Perhaps
it was the watery eyes of Omar Sharif, the beauty of Julie Christie, the fierceness
of Alec Guiness, or the wounded look of Geraldine Chaplin. What it was, I was a
young teenager when I was pulled into the movie version of Doctor Zhivago,
directed by David Lean. It was one of the movies rarely made today – a big
movie, with dozens of characters, stories and sub-stories. It was an epic film based
on an epic literary work that had only recently been published.
Published
in Russian in Italy and forbidden in the author’s own country.
The
movie pulled me to the
novel by Boris Pasternak, and I read it when I was all of 14. It’s a love
story, actually several love stories, set against the backdrop of World War I,
the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and the long Soviet night that followed.
Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, largely on the
strength of Doctor Zhivago and his
poetry, but the Soviet regime forced him to refuse the honor.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Painting of Boris Pasternak and his
brother by his father, Leonid Pasternak.
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