Doctor Zhivago

Author and presenter: Peter Weil

Peter Weil: Taking part in the program are: cultural critic Natalya Ivanova, literary critic, son of the author of the novel Evgeny Pasternak and screenwriter Yuri Arabov.

Doctor Zhivago is a cult name not only for Russia, since the novel by Boris Pasternak, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has been translated into all major languages ​​of the world. After the release of David Lean's film in 1965 with Omar Sharif in the title role, Pasternak's hero became a mass cult phenomenon. It’s all the more difficult now to figure out who he is, Doctor Zhivago? We talk with Natalya Ivanova. If there is an image of an intellectual in Russian literature of the twentieth century, then this is Doctor Zhivago, right?

Natalya Ivanova: Not only. But Doctor Zhivago, of course, yes.

Peter Weil: Who else?

Natalya Ivanova: They were different. The intelligentsia was scolded, raised, killed, and crucified. Also, perhaps, Yuri Trifonov: “Exchange”, “Preliminary results”, “Long farewell” especially.

Peter Weil: But there is no such memorable hero with a first and last name.

Natalya Ivanova: In general, Trifonov’s time has passed, but it will come. Nowadays the word “intellectual” is subject to all sorts of ostracism. But the situation will change.

Probably, Yuri Zhivago is a real intellectual. He, on the one hand, is not a person of a humanitarian profession, a doctor, but on the other hand, a person of humanistic convictions and humane behavior.

Peter Weil: Question for Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, who is now, with his wife Elena Vladimirovna, preparing for release an 11-volume collected works of Boris Pasternak. Is Yuri Zhivago an exemplary Russian intellectual?

Evgeniy Pasternak: You know, I wouldn’t say that. Because the Russian intelligentsia was fundamentally casteist and revolutionary. This Russian intelligentsia, say, did not introduce Chekhov and Tolstoy into its circle. And Doctor Zhivago is a man of that educated stratum, which later began to be called, in contrast to the classical Russian intelligentsia, the creative intelligentsia or something like that. In general, he is a very Chekhovian person. I’m not even talking about what Chekhov wrote, but what he was like, how he thought of himself in such stories as “The Bishop” and “The Student”. In those things where Chekhov allowed himself to stop being the ruthless writer he appears to be in most of his stories.

Peter Weil: Yuri Zhivago, like Chekhov, writer and doctor. More precisely, a doctor and writer. The dream of the liberal 60s. As if looking ahead, Pasternak modeled the ideal sixties - a hybrid of a physicist and a lyricist in one person.

Natalya Ivanova: He modeled not the ideal sixties, but the ideal Russian intellectual. When he decided to write a big work, which would include Russia 1902-1945 as a historical background, he chose not just a writer.

Peter Weil: A person proficient in a specific profession.

Natalya Ivanova: Zhivago is a brilliant diagnostician. But he is also a genius in poetry.

Peter Weil: Evgeny Pasternak agrees that Doctor Zhivago can be considered a prototype of the sixties intellectual, but with a big reservation, because the sixties were different.

Evgeniy Pasternak: Speaking about the sixties, first of all, we mean people who were not so distant from the social interests of society. Who in the 60s sought to make their own destiny and career. They read Doctor Zhivago, he influenced them, they took into account his features, but none of them intended to be an extra person. While social deprivation and lack of aspiration were a characteristic feature of a large number of people. Nina Braginskaya, now a professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities and one of our best authors of classical translations and works, was a night watchman in the house where filmmakers lived, and, sitting in the elevator room, translated Aristotle’s Poetics. In the 60s, people who were not interested in immediate career development looked to Doctor Zhivago as their hero. And everyone else simply took Doctor Zhivago into account.

Peter Weil: That’s not the right word - they took it into account. Pasternak and Zhivago were the holy names of the era. It is no coincidence that one of the main conceptual performances of the most oppositional, liberal and courageous Soviet theater, Lyubimov’s Taganka Theater, opened with Pasternak’s poems by Yuri Zhivago. The play "Hamlet" began like this. The audience was still taking their seats, and on the stage, at the back, the people's idol Vladimir Vysotsky was already sitting on the floor in a black tights and strumming a guitar. When the hall was filled, Vysotsky stood up, went to the front of the stage and performed a song based on the words of the poem “Hamlet”, which opens the cycle “Poems of Yuri Zhivago”. It was an epigraph to Shakespeare and at the same time to everything that was happening around.

