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Aside from its moral fervor and the grand themes of life and death, Doctor Zhivago is not intimately linked to any of the Russian masterpieces of the past. Pasternak's Yurii and Lara, Antipov and Tonia are simply not the solid and memorable characters that Tolstoy's Pierre and Natasha are, or Dostoevsky's Karamazovs. But Pasternak is not interested in character dissection. After the manner of Pushkin and Turgenev, he prefers to use the imagery of nature and inanimate objects to create a kind of poetic accompaniment to his characters' states of feeling. In Pasternak, at the heart of the weather, one always finds the weather of the heart.
As a result, the reader knows all about the moods of his characters but little about their motivations. This compounds the sense of will-lessness that pervades the book and gives Dr. Zhivago the air of a hapless victim. But there is something about Zhivago's very weakness that gives him strength. Perhaps, suggests an expert on Russian literature, Harvard Professor Renato Poggioli, this is Pasternak's way of saying that in a totalitarian society the "weakest victim may be also its most elusive enemy: and that victim and enemy is the single person, the individual soul."
Dr. Zhivago is a Hamlet and a passive Hamlet at that. What then, of Zhivago's destiny? Pasternak, himself a renowned translator of Hamlet, gives the clue in an answer that reveals more about Pasternak than it does about Hamlet: "Chance has allotted Hamlet the role of judge of his own time and servant of the future. Hamlet is the drama of a high destiny, of a life devoted and preordained to a heroic task." This is the key to Doctor Zhivago. As the judge of his own time, Pasternak declares the Revolution and its aftermath of suffering a tyrannous failure. As the servant of the future, he demands nothing less than freedom.
Sweet & Dreadful. Like Yurii Zhivago, Boris Pasternak was raised in a gracious, leisurely, art-saturated world. Of Jewish descent, he was born in 1890 in a red brick house on Moscow's fashionable Arsenal Street. "Borya" Pasternak was the eldest of four children (one brother, Alexander, now a Moscow architect, and two sisters, Lydia and Josephine, emigres in England since the mid-thirties). Papa Leonid Pasternak was a celebrated, goateed painter, who did portraits of the great and gifted, among them, Chaliapin, Rilke, Rachmaninoff, Lenin. Though she later renounced her career, Mamma Roza Kaufmann Pasternak was a concert pianist—"Mozart in skirts"—who had toured the Russian concert halls from the age of eight. Sensitive, high-strung (Pasternak claims to have contemplated suicide in his sixth, seventh, and eighth years), little Boris woke up crying one night, with "a sweet and dreadful pain" to the echoes of music. Blotting his tears, Mamma Pasternak trotted the blinky-eyed youngster out to meet the guests, among them an old man who has since "accompanied me throughout my whole life." It was Tolstoy.