A Wild Ride Through History, But Not Exactly a Literary Masterpiece

I'll admit it, reading 'Doctor Zhivago' was a bit of a slog, but watching the film first made it a lot easier. The author paints a vivid picture of the events leading up to World War I in Russia, and it's a wild ride from revolution to civil war, and then the slow decline into a post-war era of complete devastation and ruin.

It's like trying to follow a complex, real-life drama, with characters getting pulled in every direction. In 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' too, this period is described, but no one has captured 'the feelings and rhythm of those times' like Pasternak. Pasternak managed to show the underside of war, the scale of the tragedy of the population. Through his characters, he portrays the tragedy of the middle class, the true elite of society, who first realized how they'd been deceived and drowned in blood. In the Soviet hierarchy, there were actually smart people working in the ideological department, but they immediately understood the danger of this book. Although, in my opinion, the novel doesn't represent any special value from a literary standpoint. The plot is hasty, disjointed, and individual lines have neither logical nor narrative continuation. The inner turmoil of the characters isn't anti-Soviet enough to ban the book. The novel is about how the new era turned out to be far crueler, soulless, and two-faced than the previous one. It wasn't the time people thought it would be, but a completely different, much worse one. Read the pages where Doctor Zhivago's life is described after the revolution, before he left for Siberia. When he worked in the hospital, I felt like I was condemning the Soviet regime.And the entire novel has a central idea that there's no future for thinking people under this system, unless they behave like everyone else. Everything else I thought about after reading the novel is secondary. What I got was an answer to the question of why this novel was banned. I've got to say, it's crazy that Pasternak initially submitted his novel to Soviet publishers, only for the Italian communists to try and duplicate it. But Boris was in a rush to tackle the anti-cult theme, and that's when things started to get murky - especially in Italy, where they were releasing their own version. That's what they called 'overseas', code for forbidden.Considering Pasternak was a high-flyer in the Soviet elite, earning thousands of rubles a month from translations in the 50s, when the average salary was just 60 rubles. It's no wonder the Writers' Union came down hard on him when the politicized Nobel Prize controversy started, forcing him to withdraw his nomination. Compared to the likes of 'Roads to Freedom' by Alexei Tolstoy or 'Life of Klim Samgin' by Maxim Gorky, this novel feels like a secondary Soviet effort, relying on familiar tropes of the time. So, after Pasternak's pre-war prose, this novel looks like a classic attempt by a seasoned writer to make a mark and capture the essence of the era.As a poet, writer, or creative person, how do you avoid getting tangled up in politics within your own work? You can't! Politics seep into every aspect of our lives, from Sunday mass to kids' cartoons. But to create something worth reading, watching, or listening to, you need to figure out who you are, why you're here, what you're doing, how you want to live, and who you want to be. If your answers are honest, both to yourself and society, then your work won't be above politics - it'll be above it, and that's what makes it valuable! I've seen a lot of creative types get caught up in the politics and ideologies of their time, and that's exactly what happened to Pasternak and others like him. They knew that the power they lived under might not accept them, and they had a choice - leave or become loyal to the authorities.Take Tolstoy and Sholokhov, for example. They both wrote about the struggles of living under oppressive regimes in their works, like Tolstoy's 'Roads to Freedom' and Sholokhov's 'Quiet Don'. It's like they were trying to figure out the basics of life. The main character in the book, Dr. Zhivago, is basically Pasternak himself. You can't get much more honest than that. So, reading the book is like reading Pasternak's own story and seeing how he dealt with the challenges of his time.When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized something else that's relevant to our generation. We're so caught up in our own desires for comfort, wealth, and luxury, and we've forgotten what's truly important - things like honor, dignity, and compassion.But the thing is, all of that can come crashing down in an instant, and you're left facing the harsh realities of life. It's a wake-up call, really, to remind us that history repeats itself and that we're not immune to the same struggles that our ancestors faced.