#668: Doctor Zhivago
Love is revolutionary — but cheating is business as usual
Initial release: December 22, 1965
Director: David Lean
Yesterday I stumbled upon an article at The American Prospect that discussed two books that stressed the importance of love — for your family, your friends, your neighbors — in building meaningful connections and community. The timing of this is interesting, as later in the evening I watched David Lean’s epic romance, Doctor Zhivago, a tale about a doctor-poet navigating his relationships — both of them — in a world seemingly gone mad in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. His poems — banned. His family home — seized. His wife and children — fled to Paris, eventually. All he has is his lover, whose own family connections make her a target.
Or, to put it another way, this is a story about a guy who has everything but throws it away for an affair with his coworker, and yet the film treats it as this great romance.
Let’s get the good out of the way. David Lean is one of the all-time great epic filmmakers. I quite enjoy his longform work, from Bridge on the River Kwai to Lawrence of Arabia; he made epics in the way movie makers just don’t do anymore, though Oliver Stone and Ridley Scott certainly have tried. He had an eye for cinematography that made his characters feel larger than life; he knew how to string a series of seemingly disparate episodes into a compelling narrative. For all the faults of Doctor Zhivago’s titular protagonist, I can’t deny that Lean makes his story compelling. His hero weaves and winds his way through a vertical slice of a portion of Russian history — from the gilded age of Imperial Russia to the devastation of the Great War, and finally to the frigid and paranoid years of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath — in an almost Forrest Gumpian fashion. The film is a critique of the Soviet experiment, and a frank portrayal of the conditions that led to it, with Yuri Zhivago, and the two women he’s torn between, swept up into history in progress.
Doctor Zhivago is based on a book of the same name by Boris Pasternak, a Soviet poet and author who, like the hero of his novel, found his work censored and himself placed under a cloud of suspicion, and who, like the hero of his novel, cheated on his wife despite his rockstar status as one of Russia’s great poets. (And they say separate the art from the artist…) The novel and subsequent film possess a starkly anti-Soviet character; despite acknowledgment of the miserable inequity of Imperial Russia, the story has much to say about those dark years following the Revolution into the era of Stalin, criticizing collectivization, the purges, the rampant paranoia that would lead a fervent revolutionary and true believer to being marked for elimination by the very Party he fought so hard for.
Though the film is of course condensed from the doorstopper of the book, there’s still quite a cast of characters here. Aside from Yuri Zhivago, there’s also his wife Tonya, who he grew up with after his parents died; Lara, the rather ordinary woman he falls in love with after meeting her at a military field hospital; and there’s also Komarovsky, a sleazy rich bastard who seduces a teenage Lara (leading to her mother’s attempted suicide when she finds out in a sequence that isn’t explained very well in the film) and Pasha, the young revolutionary who marries Lara but eventually abandons her to join the Great War, ultimately disappearing before resurfacing as a cruel Party functionary in the civil war. Also appearing are Tonya’s parents, later reduced to just her father, who seems to take his position as ex-noble in stride despite grieving the death of the Tsar and his family. And tying it all together is Yevgraf, Yuri’s half-brother who, decades later, is searching for the grown daughter of Yuri and Lara’s illicit union.
It’s so interesting to me to contrast the absurd dynamics of Yuri’s relationships — two-timing Tonya, the woman he grew up with who loves him with Lara, a woman he met on the battlefield, alternately breaking up with her then reuniting after his wife and their children evacuate to Paris, only to pine after Lara when they’re split up again, and all of this played as some kind of tragic romance — with an article about revolutionary love. Our society is bombarded with messaging about true love, but society’s idea of true love is often toxic — heteronormative, steeped in ideas of monogamous fidelity and loyalty that are designed to isolate us from our fellow humans. As if the two people (and it’s only ever two people in what society views as a normal or real relationship) in a pairing aren’t whole individuals themselves, with their own connections that they formed outside of their relationship.
Ultimately, I find Pasternak’s story — filtered through David Lean’s camera though it may be — to be profoundly self-serving. Yuri (and Lara) agonize over how wrong it is what they’re doing, yet it doesn’t stop them from having a child together. Yuri even writes poetry about Lara, as if his wife — in Paris — wouldn’t see them eventually when he achieves immense posthumous fame. (We see Tonya one more time, shortly before Yuri is pressganged into a roving band of partisans as a medic; when he finally deserts and returns home, she’s long gone.) The film ends with Yuri dying years after being separated from Lara one last time, Lara herself disappearing into one of Stalin’s gulags, and the whole thing is treated as this great tragic romance — what rot! It’d be different if Yuri was dissatisfied with his marriage to Tonya, but he’s not. Yuri, in his upper-class status (despite his humble origins) proves himself to be a profoundly selfish man, arguably no better than Komarovsky. To think he even judged Lara — who I remind you was 17 at the time — for being abused by Komarovsky, who treats her as a possession even at their last meeting years later.
Love is revolutionary. Love will save the world. But this kind of naked, selfish behavior won’t save anyone. It couldn’t even save Yuri or Lara.
