Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, and Thomas Merton

Boris Pasternak 2015 stamp of Albania. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Part I

Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul divine…
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.

                                                     —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

The year 2020 signals both the sixtieth year since Boris Pasternak died and the one hundred thirtieth year since he was born (1890-1960). There is much to the literary and political life in the midst of Stalinist Russia that Pasternak endured and wrote about, but this two-part article will focus on Pasternak himself, his epic novel, Doctor Zhivago, and Thomas Merton.                                

In the 1980s I was on staff with Amnesty International and for a time was chairperson of Group 1 Amnesty International in Canada. When Amnesty International began in 1961, the organization had adopted a variety of Prisoners of Conscience (POC) and one of the women highlighted in Persecution 1961 was Olga Ivinskaya (1912-1995). Ivinskaya has been seen by many as the Larissa (Lara) character in Doctor Zhivago, just as Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, can be seen as Larissa’s daughter, Katya. The fact that Olga Ivinskaya played a significant role in getting Doctor Zhivago published in English in 1958 meant she was suspect by the Russian State and the KGB. When Pasternak died in 1960, Ivinskaya was arrested and given an eight-year prison sentence and her daughter a shorter sentence. Irina was released from prison in 1962 and Olga in 1964. It was not until 1988 that Gorbachev rehabilitated Ivinskaya’s reputation.

The ongoing relationship between the novel Doctor Zhivago and reality has been told from various angles, including Olga Ivinskaya’s own book, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak (1978), and in a more updated version, Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago by Anna Pasternak (2017). Moscow has Ears Everywhere: New Investigations on Pasternak and Ivinskaya by Paolo Mancosu (2019) is another treatment of the subject. There are decided points of convergence and overlap between Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak’s layered life. But to the novel I now turn.

There seem to be two tendencies that often collide when interpreting the precarious journey of life. There is the comedic version in which challenges will come our way, the “agon” cannot be avoided between the protagonist and antagonist, and when day is done, goodness emerges victorious and the ending is positive. Such a comedic approach can be found in Dante’s Divine Comedy and in such modern epics as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia and most Walt Disney films. Such is the comedic version of life. There is also the tragic interpretation of the all-too-human journey. There is, as anticipated, the challenge and “agon,” but within the tragic read the ending is often not pleasant, positive, or victorious. Such a tragic approach can be found in the work of Greek tragedians such as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tragedy of King Lear, and in Thomas Hardy’s later novels. The same inclination is found in the work of the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who was much admired by C.S. Lewis. Such tragic endings can be explained by the “tragic flaw,” but there is much more to tragedy than such a formulaic approach to the dire and sad end of the main actors on stage.

How do Boris Pasternak and his Doctor Zhivago find their way within the comedic-tragic tensions? Needless to say, both Pasternak and Zhivago are thrown (a Heideggerian phrase) into the tumult and violence of the pre-1917 Russian Revolution and throughout most of the Stalinist era ending in 1953, a brutal and tragic time. Pasternak was constantly being watched by the Russian State, the Russian literary Sanhedrin, and the KGB. His many books of poetry were meticulously combed, his translations of significant European and English classics examined, and his life was observed perpetually. In fact, Olga Ivinskaya was initially imprisoned in the late 1940s through the early 1950s (given her relationship with Pasternak) as a means of silencing him. Doctor Zhivago was written, mostly, throughout the 1950s (hopes held high, with Stalin’s death in 1953, that there would be a Soviet thaw at the political, religious, and literary levels). The novel was smuggled out of Russia and published in Italian in 1957 and in 1958 (significantly yet secretly financed through the CIA) in English, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature that year. There is quite a tale to be told about the publishing drama, but that is for another essay. What is it that makes Doctor Zhivago such an epic, though?       

The context of Doctor Zhivago, as mentioned above, traverses the pre-1917 Revolution (many were the hints and obvious signs before that) and the Stalinist regime ending in the 1950s. The journey of life goes ever on, the future unsure and unclear with Yuri Zhivago dead, his friends Gordon and Dudorov reflecting on the future of Russia, while Larissa’s fate is ambiguous as her daughters, Katya and Tanya (the daughter of Zhivago’s short-lived relationship with Larissa) enter their adult years. Who, though, are the main actors on the stage in this lyrical and poetic novel and why is it such a classic beyond the notion of its being a useful Cold War text or steamy harlequin romance of sorts? The main actors I will linger with are these: Doctor Yuri Zhivago; Tonya Gromeko, Zhivago’s first wife; Komarovsky; Pasha-Strelnikov; Larissa Antipova (Lara); and Yevgraf Zhivago, Yuri’s half-brother.

