Book 29: Dr. Zhivago (100 Great Books)
Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was smuggled, suppressed, and forced into silence. It speaks, all these decades later, with startling clarity.
Check out our latest publication in Fast Company. It talks about how AI is changing the nature and value of achivements.
Would you consider tying your shoelaces an achievement? If you’re able-bodied, probably not. Now imagine doing it with one hand, or no hands at all. Suddenly it is. Fewer than 10,000 people have stood on the summit of Everest. It takes months of training and tests the limits of human endurance. However, if you helicoptered to the top, stepped out for a photograph, and flew back down, would that be an achievement? The outcome is the same. Same summit. Same view, but most of us would not consider it an achievement.
A new kind of helicopter has now arrived. Artificial intelligence can draft reports, write software, compose correspondence, and generate ideas in a matter of seconds.
Dr. Zhivago
There is a scene near the middle of Doctor Zhivago that is hard to move past. Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet of uncommon gifts, sits in a frozen house in the Ural mountains as a civil war rages outside. He can hear the artillery. He has almost nothing to eat. And yet he writes poems by candlelight — love poems, nature poems, poems about rowan trees bending under snow. He cannot help it. The poems are are simply what a human being does when the human being is still, against all odds, intact.
Boris Pasternak published Doctor Zhivago in 1957 in Italy, because no Soviet press would touch it. The manuscript had been written in secret over a decade, during the years of terror, during the purges that swallowed Pasternak’s friends and colleagues whole. He handed it to an Italian publisher with the calm finality of a man who had made his peace. “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad,” he reportedly told him. He was not entirely joking.
The Soviet authorities understood immediately what Pasternak had done. Doctor Zhivago is not a political tract; there are no speeches against communism, no manifestos. But it commits a deeper heresy. It insists that a human life, with its loves, its doubts, its private loyalties, matters more than the abstract logic of history.
For a revolutionary state built on the opposite premise, that was unforgivable.
The novel follows Zhivago across the convulsions that remade Russia in the early twentieth century. He begins life as a child of Moscow’s educated class, orphaned early but raised among cultured people who believe in books, music, and the quiet dignity of professional work. Zhivago becomes a doctor. He writes poetry on the side. He marries Tonya, the daughter of his adoptive family, and for a moment it seems possible that Russia’s coming storms might pass without entirely destroying the private world.
Then comes the war.