Natalya Ivanova continues to talk about how Pasternak’s Yuri Zhivago managed to become a hero of the era.

Natalya Ivanova: Boris Leonidovich went through a lot of professions. When he was forming, he first wanted to become an artist, then a composer, musician, philosopher. He came to the point that he became a professional poet, translator, and prose writer through many temptations from other professions. True, he never wanted to be a natural scientist. But in his family’s St. Petersburg environment there were also natural scientists. Very many of those whom he, one way or another, listed in his calendars were connected with this. Despite the fact that about “Doctor Zhivago”, about the formation of this image, he says: “it’s something between Blok and me,” then, after thinking a little, he adds Mayakovsky and Yesenin, he never adds either doctors or naturalists. But, nevertheless, the era itself - the beginning of the twentieth century - put forward gigantic figures of people associated specifically with medical practice. It is likely that Pasternak had a thought about Chekhov specifically as a pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual. Zhivago experiences a turning point precisely in this very pre-revolutionary era, he reads the news of the revolution with delight, unfolds the newspaper under the finely falling snow pellets - the end of October according to the old calendar - and says: “What a magnificent surgery.” The comparison is medical. Chekhov did not live to see this time; he died on the eve of the first Russian revolution and did not see any of these delights. That intellectual - and this intellectual, that doctor and writer - and this doctor and poet. But, of course, they are different, because Chekhov is an exceptional skeptic, and Yuri Andreevich is not. He is rather a romantic.

Peter Weil: Yuri Arabov, the author of the script for the new television series based on the novel “Doctor Zhivago,” speaks about the hero of Pasternak’s novel.

Yuri Arabov: A number of questions arise for Zhivago himself. First of all, does this character have a sense of guilt? The presence of this guilt distinguishes old literature from new. We inherited tragic guilt and the mechanism of retribution for guilt from antiquity, existed for some time in the Renaissance, and was revived to some extent in Russian realism of the 19th century by Dostoevsky. There are no questions for Dostoevsky. All his characters have faults, everyone gets what they deserve. But when we meet a character in whom this feeling of tragic guilt is problematic, I cannot relate this to anyone. A person always has guilt, and all religions talk about this, especially Christianity.

Peter Weil: The Christian idea of ​​guilt was almost an obsession of Boris Pasternak in his later years.

Natalya Ivanova: This novel is an alternative biography that he wrote to himself. Who would I be if?... In this thing he redeemed his so-called well-being. Pasternak made very strict demands on himself, and by the end of his life he was extremely dissatisfied with what he had. He experienced a terrible crisis back in 1929. He had severe thoughts of suicide. There was a moment when he realized that literature was not needed. He writes to his sister, Lydia Pasternak, in Berlin: “Now everyone lives under very great pressure, but the pressure under which the lives of city dwellers takes place is simply a privilege compared to what is happening in the countryside. Measures of the broadest and age-old significance are being carried out there.” Can you imagine what was there in '29? “And you have to be blind not to see what unprecedented state prospects this leads to. In my opinion, you have to be a man to talk about this. You have to experience these surgical transformations yourself. From the outside, singing about this topic is even more immoral than writing about the war behind the lines.”

Peter Weil: Common opinions about the autobiographical nature of Pasternak’s novel are disputed by Evgeniy Pasternak.

Evgeny Pasternak: Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is the least autobiographical of all Pasternak's heroes, and this is intentional. Pasternak sought to free him from what bound him. The autobiographical details remained, but the main features of the hero changed. He is not a professional writer, he is an amateur. He is not constrained by his writing biography and writing skills. He is Russian, he is a nobleman, he has a positive profession. He is a doctor and realizes that he is useful, regardless of what he writes, and this gives him the opportunity to feel freer, both in his actions and in the poems that are attributed to him. This deliberate freedom, which is given to this hero, a socially outcast man at the end of his life, allows him to speak and write more freely. In particular, the main thing that this determines is the opportunity to write poems about gospel events through the eyes of an eyewitness. This is something a professional writer cannot afford.

