favorite movies that I will watch over and over again, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, were made then and seem to be immortal and epic tales that speak to the human condition in ways that most films do not. The story of Doctor Zhivago so resonates with the times we are going through now that I was transfixed and watched it all afternoon, marveling at the parallels to our current moment in history.
To recap the story, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the turbulent times in Russia from 1914 through 1922. That timeline starts with the Tsar’s declaration of martial law across Russia in 2014, runs through the violence of 2017 with the ouster and assassination of Tsar Nicholas and his family and the eventual overthrow of the government by the Bolsheviks, all the way through the arduous civil war between white and red Russian forces across the expanse of Russia as the Bolsheviks consolidated power. The story has a backdrop of the macro social trends of elitism in Tsarist Russia, workers revolts and the ravages of extended warfare, both external and internal. But the real story is about people and the reality that people are a strange blend of ideologies and do not fit neatly along ideological lines. There are pure and good people who are forced to do bad things and there are inherently bad people who soften and do good things for others. Imperialists can be good or bad. Bolsheviks can be good or bad. And then there are people who just want to survive or go about their lives without concern for the larger ideological concerns. The main protagonist, Doctor Yuri Zhivago is a courtly, educated and sensitive young doctor who wants more than anything to be left to write poetry, but is continuously conscripted into service to provide medical assistance to Russians on all sides of all conflicts. He is comfortable in evening wear in the palaces of St. Petersburg and yet accommodative to the horrors of an overburdened field hospital and accepting of his need to share whatever he has with the proletariat. He serves everyone’s needs but his own, and yet he too is human and torn between two lovers and his obligations to his own versus the broader people of Russia.
Among the most memorable scenes in the movie are those which take place in the Ural town of Yuriatin at an old family estate called Varykino. The Urals are the boundary in Russia between the sophistication of Moscow and the harshness of Siberia. Varykino is a lone house on the plains in front of the Urals that has the famous onion dome cupolas on the roof that have characterized traditional Russian architecture since the 13th Century. So it looks like a prototypical Russian dacha, where the urban elite go to immerse themselves in the idyllic rural lifestyle. But Zhivago and his family arrive there in mid-winter when the seemingly abandoned house is a veritable palace of ice with snow drifts in the main hall and icicles hanging from the crystal chandeliers. It seems to symbolize the Winter Palace that was so famously overrun by the Bolsheviks and demarcated the beginning of the first communist state. It creates a surreal world that wants to be elegant in its old world style, but must yield to the reality of the harshness of nature. One is torn between the opulence of white Russia and the exigencies of a starving population. In some ways, Varykino is like Zhivago himself, torn between the two worlds and never totally at home in either world. The feebleness of Tonya, his wife from Imperial times, and the survival instincts and pragmatism of Lara, the symbol of the new Russian blend of worker and hedonist is the ultimate juxtaposition of the story. The message? People just want peace and prosperity while idealism lays by the wayside. That feels a lot like what we are starting to feel right now in the world. While the forces of Trump try to break down and then remake our systems and Democratic dogmatists try to reestablish a new New Deal, people on all sides are growing weary and just want to be left in peace to pursue prosperity as they choose to define it.
What Zhivago shows us is that social change is hard, long and messy and there is both goodness and evil that come through in the upheaval. The only imperative is to survive to fight another day. The haunting words of the theme song, Lara’s Theme tell the tale of waiting for that future day.
Somewhere my love there will be songs to sing.
Although the snow covers the hope of Spring, somewhere a hill blossoms in green and gold and there are dreams, all that your heart can hold.
Someday we’ll meet again, my love.
Someday whenever the Spring breaks through, you’ll come to me, out of the long-ago, warm as the wind, soft as the kiss of snow.
Lara, my own, think of me now and then.
Godspeed, my love, till you are mine again.
Warm as the wind, soft as the kiss of snow,
Godspeed, my love, till you are mine again.
Life is beautiful and the sun will rise and the world will renew itself.