Doctor Zhivago, the Movie!

[Kafka's Crow]

I read the book many many years ago and felt that Pasternak had just assassinated the greatest love story ever with political propaganda. Then I watched the 2002 movie version with Hans Matheson and Keira Knightly (don't be put off!) and I liked the movie better (I do not watch movies!). This must be the only book that is better as a movie as a lot of political rubbish is left out. Is the classic Omer Shariff version any better? All that politics won Pasternak a Nobel Prize but at what price? Was it worth it after all that? It could have been such a beautiful and poignant book!

[kasie]

You are speaking of my Lost Youth here, so I would have you speak in hushed and reverent tones! Doctor Zhivago was the first film I saw when I went to college, Long Ago and Far Away - and I fell in love, but alas, Omar has never returned my feelings, though who can blame him, with Julie Christie at his side.

In other words, yes, it was a good film. That made-for-tv version was a travesty.

I had read the book and loved it, political bits and all - this was the height of the Cold War and to know that human emotions flourished despite the brutality and emphasis on The State before Everything was very reassuring. I must admit to never having returned to the book in light of the break-up of the Soviet bloc so I cannot tell how it reads by comparison. I know it was one of the factors that fixed in my mind the idea of State contra Humanity that no matter how much glasnost and peristroika has happened in between cannot be erased.

[stlukesguild]

Great movie. Never read the book... but don't underestimate Pasternak. He is a marvelous poet... unfortunately underrated as such in the English-speaking world which mostly knows him solely for Doctor Zhivago.

[Kafka's Crow]

Great movie. Never read the book... but don't underestimate Pasternak. He is a marvelous poet... unfortunately underrated as such in the English-speaking world which mostly knows him solely for Doctor Zhivago.

My edition of Zhivago had quite a few poems as well. I remember one titled Hamlet. That was long time ago, in my late teens, almost 20 years ago. Can't recall any of the poems but I am sure I'd dig some of them out if I Googled them up.

[stlukesguild]

Yes, Hamlet is one of Pasternak's better-known poems. But Pasternak is far more respected as a poet of real genius than as the writer of Doctor Zhivago... at least in his native land. Yevgeny Yevtushenko notes that "The Nobel Prize committee deigned to take notice of Pasternak only when he became a political victim of scandal over Doctor Zhivago, whereas he had been a fully great poet already in the 1920s." Of course much of this is due to the Soviet censorship of their greatest poets. Yevtushenko describes how an anthology of a great many of the best Russian Soviet-era poets works were smuggled out of the Soviet Union with the aid of American diplomats, the Palestinian poet, Makhmud Dervish, and even the American actor, Warren Beatty.

Pasternak is considered to be one of the "Golden Age" of modern Russian poets... one among Mayakovsky, Ivan Bunin, Aleksandr Blok, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Pasternak was the son of a painter who studied music with Scriabin and mastered several foreign languages. He earned his keep during much of Stalin's reign through translations of Goethe, Shakespeare, Rilke, and others rather than risk publication of his own verse. In spite of this, Pasternak's verse is usually apolitical... the strongest criticism usually leveled at him (from both Soviet critics and other writers) was that he was too much of a formalist... aloof... cold. In reality he was (to use Pessoa's phrase) "always astonished". He approaches everything with a Blakeian feeling that everything is being seen for the first time and everything is miraculous. In this... and in his precise, crystalline language he was profoundly influenced by the German poet, Rilke.

Perhaps the best volume of Pasternak's poetry is My Sister-Life which has been compared to some of the greatest volumes of 20th century poetry, including Eliot's Wasteland and Steven's Harmonium. The volume is certainly a favorite of mine... but then again Pasternak's poetry is not greatly accessible in English translations. My Sister-Life, nevertheless, is filled with marvelous poems. In "The Definition of Poetry Pasternak" defines his poetry in the most marvelous imagery:

It's a tightly filled whistle
It's the squeaking of jostled ice
It's night, frosting the leaves
It's two nightingales dueling

It's the soundlessness of sweetpeas
The tears of the universe in a pod
It's a Figaro from music-stands and flutes
Like hail on garden plots

And all that the night finds hard to find
On the sunken floors of a bathhouse...