Yuri Arabov: I understand the popularity of this novel and the popularity of Doctor Zhivago himself. The fact is that after continuous tragedies, there was a layer of people who considered themselves innocent victims. They thought something like this: “We are wonderful people, well, sometimes we cheat on our wives, we say stupid things, but we didn’t shoot innocent people, God was merciful, so why did all this fall on us?” Look how large this layer of people is even now, after everything that Russia has experienced over the past twenty years. In this regard, the novel resonated and still resonates.

Peter Weil: "Doctor Zhivago" resonates in the souls of readers. It is unlikely that this could have happened if the great lyricist Pasternak had not related his hero to himself, to the author. What do they have in common?

Evgeniy Pasternak: The main thing that the hero has is the same genius as the author. And the same striving for goodness and truth. The certainty of his moral character is, of course, Pasternak’s. The ease of his attitude towards circumstances, towards money, his compliance and ability to agree with the opinions of other people - also connect him with Pasternak.

Peter Weil: It often happens that the author, depicting a hero close to himself, gives him his own characteristics. Here, as Evgeny Pasternak says, the case is different. The intimacy is only mental.

Evgeny Pasternak: Daddy broke his leg as a child. And, despite the fact that he had developed an easy gait, in reality, his right leg was two centimeters shorter than his left. He should, in theory, have an orthopedic, heavy limp. But he bent his other leg and therefore walked easily. However, this was always painful for him, and he had to take care and think about it. Doctor Zhivago is physically absolutely fine.

Peter Weil: If you were asked who Doctor Zhivago is, what would you say? For example, they say about someone: he, you know, is such a Doctor Zhivago. What would you think?

Evgeniy Pasternak: I couldn’t say anything, because Doctor Zhivago is deliberately not depicted in portraiture. The portraits of Doctor Zhivago that artists have tried to draw do not match. Therefore, Doctor Zhivago can be played by Omar Sharif, which is actually a bit wild. And he can even play it well, which showed not the quality of the film itself, but the interest of the audience. And at the same time, in this image one can imagine, for example, an actor who plays Prince Myshkin. That is, the complete opposite. But the image tolerates this, because the transfer of spiritual load is important. Doctor Zhivago is a man with a broken fate, a hero of the first half of the twentieth century, a socially superfluous, but positive hero. His detachment from any profit makes him potentially a judge of his time and, to some extent, a prophet of the future.

Peter Weil: There is no portrait resemblance to the author. What can we say about their spiritual similarity, which lies in the mainstream of the Russian literary tradition?

Yuri Arabov: The national type that has emerged over the last hundred years - the impetuosity and talent of the Russians - does not imply repentance. Although Orthodoxy always says: repent, repent, repent. It seems to me that the novel seems to be repentant, but I have the feeling that this is some kind of appearance of repentance. Here is the last part of the novel, where the poems are, clarifies everything about Boris Leonidovich himself. Since Zhivago has a certain autobiographical quality, it seems to me that the author still hasn’t decided whether the hero has a tragic guilt. What, strictly speaking, should our doctor repent of? There is one interesting knot in the plot of the novel when Zhivago changes, in Orthodox language, his marriage, and gets together with Lara. He wants to confess to Tonya that he has sinned, gallops off to Varykino, and then says to himself: why, exactly, should I tell her this today? I'll defer my confession. He returns and ends up in a partisan detachment, after which the character’s downfall begins. He's losing his family. Then a third marriage with a woman who probably doesn’t deserve him. He's going down, going down. Pasternak himself says this. I don't find any repentance in the novel. I find something else - resonance with time. The novel absolutely embodies the feelings of many, dispossessed by the revolution and the hard times of the Russians, which, unfortunately, does not end.

Peter Weil: The most important theme for the Russian literary and social tradition is repentance for everything that is happening around - when and how did it arise from Boris Pasternak? Without this, one cannot understand where the novel “Doctor Zhivago” came from, and, therefore, one cannot understand the novel itself. Natalya Ivanova turns to the origins - the late 20s - early 30s.

