As the year 1965 was coming to an end, movie lovers were treated to the release of a massive Hollywood production that would become an all-time classic: Metro Goldwyn Meyer’s Dr. Zhivago, directed by David Lean. With a budget of 11 million dollars and box office profits rising over the years to over 111 million dollars, Dr. Zhivago competed at the Oscars against The Sound of Music for the most nominations (ten), earning five awards that included one for best screenplay adaptation from Boris Pasternak’s novel. For screenwriter Robert Bolt, adapting a roughly five-hundred-page novel with subplots gathered “like cobwebs” around the main love story proved to be frustratingly difficult, but also rewarding. Sixty years later, Dr. Zhivago is still celebrated around the world as a cinematic masterpiece about love’s enduring force against political turmoil and upheavals.
The upheaval, in this case, is the rise of communism brought by the Russian Revolution, from its earlier, failed attempts in 1905 to 1917 and its aftermath, marked by civil war and the instauration of the Soviet regime. I first watched the film when I arrived in the U.S., having left behind Eastern Europe and the Cold War but still feeling the hold of both. Before 1989, Lean’s movie had achieved almost a cult status in the socialist bloc. Those who managed to get a hold of it on a VHS tape were enthralled by the sheer fact that Westerners could see—in bright colors— the destruction wrought by communism. Re-watching the film on its 60th anniversary, I cringed at some of the details I ignored thirty years ago, from turning history into a prop for a saccharine love story, to the phoniness of English phrases like “old chap” alongside clichéd fur hats and balalaikas meant to evoke an exotic Russia. The politics lite feel of the movie can irk some viewers but is likely what has given this film an enduring mass audience appeal. Look more carefully, and the political is there, albeit in not the form Pasternak might have intended it.
Dr. Zhivago covers almost fifty years (from 1905 to the early 1950s), tumultuous and defining years in Russian history, through the life of Yuri Zhivago, a man with an ambiguous class affiliation and an even more ambiguous ideology. He is the son of a wealthy industrialist who abandons the family, scatters the money, and commits suicide. After also losing his mother, Yuri is adopted by the Gromeko family and grows up alongside their daughter Tonya, whom he eventually marries. He meets Lara while attending, as a medical student, to her mother after a failed suicide attempt. Lara is romantically and financially entangled with the much older Victor Komarovsky, a powerful lawyer and businessman who acts as her family’s advisor and protector. After trying, unsuccessfully, to kill Komarovsky to break free from him, she marries Pasha Antipov, an idealistic young man who later becomes a revolutionary under the assumed name Strelnikov, acting as a ruthless Bolshevik military commander during the Russian civil war. Yuri meets Lara again while serving as a military doctor on the front during the first world war, and then again after he and his family seek safety from the civil war away from Moscow, in their country estate in the Urals. Their intense love affair begins at the height of the Revolution’s chaos and terror and is rather short-lived, measured at the historic scale of the political events unfurling in their lives. It comes to an end when Antipov/Strelnikov falls out of grace with the Bolsheviks, which puts Lara, his wife, at risk for persecution. She falls back on a fatefully resurfaced Komarovsky who takes her in hiding. Yuri never sees Lara again except many years later, in the final scenes, when he spots her by chance on the streets of Moscow but collapses and dies of a heart attack without her hearing him call her name.
