Welcome to week nine of my sixteen-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
This one's a favourite — much of it is written as Yury's diary, so we're deep inside his head as he works the land at Varykino, muses on art and Russian literature (Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky), and senses spring coming. Then the chapter turns: a chance sighting in the Yuryatin library brings Lara back into his life, an affair begins, and Pasternak's own tangled life starts bleeding into the fiction. It ends with Yury stopped at a crossroads by three horsemen — and everything about to change.I also get into the biography here: the guilt, Zinaida and Olga, and how hard it becomes to tell Pasternak and Zhivago apart.
📖 Follow along with the essay and printable version at https://camscampbellreads.substack.com/p/doctor-zhivago-chapter-9
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
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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