Natalya Ivanova: Mayakovsky’s suicide on March 14, 1930 made a terrible impression on him. He writes to Gorky, without risking writing to Stalin what Bulgakov wrote to Stalin, that is, that he wants to leave, to emigrate. Of course, he covers it up by saying he wants to leave for a while. “In recent years, I have been dreaming of a trip for a year and a half abroad. With my wife and son. In extreme cases, if this claim is too great, I would give up this happiness in their favor.” In addition, he overcame suicidal urges. Why is his book called "The Second Birth"? Because that life has already ended, in fact, suicide has already happened. In 1931, Pasternak began to write completely differently. When does he end the life of his hero Yuri Zhivago? In August '29. Then, when he himself had terrible internal tension and a desire to leave this life forever, if not to emigrate. In the spring and summer of 29, there was reprisal against Yevgeny Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak over the publication of their books, which were published not here, but abroad. That is, the case of the novel "Doctor Zhivago". Both this and Mayakovsky’s suicide had a very strong effect on Pasternak.

Peter Weil: Why didn’t Pasternak leave, and why didn’t Doctor Zhivago leave? An incomprehensible situation when Komarovsky invites Zhivago and Lara to leave, and Lara leaves, but Doctor Zhivago does not explain his refusal to do so. He just says, "I can't." Of course, the book, in principle, is not very logical; it is built according to other, poetic rules, and not according to the laws of cause and effect. There you don’t expect a logical explanation of the action, but still Zhivago’s decision remains unexplained.

Natalya Ivanova: As for Boris Leonidovich himself, when the campaign against Doctor Zhivago flared up, he wrote in despair that if his work was interesting only to a few Moscow Jews, he refused to be a writer for such a narrow group. He felt like he belonged to the whole community and really wanted to assimilate. He did not want to be a Jew and constantly proved that he was a Russian poet. The first sentence of my book about Boris Pasternak is: “The great Russian poet was born into a Jewish family.”

Peter Weil: By the way, there is an interesting twist to this topic. Comparing Mandelstam and Pasternak, in the mythology of the intelligentsia there is a rather common place about Mandelstam’s inflexibility and Pasternak’s conformism. But it is curious that it was Mandelstam who was baptized in order to enter the university, and Pasternak, like his father, categorically did not agree to such things.

Natalya Ivanova: His father explained to him that if he wants to study at a gymnasium and go to university, he must understand that the quota is three percent, and he must study better than anyone else. Pasternak was the best student.

Peter Weil: There is an amazing story connected with this. Leonid Osipovich Pasternak was a famous artist, and the Governor General of Moscow wrote a letter to the director of the gymnasium with a request to admit Boris Pasternak to the gymnasium. And I received the answer that the quota for Jews had already been fulfilled. Just imagine that Mayor Luzhkov writes to some director of the current Moscow gymnasium with a request to accept a student, but this is not fulfilled. Corruption was still not like that, there was some order. On the one hand, the quota is a complete disgrace and abomination, and on the other hand, the director of the gymnasium dares not to comply with the request of the governor-general.

Natalya Ivanova: Pasternak partly felt himself a Jew, but did not want to be one. He was a real Russian writer. In all his poems and in the novel "Doctor Zhivago" one can see how he is dissolved in the Russian landscape - in sunrises, in sunsets, in Russian women. He had an idea of ​​what foreign countries were like, he suffered when he came to Paris for the anti-fascist congress, he didn’t know what to do with himself. In his free time, he did not wander around Paris, and if he wandered, it was only in search of gifts for Zinaida Nikolaevna. He had a feeling of terrible vulgarity and uselessness of this world for him, and he had one desire - to return as soon as possible.

Yuri Arabov: Let me remind you of Pasternak’s poem “On the Train”:

There were women, Sloboda residents,
Students, mechanics,
There were no traces of servility in them...

The fact of the matter is that Pasternak himself was ambivalent. Pasternak, like people of the 10-20s, was seduced by the idea of ​​community. With a different attitude, we must reduce the novel to a certain human rights paradigm, but it does not reduce to this, and this is precisely the duality of Zhivago and the duality of the novel. I can cite as an example the euphoria that Zhivago experienced from these revealed human types on the road to the Urals. Elation, admiration for the minted style of the first decrees of the Soviet government. I was just making a film adaptation, crossed myself and looked at these decrees. Not only the coined syllable, but, for example, the very idea of ​​free higher education - one of the first decrees. I just shuddered. I myself am the head of the department at VGIK. A completely paid system hangs over us all the time. So it seems to me that not everything is simple with Doctor Zhivago. This has both positive features and some that are not very convenient for some conceptual promotion of this work.