This is the plot of the film, as it somewhat loosely follows the novel. Bolt called the story “second-rate, melodramatic, full of coincidences, pointless,” which emboldened him to take some licenses in the adaptation, dropping characters and skipping many subplots, especially those with more political relevance in the novel. Lean had no qualms about sacrificing historical accuracy and even narrative plausibility to keep the main characters together throughout the build-up of their romance, and this choice (literally) paid off. Bolt modified key details of the book, from omitting Zhivago’s relationship with another woman, after Lara, to the scene of his death, in which he doesn’t see his beloved Lara, and finally and most critically, to not mentioning Lara’s death in a Gulag camp. These are no doubt grim and depressing details for film audiences looking for a good time during the winter holidays, whether in 1965 or on its recent 60th anniversary. A handsome and melancholic looking Omar Shariff playing Zhivago alongside the platinum blond, piercingly blue-eyed Julie Christie cast as Lara did not win any Oscars, but they drew the large audiences that made the film a blockbuster. Maurice Jarre’s soundtrack did win an Oscar, and Lara’s Theme, an “earworm blared out from an ice cream van” according to some critics, has become a popular choice of music at weddings. Beautiful costumes, magnificent scenery, and tender music made it clear that the film was meant to captivate, a heart-stirring romance rather than historical epic.
By 1965, Lean had done both the former and the latter. Brief Encounter (1945) showed him that audiences go for a good love story, even an adulterous one. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) had consolidated his reputation as an ambitious filmmaker, with both critics and the public. When producer Carlo Ponti secured the rights to Dr. Zhivago and approached him, Lean agreed to take on the project despite its political and historical aspects, possibly ignoring the fact that a full excision of the political was hardly possible. Not that many years had passed since the Pasternak affair made headlines in most Western newspapers. The novel, rejected from publication in 1956 in the Soviet Union, had been smuggled from the country and was first printed in Italy. English and French translations followed shortly, with help from the CIA, which subsided the global circulation of the novel, including, clandestinely, inside the Soviet Union. This illicit status brought the author a fame no other Russian writer at the time enjoyed or wished to enjoy in the West and is probably the reason behind the Nobel prize he was awarded in 1958 (over Ernest Hemingway among others). In tandem with the intense publicity campaign in the West celebrating the success of a Soviet writer who had exposed the brutality of Stalinism, a counter-campaign against Pasternak in the Soviet Union, threatening him with exile, forced him to decline the award—which only fanned the fire of a scandal that did not fully end until Pasternak’s death in 1960.
With the hindsight made possible by books such as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag exposé One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovici (1963), Pasternak’s novel can seem politically mild. According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, when Nikita Khrushchev eventually read Pasternak’s book, in a samizdat edition (!), he shrugged it off as not worth the fuss. But at the height of Cold War rhetorical hostilities against the Soviet Union, Dr. Zhivago arrived in the West as a denunciation of communism ideally packaged, through its love story format, for mass consumption. By contrast to other works critical of communism, including those written before and after by victims of Stalinism, Pasternak’s novel turned the political into mere background. It mostly invited readers indirectly to condemn communism as they sympathize with the protagonists. Even without explicit political commentary, the 500+ page book was still very demanding through its abstruse philosophical asides, the large cast of characters, and the intricate plotline. Some of the most outraged readers protesting Pasternak’s treatment in the Soviet Union admitted to not having read the novel. It’s hard to say how much they truly missed. The original rushed English translation did not help—two additional translations have been released since then— and the poems included at the end of the novel as Yuri Zhivago’s give little measure of why some discerning commentators like Isaiah Berlin compared Pasternak to contemporaries like Vladimir Mayakovski or Anna Akhmatova. Without going as far as Isaac Deutscher, who sneered at the style of novel as “pre-Balzac, nay, pre-Guy de Maupassant,” Dr. Zhivago has more flaws, literally, than merits.
Bolt saw these flaws but praised the “manner of the telling,” presumably referring to the long descriptive passages whose lyricism had led Berlin to declare Pasternak “a genius.” The movie’s manner of telling is its cinematography, perhaps the only aspect of the MGM production that impressed even the harshest critics, not to mention winning an Oscar. The film’s art directors, John Box and Terrence Marsh masterfully employed some of the most innovative cinematic techniques available at the time to capture both vast landscapes and minute details. The scenery might be cliché, but it is breathtakingly beautiful especially in its depiction of snow, most memorably in the image of a deserted house that has frozen inside, its interiors turned into a blindingly white, ice sculpture. In this house, Yuri and Lara live the happiest days of their love story.
