Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)

Fui procurar o novo livro da Pasternak no Z Library (porque não vou pagar por um livro que emite opiniões como fosse uma pós adolescente recém entrada na faculdade que tem zero conhecimento do que é psicanálise) e felizmente dei de cara com algo muito melhor, essa coletânea de poemas do Boris Pasternak que me ajudou a passar a semana em que Dick Face esteve internado por atropelamento, posterior falecimento e meu processo de luto.
Gostei bem mais da segunda metade do livro, a fase show more madura de Pasternak, nem todo mundo é Rimbaud pra acertar tudo na juventude, mas seus poemas dos anos 50 quando estava bem desiludido com a União Soviética são os que mais reverberaram em mim. show less

"The calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness."
(p. 568)

I don't think I can really judge this book properly: it's a big, slow, quiet book, and I wasn't in the right place for that. I read it during a time when my life was moving very quickly. (And I didn't have as much time for reading as I've been used to, so this took way longer than I was mentally prepared for.) So your mileage may vary. The lesson is, read the book your life has room for. Lots of time on your show more hands? Once I got laid off and spent the next two weeks (two weeks!) reading War & Peace. That was a good idea. Right now, I should probably stick to comic books.

"Consciousness is poison, a means of self-poisoning for the subject who applies it to himself."
(p. 75)

This is a quiet book. It has flashes of wonderful insight:

"Decidedly all mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them."
(p. 332)

"Misha gradually became filled with scorn for adults, who had cooked a pudding they were unable to eat. He was convinced that when he grew up, he would untangle it all."
(p. 13)

And some beautiful writing:

"There in the haze of a mist the sun rose and peeped dimly between the scraps of floating murk, the way naked people in a bathhouse flash through clouds of soapy steam."
(p. 287)

And "Swarms of the enormously multiplied, glutted mice darted underfoot on the road by day and turned into a slippery, squealing, slithering mush when stepped on."
(p. 552)
which is wonderful in its disgusting vividness.

And a great thing to say to your artist friends:
"He considered art unsuitable as a calling, in the same sense that innate gaiety or an inclination to melancholy could not be a profession."
(p. 73)

But it's very slow. You know that old rule, "Show don't tell"? Pasternak doesn't know that rule.

I expected a romance, and I guess I got one...but one friend told me as I was starting, "I kept shouting for him to stay with Lara!" and I was expecting a story about a quiet, stolid man who wrestled with his responsibilities toward his family and his attraction for another woman. The truth is, he doesn't wrestle terribly hard. The big revelation for me about Dr Zhivago was that he's an asshole. He makes no effort to recover his family. And he abandons Lara in a particularly vile way. This is a guy who really just wanders from one woman to another, discarding them whenever his path happens to lead in a different direction.

"From fear alone of the humiliating, annihilating punishment that non-love is, I would unconsciously beware of realizing that I did not love you. Neither I nor you would ever find it out. My own heart would conceal it from me, because non-love is almost like murder, and I would be unable to deal such a blow to anyone."
(p. 492)

That's a deadly insightful thing to say, and it speaks to Zhivago's inability to man up.

Zhivago wrestles with individuality throughout the book:
"And thus it turns out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that a duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are even not alcohol and a duck at all."
(p. 203)

But

"He wanted to cry out to the boy and to the people in the car that salvation lay not in faithfulness to forms but in liberation from them."
(p. 292)

But he remains a passive character, unable to reconcile his views into a real philosophy and instead letting the wind blow him whichever way it goes.

So that's all very interesting, and this is an insightful character study. Still, though: it's like 700 pages long, and not a ton of things happen. Good for a long winter's week when you don't have much going on. Bad for reading in snatches.

"Lara reflected on the diligence with which drunk people always like to imitate drunk people, and with all the more giftless and amateurish deliberateness the drunker they are."
(p.113)

Sadly, this was not a particularly drunk review. show less

As the Napoleonic War had dislodged the Bolkonskys and Rostovs from their habitual sorties in War and Peace, so in Dr. Zhivago the Russian Revolution uprooted the Zhivagos and Antipovs from their daily toils. Through the crisscrossing paths of Zhivago, Strelnikov, Lara, Komarovsky, Yevgraf, and dozens of other characters, Pasternak interwove the shattered lives along the hurricane’s trail and the opportunists who thrived upon revolutionary disillusionment and rose through the ashes. The show more tragic revolutionary, whose ideals threatened the ambitions of newly minted leaders, towered above other characters in the novel. But in the end, he must sacrifice himself on the altar just as Zhivago must wither under the new air. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/doctor-zhivago-by-boris-pasternak/

I first read this at least 35 years ago, possibly longer, and my copy still smells of the mildewy second-hand bookshop where I got it, probably in Cambridge. It’s a great book. There’s a wonderful human story in the transition from the fading empire to the brutality of the Communist regime, with people clinging to what crumbs of comfort they can, especially each other.

Although the title of the book is Doctor Zhivago, show more it’s just as much Lara’s story; she’s there at the beginning and the end, and has a more complicated life, with the climax of the story coming when three of her lovers end up in the same place at almost the same time. A lot of her story is unstated – for instance, when she is first seduced by Komarovsky, it happens entirely off screen, where most writers today would go into explicit erotic detail about the encounter. But we know perfectly well what has happened.

There is also a tremendous sense of place. Moscow, the steppes, the fictional towns that Yuri and Lara end up living in, are all vividly described, and although if you’re not used to Russian nomenclature you can get lost among the characters (most of whom have at least three completely different modes of address), you can’t get lost among the locations.

I haven’t seen the film (which lost the Best Oscar to The Sound of Music, though it won just as many awards on the night), and given that it’s three hours long, I am a little intimidated; but I really enjoyed revisiting the book after a third of a century. show less