Doctor Zhivago is a novel of the Russian Revolution and its author, Boris Pasternak, had a long struggle to get it published.  Some of it was written during the years surrounding the revolution (1910-1920) but it was thirty five years before it was successfully published.

The reason for the delay in actually getting the book into print was Pasternak’s own political opinion. It opposed the way that the Soviet government did things and such was silenced.  They claimed that Pasternak’s work criticised the Stalinist regime and that his remarks about prison camps were false and against Marxist philosophy.

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Giangiacomo Feltrinelli an Italian publisher from Milan managed to get the manuscript out of Russia and published the story in both Italian and Russian. The next year it appeared in English and another eighteen languages followed.

The main character is Yuri Zhivago who is a doctor and a poet and traces his struggle with his poetry, his love of two women and his concern with the growing suffering of humanity that was all around him. The whole thing has the Russian revolution and the Civil War going on in the background.

In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago and the Soviet Union asked the organisers not to give him the award. Boris Pasternak refused the award rather than cause a political upheaval within the Soviet Union.

The author died in 1960 and it was not until 1988 that Doctor Zhivago was finally published in Russia by the magazine, Novy mir.

In 1965 director David Lean made the first Doctor Zhivago movie which starred Omar Sharif  as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara. It had been adapted for television in many countries and most recently in 2005 was made into a mini series to be shown on Russian television.

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I read the book and saw the movie back in 1965 when I was studying the Russian Revolution and there are one or two scenes that made such an impact on me way back then, that I can remember them today.

 The scene where protesters are walking to the Winter Palace to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas and the Imperial guard mows them all down is a powerful one and based on a true event: Bloody Sunday: 22nd January 1905. Then there is the scene where the starving peasant are battling their way across the snow swept Russian steps and they are caught up between opposing Red and White guards.

The music is fabulous and it still haunts me all these years later. ‘Lara’s Theme’ written by Maurice Jarre is in the background for most of the film. Its haunting melody still brings back memories of the film.  Fantastic, is the only way to describe it.

The book is worth reading if you have the patience to wade through it but the movie is equally good. It has a lot of scenes and events that are historically accurate and it’s quite sobering to think that these things took place less than a hundred years ago.