Projected onto visually spellbinding splendor is a world that sounds and looks both exotic and familiar, while also shedding its ideology. Lean created an almost abstract Russia, steeped in European/Western values imported through a liberal intelligentsia with anti-tsarist but not pro (or proto)-communist views, keen on democratic reform but not on revolution. In this Russia, well-meaning leftist gentry like Yuri’s adoptive family, the Gromikos, hold socialist sympathies that are naïve and vacuous. In one of the most emblematic political scenes of the film, which depicts the bloody quelling of a protest by White guards, Yuri and the Gromikos watch the crowd from a balcony, and Anna Ivanovna Gromeko reads out loud, approvingly, the banners carried by the revolutionaries. While this is partly a cinematic conceit needed to translate for the Western viewers the messages written in Russian (itself a conceit, meant to provide local authenticity in jarring contrast to the British accent of the actors), it ends up diminishing the political aspect of the scene. The force of the protest is reduced to slogans—freedom, brotherhood, etc.—that sound banal and hollow on the lips of a well-to-do bourgeois woman. Anna reads the banners not only from a distance, far and safe from the crowd and the guards who are shooting them, but also from an elevated distance, the upper floor of an elegant building where the family lives in material comfort. She and Yuri quite literally look down on the protesters while stating their support and admiration. When Yuri rushes to give medical help to the wounded, his adoptive father, Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko, follows only to beg him to retreat to safety. The same Gromeko later marvels at Yuri’s skill in peeling potatoes when the family struggles to make do during their retreat in the mountains. Peasants and workers look harmless or exotic to the kind-hearted and ideologically shallow gentry depicted in the movie.
The movie doesn’t just simply miss—or misrepresent— the ideology of the Russian Revolution: it carefully extracts it from the characters’ behaviors. Lean presents the novel’s iconic revolutionary hero Pasha Antipov/Strelnikov as detached from the movement that has given him power, a man consumed by his own desire to dominate, including erotic desire for Lara. “His unbridled revolutionary fervour fitted the spirit of the times and stood out by its sincerity and its fanaticism, neither borrowed nor accidental, but his own, deliberately fostered by him and developed by his circumstances of his life,” wrote Pasternak (according to the first English translation, by Many Harari and Max Hayward). In Lean’s film, Antipov evolves from an awkward and self-conscious youth who stutters when he tries to express his feelings for Lara, to the stone faced, solemnly quiet Strelnikov haunting the Russian steppe in his own personal train. Lean’s cinematographic use of the train impressed film critics through its technical sophistication, but the train is also a metaphor for Strelnikov’s isolation even at the height of the revolution’s power, echoing Pasternak’s reflection conveyed through Yuri: “He’ll come to a bad end and he will atone for the evil he has done. Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying, not as criminals, but as machines that have gotten out of control, like a runaway train.”
