ABSTRACT

Doctor Zhivago is written largely in shorthand: it has the abrupt transitions of Pasternak’s poetry, or of earlier prose pieces by him such as Letters from Tula or Aerial Ways. Doctor Zhivago can be broken down into hundreds of separate lyric notations, as when the refugee party on arriving at Mikulitsin’s feel the enormity of their intrusion. The true life of Zhivago, its profoundest meaning, must be sought in the poems. The poems have the effect of ordering and relating the wayward and unsystematic career of Zhivago. The death of Zhivago himself is ignominious enough, struggling out of a crowded tramcar to die in the street. He has made ‘a superhuman effort of will’—this man who appears to lack any will atall—because he needs air and freedom. Doctor Zhivago may be called a grammar of feeling, which rehearses every mode available to a mind expressing itself in Russian.