Welcome to week twelve of my sixteen-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
Welcome back to the Doctor Zhivago Slow Read. This week we're into Part 12 — the partisans, the taiga, and one of the bleakest and strangest stretches of the whole novel.The partisans' families arrive (the cattle-healer and self-proclaimed witch Kubarikha among them), last week's conspirators meet their end by the ravine, and the brotherhood finds itself besieged in the deep Siberian forest: rationing supplies, stitching coats from dogskin, and slowly coming apart. We get Pamphil's heartbreaking unravelling, Kubarikha's pagan spell over a sick cow, that gorgeous passage on the Russian folk-song as "water in a weir," and finally Yury seizing his chance to slip away into the snow.Along the way, a short detour through French and Russian history — the Communards, the Bourbons, and Ivan the Terrible's oprichniki — plus a note from Orlando Figes on just how meagre Allied aid to the Whites really was.
📖 Follow along with the essay and printable version at https://camscampbellreads.substack.com/p/doctor-zhivago-chapter-12
Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago, Anna Pasternak
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, Peter Finn, Petra Couvée
A People's Tragedy, Orlando Figes
It's also available as a YouTube video here.
All quotations are from the Hayward/Harari translation. Buy the Everyman's Library edition from Amazon, Blackwells, Waterstones or Bookshop.org with this affiliate link: https://geni.us/bZsI
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