Peter Weil: Few of the Russian intellectuals, at one stage or another in their lives, escaped the temptation to be together with society, with all the people. Few people have not experienced a feeling of spiritual delight from the consciousness of such a community. Yuri Arabov himself is no exception.

Yuri Arabov: There was a period of euphoria - the defense of the White House in 1991. This caught me in a village in the Yaroslavl region. I couldn’t leave that same day, it was impossible to get out. I listened to your programs, “Svoboda,” and realized that I was committing the greatest crime: I was not with them. I got ready and arrived when the State Emergency Committee had already fled. I remember how for many years I reproached myself: “What have you done, brother, how could you skip the story and not be with the guys.” Now this is, of course, a complete joke.

Peter Weil: It can be assumed that since Pasternak himself decided for himself the issue of emigration, then his hero had no need to justify the reasons for his refusal to leave Russia. Pasternak stayed, survived the crisis, and in 1934 he wrote to his father that he accepted what was happening in the country. The country defeated him.

Natalya Ivanova: Although in 1937 he wrote in one of his letters that “he is weakening the era with liquid marble.”

Peter Weil: Nevertheless, he accepted this life. There is a famous phrase by Zinaida Nikolaevna Pasternak that at Pasternak’s funeral she wanted to say: “Farewell, a real big communist.” This is cited as a manifestation of the scoundrel nature of Zinaida Nikolaevna. Although you need to read what is two paragraphs below. When she explains what she means by the concept of “communist,” you see that there is no talk of any communist. A portrait is drawn of someone very similar to a populist from the 60s of the 19th century. In this sense, Pasternak wanted to be dissolved among the people. Not as a Bolshevik, but precisely as a populist.

Natalya Ivanova: He didn’t just want to be dissolved among the people, like a populist, he had a very strong Christian desire to dissolve. No wonder Stalin called him a holy fool. By the way, all sorts of mechanics in Peredelkino for a long time later said that there was no such second person in terms of simplicity, in the way he talks to people. There were all Soviet bars there. He was never a Soviet master.

Peter Weil: Narodnik, enemy of the people, communist, anti-communist, Boris Pasternak was a poet. Whatever and however we try to understand and explore. This is the first and most important thing. He experienced the most difficult crises, but he always had literature.

Evgeniy Pasternak: “Doctor Zhivago” is also proof of one truth. Adorno wrote that after Auschwitz one cannot write poetry, and more broadly, one cannot engage in lyrical creativity. Here "Doctor Zhivago" is proof that there is such poetry that can be written after Auschwitz.

Natalya Ivanova: There are features of Christ in Zhivago. Of course, this crucifixion is what Pasternak puts Zhivago through. It is not for nothing that in the poems that accompany the ending of the novel, the entire Christian theme sounds so open. By the way, they were not understood, these verses. They thought, for example, about the poem "Dawn", that it was about some comrade who had been away for a long time, and now came from somewhere. In fact, it is about returning to God.

Peter Weil: The country is so godless that no one understood. True, there is also a circumstance that few people understand poetry by ear. Tsvetaeva read poems from “Swan Camp” to the red cadets in the 20s, and they applauded. True, by the time Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago, attentive readers already had a good understanding of everything, clearly signaling where the literature was party and where it was not.

Yuri Arabov: “Doctor Zhivago” is one of the few Soviet novels written from a non-partisan position. What else can we remember here? "The White Guard", probably "The Master and Margarita", some pieces of "The Quiet Don". And so, the rest is party stuff. The very fact of the emergence of the novel in Soviet society from a non-partisan position is a fact of personal repentance. Parsnip was undoubtedly eaten by this worm and caused his cancer.

Peter Weil: Boris Pasternak could have cut the knot a long time ago by simply going abroad, as many Russian writers did. But he did not leave himself and did not let his hero leave.

Natalya Ivanova: Yuri Zhivago is not only Russian, he is also snub-nosed, whitish, and blue-eyed. Pasternak gave him his super-Russianness. He stayed, didn’t leave, he thought. that will not be able to take place abroad.

Peter Weil: If we didn’t have Brodsky, we could only discuss this topic hypothetically.

Natalya Ivanova: And Bunina. And so we know that Russian writers also create abroad, and quite successfully. But when this terrible campaign unfolded and the Pravda newspaper wrote that the path to the West was open to Pasternak, he wrote a whole letter saying that he could not imagine life without Russia.