Most Western readers must have found such sentences retrospectively prophetic in 1957, with the horrors of Stalinism openly acknowledged even in the Soviet Union. Western liberals, on the other hand, were trying to extricate and rescue Leftist ideals from the Stalinist nightmare. Protecting the ideals of the Russian Revolution against their Stalinist implementation became a yardstick for the political cultural camps of the early Cold War in the West, setting apart Marxists from communists, Trotskyists from anti-Stalinists, etc. The left-leaning American magazine Partisan Review published in 1960 Deutscher’s negative review of the novel. Deutscher, best known for his biography of Leon Trotsky, was particularly incensed by what he deemed to be a crude anachronism at the core of Pasternak’s novel: using the 1905 failed revolutionary movements against the tsarist regime as broadly representing the spirit of the 1917 October Russian Revolution or the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
At the risk of sounding elitist, I fear that such historical details would have mattered little to film audiences enthralled by Julie Christie’s costumes (her mid-length coat and fur hat apparently launched a new fashion). Yet we can’t explain all the adaptation decisions only by invoking the commitment to commercial success. Historical nuance was starting to get lost at the time of the movie’s release, on the eve of détente, for political reasons, too. A new phase was beginning in the Cold War, with confrontation changing into “co-evolution” with the Socialist Bloc. Lean had no desire to revive the Zhivago controversy or to pay homage to a writer banned in the Soviet Union. He stressed to Bolt—a man with known leftist sympathies who bristled at the accusation that he had painted an edulcorated portrait of the Russian pre-revolutionary gentry— that he did not want to be a part of the cultural Cold War. Bolt delivered a script that was on the surface apolitical but in fact imbued with the political affect of the time. This is clearest in how he framed the story using a technique called external narrator focalization: a narrator not directly involved in the events, in this case Yuri’s half-brother Yevgraf, helps the plot advance through offstage commentary. The film opens with a scene in which Yevgraf, now a high-level Soviet official, has found Yuri and Lara’s lost illegitimate daughter. In the novel, the young woman makes a living by doing the laundry of a Red Army regiment. In the film, she is featured as a contented worker on a massive construction site for a new dam, a cliché symbol of Soviet progress and industrialization. An orphan who has grown up in the care of the Soviet state, Yuri’s daughter has no worries and no regrets, which pleases her uncle. The movie ends with Yevgraf watching the girl walk away, smiling, with a balalaika swung on her back.
Resorting to an external narrator helped Bolt control the sprawling narrative but assigning this role to a Soviet official is part of the détente fantasy of a tamed post-Stalin Soviet Union, an enemy the West could tolerate after it had stopped trying to defeat. Historical details that appear in the novel, such as that Lara and Zhivago’s daughter belonged to the numberless bezprinorniki, abandoned children roaming Russia after their parents had been killed or sent to Gulags, were too unseemly for a movie like Lean’s. The balalaika is the only connection between Yuri Zhivago and his daughter, who knows nothing about him as her father or as a poet. If the girl inherits, in the movie, her father’s instrument and musical talent, she is also entirely oblivious to Zhivago’s history, and Yevgraf doesn’t bother to explain it to her.
Forgotten or willfully misremembered, history turns into a political weapon. In 2006, the first Russian adaptation of the novel, written by prominent screenwriter Yuri Arabov (himself a poet) came out with predictable bravado. The cast and production team issued self-congratulatory statements that only Russians could do justice to Pasternak’s story—a clear jab at the famous Hollywood production. As artistic justice goes, I did indeed prefer the Russian mini-series (in 2002, a British mini-series was released as well) to Lean’s film. I especially appreciated the classical music of the Russian version, by contrast to the Hollywood balalaikas. In the early part of the twentieth century, the gentry featured in Pasternak’s novel was more likely to play the piano and to mention Rachmaninoff in their casual conversations. On the surface, Arabov’s Russia is not less European than Bolt’s. The difference is that it appears homegrown rather than imported, on par with, or even superior to European culture, just like the pictures of Russian, French, and German poets lined up in Tonya’s room. The hyper-intellectual Russian Tonya has nothing in common with the domestic Tonya to whom Bold barely gave a few lines; nor does the borderline evil seductress Lara share much with the ingenue played by Julie Christie. Arabov brought his own politically infused vision to the novel, not by simply re-inserting the ideology of the Revolution. His Zhivago caters to modern taste—love and sex—and uses the affordances of serialized storytelling in the age of Netflix (suspense built by alternating subplots) to deliver its own political message. 2006, designated in Russia as the national “Year of Culture,” saw the launch of the federal program “Culture of Russia,” which emphasized the prestige and continuity of Russian tradition, in line with Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric of restoring greatness in the post-Soviet era. Long after Pasternak’s nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times, or Lean’s optimism for a post-revolutionary era, it seems like Russian history is up for grabs. Who grabs it is always part of a bigger story.