Yuri comes from a troubled family and the novel begins with his mother’s death. His father is a rake of sorts, and suicide is his answer to his poorly made life decisions with other women and finances. Zhivago is adopted by the well-off Gromeko family in upper class Moscow, but he is torn constantly between his medical-empirical-scientific way of knowing and being and his literary-poetic-intuitive way of being and knowing. He is also conflicted regarding the Revolution. Injustices, obviously, have to be dealt with, but the oppressed, once in power, soon become the violent oppressors. Zhivago is very much a Hamlet-like figure— often paralyzed and impotent when making hard decisions, his will often weak, a passive victim of life and the decisions of others. Such was to be his unfolding, indulgent, and, in many ways, tragic end, his weak heart contributing to his demise (a weak heart being an obvious metaphor and icon).

Tonya and Zhivago grew up almost as brother and sister once Zhivago had been adopted into Tonya’s family, the relationship more that of familiar friendship than deep love, a relationship that was meaningful but lacked a certain deeper connection and unity that Zhivago ever longed for, given his painful immediate blood family experience. There was an emptiness deep in Zhivago that his wife Tonya could not meet, although she was a fine and caring woman.  

Komarovsky embodies those who do not have a moral center, compass, or core, in a calculated way using one and all to advance his narcissistic interests. His conniving ways are partially responsible for Zhivago’s father’s suicide, he seduces the innocent Larissa, takes advantage of her mother, and cunningly plays people and the political system to his egoistic ends.

Pasha begins life, in some ways, as a cheerful “songs of innocence” boy in a working class family, but the injustices of life perpetuated by the bourgeois and aristocratic classes converts him, via the “songs of experience,” into a justice warrior, in time to become the dreaded Strelnikov. Strelnikov, who equates justice with an overcoming of the class war— reason and diplomacy being mere distractions— assumes that violence is needed to bring in the classless society. Idealism and justice are wed in Pasha via violence, but in such a merging he loses his basic humanity which, by novel’s end, he tries too late to reclaim. Pasha was, when young, married to Larissa, but the horror of the times and Komarovsky’s seduction of her further turned Pasha into the angry and retributive justice-seeking Strelnikov. It was only at the end, when he realized he was dispensable to the militant Left, that he tried to find Larissa again.   

There are a variety of ways of interpreting Larissa (Lara). She can be viewed as a woman who faces, again and again, disappointments, betrayals, failed expectations, and has her dreams and hopes dashed. Yet she never becomes bitter and angry. She embodies, in many ways, a life force that will not and cannot shrink to the level of anger, bitterness, vindictiveness, nor allow poisons and toxins to inhabit her soul. She also has been seen as Lady Wisdom, a voice ever in the streets calling all to hope and a higher life even though ignored and rejected many times. The three men who turned to her (Komarovsky, Pasha-Strelnikov and Zhivago) all, by day’s end, desert her. The price she pays for such desertion is tragic. Larissa deeply internalizes all her mistreatment, rising above it although suffering because of it. Her end is not pleasant, as often is the treatment of Lady Wisdom throughout time. And yet, in hope and love, she calls out in the streets to come and see a more meaningful way— comedy and tragedy dwelling in the same soul.

Yevgraf is Yuri Zhivago’s half-brother, a faithful and high-ranking member of the Communist Party. But, deeper than Yevgraf’s faithful commitment to the Communist Party is his familial commitment to his brother; ideology and party commitment never undermines Yevgraf’s basic humanity and human compassion. He embodies, in many ways, a notion of Divine Grace, ever and always there as much as possible to assist and aid Zhivago and Tonya, Zhivago and Larissa and Larissa’s children, Katya and Tanya, in their hours of desperate need. He is often hidden and unseen yet ever present, easing painful and tragic passages for one and all.

There is much more that could be said about both the major and minor actors on the stage of the novel. The 1965 and 2003 films adaptations of the novel scarcely do the epic book minimal justice. Thomas Merton warned and urged Boris Pasternak in their correspondence between 1958 and 1960 to prevent the novel from being turned into a movie. Pasternak died in 1960, so the production of the 1965 film was not his decision. I will, in part 2 of this essay, reflect on the friendship and correspondence between Pasternak and Merton and on Merton’s varied essays on Pasternak, as well as Pasternak’s Letters to his Georgian Friends.


Ron Dart teaches in the Department of Political Science, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He has authored or coauthored thirty-five books that deal with the interface between literature, spirituality, and politics, including The North American High Tory Tradition (American Anglican Press, 2016) and Christianity and Pluralism (Lexham Press, 2019).