Peter Weil: He was certainly sincere in his patriotism, as in everything else. This is what neither Yuri Zhivago nor Boris Pasternak have - posture and falsehood: because they have a sense of self-esteem. This quality has been lost by current Russian society, says Yuri Arabov.

Yuri Arabov: Even if this novel were written a million times worse, it would still be difficult to overestimate its importance. On some personal level, for example, in Zhivago I recognize people with self-esteem. You and I are people of the same generation. A generation is like a generation, a lot of bad, a lot of good, but I have never seen that sense of dignity that I still saw a little bit in individual people of the 60s. The system was completely cannibalistic. True, in the 60s it switched to vegetarianism and, on the whole, became tolerable for a working person if he did not go to demonstrations in Novocherkassk. But there were people with a sense of self-esteem - a straight spine, a head thrown back proudly. To some extent, they were probably formed before the revolution. I found the remnants of such a person - a person who is responsible for his words, who earns cancer for himself because he does not sleep at night, cursing himself for some actions.

Peter Weil: If Doctor Zhivago is a biography of a certain life that Pasternak did not live, how is Doctor Zhivago better than his author, from his point of view?

Natalya Ivanova: In his eyes, Yuri Zhivago is better because he suffered, suffered greatly, while Pasternak did not suffer so much. It is known what happened to Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam was killed, Babel was shot. And he walked along this edge of life, as he believed, undeservedly safely. No loved ones were taken away from him, except for Olga Ivinskaya, who was imprisoned. Therefore, this is not atonement for his guilt before those for whom he prayed. Redemption for having to live the same tragic, dramatic fate.

Peter Weil: And the fact that he did this with his manuscript - he transferred it to the West, it was he who built Golgotha ​​for himself.

Natalya Ivanova: He did it on purpose. When everything happened, it was not for nothing that he wrote that he was happier than ever. He didn't make it up. He is a man who has never stood in a pose.

Peter Weil: Zhivago has wonderful words. Of course, this is the voice of Pasternak: “I don’t like those on the right who have not fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is dead and of little value. The beauty of life was not revealed to them.”

Natalya Ivanova: This is absolutely accurate. He understood that in such a terrible life, when not only “the era is weakened by liquid marble,” but also people’s lives turn into dust, he was lucky.

Peter Weil: “You yourself should not distinguish defeat from victory.” It is fair to apply these words of Boris Pasternak to himself. You can do wrong, you can lose, you can be wrong, but even in defeats and falls you cannot “give up your face,” you must “be yourself, yourself and nothing more.” Again, the question is about a sense of dignity, which, according to Yuri Arabov, today's Russian people have less and less.

Yuri Arabov: Gone, extinct genotype. For me, the question is: how could such people be controlled? I don't understand. Or am I very, very wrong about these people? But I see these qualities in Zhivago and I understand that, say, in cinema it is now very difficult to realize this.

Peter Weil: So, have such people completely disappeared now?

Yuri Arabov: No. There are wonderful people. But overall I come to a very difficult feeling. In Russia, one generation is worse than the other. I have a complete feeling of the descending development of the nation. And I have very alarming feelings about our prospects.

Peter Weil: The novel "Doctor Zhivago" is one of the most famous books of world literature of the twentieth century. A lot contributed to this. The civil execution of Pasternak against the backdrop of his Nobel Prize, then a popular film. But the literature itself of Doctor Zhivago - what is it in the context of Russian literature?

Evgeny Pasternak: This is the beginning of a new prose of the second half of the twentieth century. But to what extent it can be taken into account is difficult to say. "Doctor Zhivago" is a brilliant work. You cannot take something from there and transfer it into yourself. We need to make an original thing, to some extent congenial to Doctor Zhivago. So far I simply don’t know of such examples.

Peter Weil: Question to Natalia Ivanova. You wrote a wonderful book about Pasternak with the wonderful title “Fate and Destiny.” Therefore, who else but you to ask: the figure of Doctor Zhivago for further Russian literature?

