The Real Doctor Zhivago

Among Nobel laureates for literature, Boris Pasternak has been the one with all the asterisks. At first, there was an asterisk saying “award refused,” but then it was changed to “forced to refuse.” Eventually, the Pasternak family finally posthumously accepted his rightful prize. It was a proud day for them and the CIA. The story of Pasternak’s celebrated and censored novel is chronicled in the documentary special, The Real Doctor Zhivago, directed by George Cathro, which premieres this Monday on Acorn TV.

Boris Pasternak was more Russian than vodka, borsht, or caviar. He hailed from an elite family, but he initially supported the revolution, out of sympathy for his less fortunate countrymen. Technically, Pasternak never explicitly turned against the Soviet system, but he wrote the unvarnished truth as he saw it. His epic novel Doctor Zhivago was where he recorded it all.

One of the great ironies Real Zhivago reveals is Stalin’s high regard for Pasternak’s poetry. Unbeknownst to Pasternak, the Soviet dictator interceded with his underlings several times on his behalf. Khrushchev, not so much. However, Pasternak’s found other fans, most notably the CIA, who supported the international publication of his great novel and masterminded schemes to smuggle samizdat copies back into Russia. Yet, in another supreme irony, a publisher affiliated with the Italian Communist Party was the first house to publish Doctor Zhivago in any country.

Host Stephen Smith talks extensively with Pasternak family members and relatives of his great love and editor, Olga Ivinskaya, who is widely acknowledged as the inspiration for Zhivago’s lover, Lara. We also hear from many of his surviving champions in the west, as well as several Pasternak scholars. Smith takes a little getting used to (he has the voice of gameshow host, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but he clearly did his homework, demonstrating intimate familiarity with the novel in question.

Clearly, the notion that the CIA exploited Pasternak is floated several times during RDZ, but one could argue his increased prominence also afforded him greater protection, creating a politically climate wherein it would be risky for the Soviets to make him disappear for long. Indeed, they focused most of their thuggery on Ivinskaya instead. Regardless, it is painfully obvious the CIA (as well as the VOA) were much more attuned to the geopolitical significance of art and culture in the 1950s and 1960s than they are now.

Regardless, most viewers will learn quite a bit from The Real Doctor Zhivago. It incorporates quite a bit of literary and Cold War history in just under sixty minutes. Doctor Zhivago is a great novel, written by a great artist that became a great film and is now the subject of quite a nice special report. Highly recommended, The Real Doctor Zhivago premieres New Year’s Eve (12/31), on Acorn TV.

Lightning from Heaven: The Love Story Behind Zhivago

Boris Pasternak’s epic novel Doctor Zhivago was banned, denounced, and a major factor leading to the Nobel Prize for Literature he was forced to decline.  It was also a love story.  Unfortunately, the woman who inspired Pasternak faced the full force of the Communist Party’s wrath, to an even greater extent her more famous lover.  Their romance and its legacy also inspired Scott C. Sickles’ play Lightning from Heaven (trailer here), which officially opened this weekend at the Main Stage Theater in New York.

Set in various cells in the Lubyanka, Lightning is told in flashbacks during Olga Ivinskaya’s many KGB interrogation (torture) sessions.  Sadly, she is no stranger to the place.  A literary editor by profession, Ivinskaya had more in common with Pasternak than his wife Zinaida.  However, as the daughter of a moderately high ranking military officer, Madame Pasternak was able to protect her husband when he publicly spoke out against Stalin. 

Of course, the publication of Zhivago was another matter entirely.  Zinaida is quite certain she is not Lara.  After all, the two fictional lovers never married.  Nor is the Party pleased with Pasternak’s portrayal of the Revolution and the subsequent purges, so they target his greatest vulnerability: his mistress-muse Ivinskaya.  In order to discredit the late Pasternak and his masterpiece, Vladilen Alexanochkin, the “good cop” KGB agent, engages in a cat-and-mouse game with the sleep-deprived Ivinskaya.  Either she will renounce Pasternak and Zhivago, or she will proclaim herself the illicit inspiration for Lara.

In a way, Lightning is like the historical forebear of the dystopian television show The Prisoner, with the question “are you Lara” replacing “why did you resign,” except it is very definitely based on fact.  Sickles alters a detail here and there for dramatic purposes, but he is more faithful to history than David Lean’s great film was to Pasternak’s source novel.  It is a smart, deeply literate play, driven by the conflict between individual artistic integrity and the collectivist state.  Perhaps most touching are the scenes deliberately echoing Zhivago in which Pasternak and Ivinskaya find beauty in the increasingly drab, dehumanized Soviet world about them.