Pastenak is ever silver-tongued... as he overwhelms us with a stream of imagery that echoes Verlaine or Rilke at their most sensuous and suggestive, and even verges upon Surrealism:

It runs from the crackling logs, from the bravado of Liszt,
From the chandelier in the ballroom, from the glasses and guest,
Over the piano in flames and jumps--
From rosettes and dice, roses and knucklebones...

from The Substitute

Arrows scramble down the wall.
Time crawls like a cockroach.
Wait, why toss the plates,
beat the alarm, smash the glasses!

In our wooden dacha
Anything could happen...

from Mein Liebchen, Was Willst Du Noch Mehr?

Of course Pasternak was not so apolitical that he was in any way ignorant of the darkness that was descending upon Russia. Yet he was very careful... oblique in his criticisms... and yet they seem more than clear today:

They will extract a price, my love. The Gods
grow too enamored of this "poetic" love.
And raw chaos crawls out of the cave
toward original light...

How life, like a pearly jest
out of Watteau, they would
snuff out in snuff boxes;
while they twist, mangle, and distort...

from Postscript

But Pasternak was adamantly against the notion that poetry should be employed in a utilitarian manner in support of political aims... as propaganda. He makes this especially clear in the "The Highest Sickness", the final poem in My Sister-Life in which he rejects both the notion of utilizing his poetry in support of the Soviet State... or in rebellion against it:

I grow more and more ashamed each day
that in an age of shadows
the highest sickness escapes censure
and still goes by the name of song.
is Sodom the proper name for song
learned by ear the hard way,
then hurled out of books
only to be skewered by spears and bayonets?
Hell is paved with good intentions.
The current notion is
that by paving your poems with them
your sins will be forgiven...

We were the music of ice...
I wasn't put on this earth
to gaze three ways into men's eyes...
We were the music of cups,
gone to sip tea in the dark
of deaf forests, oblique habits,
and secrets flattering to no one.
Forests crackled. Pails hung.
Jackdaws soared and the frostbitten year
was ashamed to show up at the gates.
We were the music of thought
and sought to sweep the stairs,
but as the cold froze,
ice blurred the passage...

Poems by Boris Pasternak
My Sister-Life
Translation by Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk

[mortalterror]

Kafka, I watch hundreds of films every year and Doctor Zhivago is one of the best I've ever seen. I guarantee you that the 1965 David Lean version is infinitely better than the new made for tv version. In film, the director is the primary artistic contributor and there are few better directors than David Lean. Personally, I prefer his Lawrence of Arabia but his Doctor is something truly special as well. I hear that it departs from the book in some places, and might have invented a character to give the film more structure than the book had, but all told it is a strong adaptation. Also, rule of thumb, made for tv movies tend to be inferior to big budget studio productions. I own a copy, though I have not watched it in some time. I remember being especially impressed by Lean's use of color, long shots, and pacing.

Also, I can think of any number of films that are better than the novels they were based upon. It's not that one medium is better than another so much as it depends how adept the individual artists are at expressing their material.

[Kafka's Crow]

Oh, thanks St Lukes. You are so right in mentioning that poetry in general and Pasternak in particular is inaccessible in translation. So much so that I am finding myself falling out of touch with all poetry. I have always maintained that in less commerialised cultures and societies, literature, most of the time means poetry and since poetry is less accessible in translation, we develop all these vain notions about some cultural superiority over certain other nation whereas we are only more familiar with one literature because of it producing more accessible genre, i-e novel. Human spirit sings everywhere, human expression can not be curbed either by state-terror or the so-called 'cultural backwardness.' I will look for my old copy of Zhivago just to gain access to those poems. Thanks for re-lighting an old flame! I have ordered a copy of this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pasternak-Poems-Chosen-translated-Slater/dp/B00126K5T2/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211093427&sr=8-6

Hey Mortalterror, thanks for your input as well. I think I am too young to have seen the Omer Shariff version but I know that people swear by it. The television mini-series is more accessible for someone younger than us (I am dragged back into Russian Litt by this extremely pretty young lady I am seeing these days. I won her with one simple sentence "Dostoevsky is God!" I thought the newer version would be appropriate for someone yet to reach her thirtieth birthday (October 10th this year), I am only yet to reach my 40th!(July th 1st this year). Apart from Lord of the Ring series, what other movies based on novels are better than the book itself? Russians made a mini-series of Zhivago in 2006. I have ordered that one as well.

[loe]

Kafka, I watch hundreds of films every year and Doctor Zhivago is one of the best I've ever seen. I guarantee you that the 1965 David Lean version is infinitely better than the new made for tv version.
I absolutely agree with that. In my opinion the version of 2002 is completely unnecessary.