Natalya Ivanova: First of all, so that Russian literature recognizes itself as free and independent. Because she went through the ordeal of what was done to Pasternak. This was a test of all Russian literature. After all, all independent Russian literature was crucified at that moment. One can treat the novel better or worse... Nabokov could not stand it, Akhmatova believed that it was a thing with great weaknesses and oddities, to put it mildly. And in general, I have met many people in my life who said: “Let’s better talk about poetry.” However, I believe that this novel greatly influenced even legal Russian literature. Because writers like Trifonov or Iskander, Voinovich, Bella Akhmadulina - they all read Doctor Zhivago. And the imprint of that purity and that romanticism, that unprecedented sincerity and that foolishness that is in Yuri Andreevich still exists. This image is imprinted on Russian consciousness and Russian literature. Although, if we talk about the continuation, the novel closes a very large tradition, and does not open it.

Peter Weil: We have already mentioned David Lean’s film more than once with Omar Sharif - Yuri Zhivago, and Julia Christie - Lara. And it would be strange not to remember, since in our time it is the transfer of books to cinema and television that makes them widely popular. In educated circles, it is customary to criticize the painting “Doctor Zhivago” as a handicraft, and to treat it, at best, condescendingly. What does Evgeny Pasternak think about this film?

Evgeniy Pasternak: I have a positive attitude towards him, because he is very far from the novel. We watched it back in Soviet times. Then the journalist and later the famous television personality Hedrick Smith received this film from America. They moved our apartment, which had one large room, hung a sheet on the wall, invited Natalia Solzhenitsyn (he himself was already in exile), family members and watched this film. Hedrick Smith began to swear, how terrible. I said that he was swearing in vain, because this melodrama is very good in itself, although it has nothing to do with the novel.

Peter Weil: So you are grateful to the director for not invading the territory of the novel?

Evgeniy Pasternak: I am grateful to him that he chose his genre, and the correspondence is very distant. And this, in general, is the condition for a good film adaptation of large works. An example of this is the film adaptation of the English-language “War and Peace” in comparison with what Bondarchuk did. The result is an independent thing that has some airways of connection with the literary work.

Petr Weil: Russian filmmakers have long intended to film their own version of Doctor Zhivago. Yuri Arabov has already written the script, the director is Alexander Proshkin. How does Evgeny Pasternak assess the chances of the Russian version?

Evgeniy Pasternak: Modern Russian cinema produces a lot of different things. There was a good film called "The Return" - loud, very correctly made with an ax and rope, without much technical detail. Anything can happen. Talent has no boundaries. Such a film is needed, and it needs to be independent, and not what is called loyalty to the traditions of modernity in modern cinema.

Peter Weil: The issue of reproducing Pasternak’s novel on screen is not only a creative and professional issue. This is a problem of public consciousness, since the book and its main character occupy such a special place in the mental and spiritual everyday life of Russian people. Since the times of both Yuri Zhivago and Boris Pasternak, too much has changed too much.

Yuri Arabov: There was a social contract between the writer and society in Russia. It was apparently concluded in the 30s of the 19th century, and the society’s dissemination of Gogol’s “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” suggests that there was some kind of agreement. The writer and society have already agreed on something. Then this was articulated as the expression by the writer of certain progressive socio-political humanistic ideas, but in fact the writer acted as an intermediary between an amorphous society and a fairly solid government. But our generation terminated this agreement. Pasternak still felt the burden of the social contract, despite the fact that in 1934 there was a repurchase: instead of a social contract, there was a state contract with the writer. Pasternak felt this, and somehow it manifested itself in Doctor Zhivago. And among our generation, I cannot name a single name, anyone who would feel this burden. Again, once again, a terrible, enchanted place according to Gogol. “If you sow a cucumber, a turnip will come out. If you sow a turnip, it will not be a turnip, nor a cucumber, but God knows what.” A place where there is no dancing. Again, once again, civil society is in its infancy, and it is very easy to crush it and, once again, maybe this is not visible, but again the writer must enter into some kind of agreement. A writer in the West, due to the development of civil institutions, may not have to carry this burden. In Pasternak this burden is felt.

Peter Weil: That’s what Pasternak’s genius is for, not only to speak, but also to let it slip. Has anyone noticed that Doctor Zhivago says to Lara: “The roof has been blown off all over Russia.” The current, slang, generally accepted expression - then, half a century before our days.

Natalya Ivanova: He meant, of course, something completely different. For Pasternak, the image of home is very important.

Peter Weil: Well, yes, it completely sounds like this: “The roof was torn off from all over Russia, and all the people and I found ourselves in the open air.” But it is still noteworthy that the current slang meaning is clearly there too.