Doctor Zhivago
Spoilers inside!
Doctor Zhivago is a relentlessly long read, but is ultimately about the inner life of an Idealist (in the MBTI NF sense) living through the harsh political turmoil of the Russian Civil War.
Quotes I enjoyed
My favourite scene is while Lara and Yuri are hiding in Yuriatin from the madness of the civil war and Yuri’s responsibilities, and just talking with each other. The couple have such a deep understanding and sympathy for each other’s feelings and thoughts, and up until now Zhivago’s rambling inner monologue has not felt received by another character’s with the affordance for him to fully explore it. The dialogue below summarises that:
[Yuri:] Have you ever heard the name of Nikolai Vedenyapin?”
[Lara: ] Well, of course. Before I met you, and later, from what you’ve often told me. Simochka Tuntseva mentions him often. She’s his follower. But I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read his books. I don’t like works devoted entirely to philosophy. I think philosophy should be used sparingly as a seasoning for art and life. To be occupied with it alone is the same as eating horseradish by itself. But forgive me, I’ve distracted you with my stupid talk.
[Yuri:] No, on the contrary. I agree with you. That way of thinking is very close to me.
And later when Lara reflects on their love:
Never, never, even in moments of the most gratuitous, self-forgetful happiness, did that most lofty and thrilling thing abandon them: delight in the general mold of the world, the feeling of their relation to the whole picture, the sense of belonging to the beauty of the whole spectacle, to the whole universe. They breathed only by that oneness.
I think Pasternak illustrated the joy of feeling like your inner thoughts, regardless of their messiness, might be understood by someone. That conversation may branch from a family member to the importance of philosophy.
I had a lot of self-identification in Zhivago’s internal life. He is a man constantly preoccupied with the profoundness of things and what it means for others, what is going on in their life. He spends such long periods reflecting and understanding, and - to his failure - such little acting upon the world.
The uncle’s influence furthered Yura and liberated him, but it fettered Misha. Yura understood what role in Misha’s extreme enthusiasms was played by his origins. From cautious tactfulness, he did not try to talk Misha out of his strange projects. But he often wished to see an empirical Misha, much closer to life.
And Lara in return:
Then untruth came to the Russian land. The main trouble, the root of the future evil, was loss of faith in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the urgings of their moral sense was gone, that now they had to sing to the general tune and live by foreign notions imposed on everyone. The dominion of the ready-made phrase began to grow—first monarchistic, then revolutionary.
I assume Pasternak is kind of like this. Other characters have random asides of esoteric (often Christian) ideas, which show that character as an intellectual. But in doing so they too demonstrate the author’s intelligence, faith, and perhaps a leaning towards the psychological:
Nikolai Nikolaevich was living in Lausanne. In the books he published there in Russian and in translation, he developed his long-standing notion of history as a second universe, erected by mankind in response to the phenomenon of death with the aid of the phenomena of time and memory. The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.
And Sima Tuntseva, differentiating “passion” as lust from “passion” for forgiveness and intimacy with Christ:
‘Passion’ in Slavonic, as you know perfectly well, first of all means ‘suffering,’ the Passion of our Lord, ‘the Lord goeth to His voluntary passion’ (that is, to His voluntary suffering). Besides that, the word is used in the later Russian meaning of vices and lusts. ‘Having enslaved the dignity of my soul to passions, I turned into a beast,’ ‘Having been expelled from paradise, let us strive to enter it by abstention from passions,’ and so on. I’m probably very depraved, but I don’t like the pre-Easter readings in that line, devoted to harnessing sensuality and mortifying the flesh. It always seems to me that these crude, flat prayers, lacking in the poetry proper to other spiritual texts, were composed by greasy, fat-bellied monks. And the point is not that they themselves did not live by their own rules and deceived others. Suppose they even lived according to conscience. The point isn’t them, but the content of these texts. These laments give unnecessary significance to various infirmities of the body and to whether it is well-fed or famished. It’s disgusting. Here a dirty, inessential secondariness is raised to an undue, inappropriate height.
“It has always interested me why the mention of Mary Magdalene is placed just before Easter, on the threshold of Christ’s end and His resurrection…Now listen with what genuine passion, with what directness regardless of anything, this mention is made.
The physical world takes up little of Zhivago’s internal monologue and the author’s prose. His escape from Liberius’s camp is an almost non-event, the principle events happening are his thinking about his family and Lara, a brief conversation with a sentry, and a one paragraph montage of his “very long” journey which illustrates more the state of the people than anything Zhivago himself does.
On Style
I enjoyed the rambling conversations of all the characters. There is a lot of dialogue, and it can often be hard to track who is saying what. This creates an impression of ideas being shared and mingled between characters, with the back-and-forth being more central than any one character changing their mind.
I understand it is a common assertion that the book is very long, and there’s an unreasonable number of coincidences and chance run-ins. So I simply echo these.
On Zhivago as an INFJ
As an indulgence to my MBTI brain, I think it is pretty clear that Yuri is an INFJ:
- Ni - he spends a lot of time thinking about the world, drawing out patterns, and being struck by the enormity or significance of things.
- Fe - in particular he’s interested in the emotional worlds of people, the ideas and thoughts which are shaping their feelings and actions. He also seems to be cautious about upsetting other people, and it feels like his first and last marriage both kind of “happen” to him based on the expectations of others. And until he meets Lara, he expresses little pain with that.
- Ti - he is interested in ideas and frameworks, but more as things to play with or explore. His preferred writings is poetry - impressionistic and vibesy - over essays - ideas-based and logical. He has a brief discussion with Pogorevshikh on the train, but not nearly enough to try to argue his case.
- Se - very rarely does he act decisively, and it seems that actions almost occur to him.