Jed Dickson resembles the Robert Frost-ish Pasternak that appeared on Time Magazine enough to look credible in the part.  More importantly, he really expresses Pasternak’s poetic sensibilities.  As a private citizen, Pasternak made some problematic choices, but Dickson makes them understandable, beyond the self-centeredness of the creative class (though there is that as well). 

Likewise, Kari Swenson Riely is more than a mere victim of the Communist thought police, although she certainly convincing enduring the KGB’s physical and emotional torments.  She develops a comfortable romantic chemistry with Dickson’s Pasternak that is quite moving in an almost chaste way.  Yet, when her character stands on principles, she makes it feel genuine and profound, rather than didactic (like say a character from Soviet propaganda).  It is also important to note the work of Mick Bleyer as Alexanochkin, who keeps the audience consistently off-balance in satisfyingly ambiguous ways.

Perhaps the only historical figure getting short-changed in Lightning is Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who ruptured his relationship with the Italian Communist Party by publishing Zhivago.  He comes across a bit caricatured here, but that is trifling complaint.  Lightning is big idea production, rendered in intimately personal terms.  It also boasts an admirably professional cast that continued on like troopers even when a freak accident in the audience forced an unusually long intermission Friday night.  Highly recommended for fans of historical drama or Zhivago in any of its incarnations, the Workshop Theater Company’s production of Lightning from Heaven runs through March 9^th at the Main Stage Theater on 36^th Street.

Tribeca ’10: Doctor Zhivago

In 1958, Boris Pasternak was forced to renounce his Nobel Prize for Literature, when the Soviets made it clear he would not be allowed back in to the country if he traveled to Stockholm to accept. However, seven years later, they were only too happy to allow Central Committee member Mikhail Sholokhov to receive the honor they had denied Pasternak. Yet today, hardly anyone reads And Quiet Flows the Don aside from a handful of Russian majors, but Doctor Zhivago remains widely read throughout the world.

Of course a considerable measure of that enduring popularity stems from David Lean’s truly classic cinematic adaptation of Pasternak’s novel. Considered the last great MGM epic, Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (trailer here) will screen Wednesday at the Tribeca Film Festival in a newly restored high-definition print, in advance of the release of its 45th Anniversary Blue-Ray edition next week.

Zhivago is a poet, a healer, and a lover. He is not a fighter or an ideologue. Unfortunately, that puts him at odds with the tenor of his time and place—Revolutionary Russia. Initially, Zhivago is sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. Unfortunately, when he returns from World War I, he quickly discovers the difference between Bolshevik rhetoric and reality.

The biographical parallels between Pasternak and his Nobel Prize winning character have been often noted. Both were poets whose work ran afoul of Communist ideology, yet they loved Mother Russia too much to leave her, even when offered the opportunity. They also loved two women simultaneously, their faithful wives, and in Zhivago’s case, Lara, the women who inspired the character’s most famous poem and composer Maurice Jarre’s lushly romantic theme.

It is hard to imagine a film like Zhivago coming out of Hollywood today. While it is truly a sweeping wide-screen epic, it is character-driven. Certainly, it would be impossible to assemble a comparable cast of legitimate movie stars who offered intriguing screen presences as well as their marquee names. Omar Sharif conveys the soul of a poet as Zhivago, while Julie Christie is quite haunting as the beautiful and fragile Lara. Yet, perhaps the greatest performance comes from Sir Alec Guinness in the trickiest part, Zhivago’s half-brother Yevgraf, a hard but strangely sympathetic Bolshevik enforcer. Throw in Rod Steiger, Tom Courtenay, Sir Ralph Richardson, Geraldine Chaplin, Rita Tushingham, and Klaus Kinski in a bit part, and you have a cast for the ages.

Though justly renowned for its spectacle, Zhivago is also the work of a genuine auteur. Lean’s perspectives and transitions have a visual excitement that still seems surprisingly bold. While Robert Bolt’s script avoids wallowing in the terrors of Revolutionary Russia, he never whitewashes the constant purges and executions. Indeed, it is a fitting reflection of its author and protagonist, rebels by virtue of being apolitical in a time of ideological madness.

Zhivago is a great film, worth seeing at any time, under any circumstances. Without screening the new high def print, one can only assume it was well done, because messing up this film would be one big, conspicuous scandal. It screens tomorrow (4/28) as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.