Greetings

[Kafka's Crow]

I absolutely agree with that. In my opinion the version of 2002 is completely unnecessary.

Greetings

It did cost 8 million pounds though, so no small-budget venture this one:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/review/2493635.stm

About the recent Russian version:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4755629.stm

[mortalterror]

Apart from Lord of the Ring series, what other movies based on novels are better than the book itself?

Take Scorsese's body of work for example. Goodfellas was based on a rather lackluster true crime confession called Wiseguy. I read a couple chapters of Raging Bull too, and it's not much to look at. Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary was alright, but not nearly as good as Taxi Driver. Not everybody gets the maximum out of their material and sometimes a greater artist can really nail the execution a second or third time around which an inferior artist has missed. That's how Shakespeare did it with his adaptations.

Obviously, you aren't going to get movie versions of Hamlet or Don Quixote which are better than their source material: but neither are you going to get a Hamlet novel or a Don Quixote drama without some diminution. In the case of most masterpieces the form is inextricably tied up with the content and you cannot change one without changing the other. Luckily for Hollywood, most novels are not masterpieces and there is ample room for improvement. In the case of Shakespeare and Cervantes there are a few places where one could improve upon the originals but for the most part they represent the pinnacle of human achievement and are immune from duplication. Patch a spot and you leave a hole somewhere else. The real challenge is in maintaining a message when one switches among verbal, oral, and visual modes of expression. While I think that Raphael could paint Shakespeare, and Bernini could sculpt him, most artists of the highest rank are uninterested in the themes and motives of their predecessors. Or the ideas and forms do not mean the same things to them anymore, and so there are bound to be changes. The same passion doesn't go into the work; or at least not in the same proportion. There is a shift in emphasis.

So, if we agree that masterpieces are not reproducable, what does that say for the work of lesser author's such as Stephen King? I believe that The Shawshank Redemption, as a film, was quite a bit above him.

[loe]

@Kafka's Crow:
I don't want to say that the movie is bad, with "unnecessary" I mean that the version with Omar Sharif was so excellent that I can't see any need for a new adaptation (maybe I'm a little bit old-fashioned).
Only because of more money and/or a better technique for the effects it's not easier to make an excellent film.

(Although it's not literature for me it's the same with Hitchcock films - I can't understand, why people think they could to a better newer version (e.g. Psycho)).

In my opinion the main problem with the adaptation of masterpieces is that they often deal also with philosophical or psychological aspects that can be described but not shown as pictures. So films usually concentrate only on the pure plot and therefore they could loose a lot of the book's real fascination.

Greetings

[hellsapoppin]

The David Lean 1965 movie was one of my favorites. Julie was so stunningly beautiful in the role as Lara! Great setting and plot development. But to me, the star of the show was Rod Steiger as the evil Komarovsky.

[stlukesguild]

Ron... Unfortunately there is so little of Pasternak in English translation. Penguin in its "Twentieth Century Classics" series published a slim volume of selcted poems translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France (and no longer in print from what I have seen on Amazon). Yevgeny Yevtushenko edited a volume of 20th Century Russian Poetry which also included a goodly amount of Pasternak from various hands... and of course there's always the Doctor Zhivago poems by Max Hayward. By far the best volume I have yet come across... and the volume that convinced me of Pasternak's status as a major poet, was the translation of My Sister-Life by Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk, which is still in print... or has be re-released in a new edition. I would not think to make a judgmental comparison of him with Rilke... considering my own admiration of the German poet... and the fact that Rilke has been so far better (and so much more voluminously) served by translators into English. Is there actually any 20th century foreign-language poet that has been translated more than Rilke? Perhaps Neruda? Garcia-Lorca?

Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
Dave, This connection is a new avenue in the sense that I'm not well read at all in Pasternak's poetry. (Don't you love to come home from a trip and find six pages of e-mail.) This stanza seems to resemble Rilke... "We were the music of ice...
I wasn't put on this earth
to gaze three ways into men's eyes...
We were the music of cups,
gone to sip tea in the dark
of deaf forests, oblique habits,
and secrets flattering to no one.
Forests crackled. Pails hung.
Jackdaws soared and the frostbitten year
was ashamed to show up at the gates.
We were the music of thought
and sought to sweep the stairs,
but as the cold froze,
ice blurred the passage..." I can read some Pasternak while the "Poetry Book Club" thread gets going. Ron