Dr John Wallace looks at the background to the epic film Doctor Zhivago, which was adapted from the eponymous book about the surgeon and poet, written by banned Russian writer Boris Pasternak.
Told in flashback by Alec Guinness, the intimate yet epic film Doctor Zhivago tells the story of surgeon-writer Yuri Zhivago, played by Omar Sharif. Director David Lean’s blockbuster is a three-hour film that covers fifty years of Russian history.
The story is told through the lens of the relationship between the protagonist Yuri Zhivago – a humanist, medical doctor and poet – and Lara, played in the film by Julie Christie.
Produced by Carlo Ponti, with music by Maurice Jarre and a screenplay by Robert Bolt, the central character is a doctor and his medical role is used as a device through which we get to view a nation’s history. Though a vast, epic tale, the film remains psychologically intimate. Lean’s attention to detail and the stunning set pieces made the film a huge success.
Doctor Zhivago’s war-disrupted existence alters the lives of many people, including the numerous injured soldiers and civilians that he treats. Filmed in a sweeping, lyrical style, this is epic film-making at its best.
h4. Omar Sharif
Omar Sharif was cast in the title role. Born in Egypt, Sharif studied physics at Cairo University. Already a star in Egypt, he played in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. As well as being the world’s most renowned Franco-Arabic actor, he was better known as a professional bridge player and wrote several books on the subject. He would postpone any film shooting that coincided with a major bridge game. Fluent in Arabic, English, Greek, and French, he was a fifty-cigarette-a-day man until he had triple bypass surgery in 1992.
His muse in the film, Lara, was played by Julie Christie. Born on her father’s tea plantation in India, Christie was a blonde and blue-eyed beauty, a versatile leading lady and a welcome screen presence in Zhivago. She was also superb with Donald Sutherland in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now set in Venice. Looking back on her career she said, “adulation is terribly corroding”. Zhivago’s wife was played by Geraldine Chaplin, the granddaughter of writer Eugene O’Neill.
Ralph Richardson played Zhivago’s father-in-law. A wise man with an abstracted charm, Richardson had become an actor instead of a priest and did not give much consideration to his film work. Only a few films, such as Zhivago, do him justice. He was also excellent as the aristocratic grandfather and moving old earl, in the Tarzan tale Greystoke in 1984, where he slid down the staircase on a silver tray.
Rod Steiger played a complex brute in Zhivago. A method actor with a dramatic screen presence, his big movie breakthrough was in the famous taxi-ride scene with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront in 1954. Steiger suffered from recurrent depressive disorder and gave public lectures on mental health.
The film was narrated by Alec Guinness, who played a policeman. Guinness’s career spanned more than 60 years. He is most famous for having captured a subtly unhinged Britishness in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957.
Irish actors Jack MacGowran, who was a friend of Samuel Beckett, and Siobhan McKenna also contributed to Zhivago’s success.
h4. Boris Pasternak
The film Doctor Zhivago, based on the banned novel by Boris Pasternak, was made in 1965, five years before David Lean went on to make Ryan’s Daughter in Ireland. In total, Lean directed five international blockbusters that won some 23 Academy Awards.
The novel’s author, Boris Pasternak, was bought up in a highly cosmopolitan atmosphere. He was born in 1890 in Moscow, to a father who printed and illustrated the works of Leo Tolstoy. He first studied law, then music, before going on to read philosophy in Germany.
In WWI he worked in a factory in the Urals. Unlike his friends, he did not leave Russia after the Revolution but worked in the library of the Education Ministry in Moscow. Under Stalin, he became an official translator. This work was highly valued and for ten years he published little else.
In the 1930s, Pasternak’s position became increasingly difficult though Stalin, luckily, had ordered the secret police not to touch the ‘cloud dweller’.
In the last decade of his life, despite his declining health, Pasternak worked feverishly on the novel he intended to be his testament. This manuscript was meant to witness the experience of the Russian intelligentsia before, during and after the Revolution: Doctor Zhivago.
h4. Medical school
The book is poetic and fragmentary and depicts the plight of a man more concerned with the individual than the State. Zhivago, the doctor, is poetic to the point of mysticism. In medical school, one of his professors reminds Zhivago that while bacteria are beautiful under the microscope, they also can do ugly things to people.
The book describes, with intense feeling, the Russian Revolution as it impinged on one individual who was both a surgeon and a poet. The novel is a tragedy that spans the last period of Tsarist Russia, the Russian Revolution and the civil war. Zhivago’s journey through Siberia is epic. A major theme in the work is how the doctor’s idealism is destroyed by the Bolsheviks and then the White Army. Even Lara is eventually taken from him.
The book is not anti-Marxist but is the view of a Communist disappointed that history has not confirmed his vision. With Khrushchev, Pasternak mistakenly believed that there was a ‘political thaw’. While still despairing of publication in the USSR, he ill-advisedly allowed publication of the book in Italy in 1957. Dr Zhivago caused an immediate political earthquake and was promptly banned in Russia. An instant sensation outside the USSR, the novel went to the top of the American bestseller list.
h4. The Nobel Prize
Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Initially, he accepted he prize but four days later he refused it. A vehement campaign was waged against him, with the Soviet Government asking the Nobel Committee not to award him the prize. As a result, he was never formally presented with the honour. He feared that if he travelled to Stockholm to accept it, he might lose his citizenship and that he would not be allowed to re-enter Russia. The companion of his last years, Olga Ivinskaya, on whom Lara the heroine of Doctor Zhivago is based, was arrested and imprisoned.
Doctor Zhivago, on which Pasternak’s international reputation is founded, was not published in Russia until 1987. Lean’s film was not released in Russia until the fall of the USSR. Pasternak wrote the most influential collection of poetry published in the Russian language in the 20th century. Despite this, he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union. And he had to take the unprecedented step of refusing the Nobel Prize.
Boris Pasternak died from lung cancer in May 1960. Prior to his death, in his poetry, he became concerned with universal questions such as love, immortality, and most importantly, the possibility of man’s reconciliation with God.
* The novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is published by Penguin. The DVD is available courtesy of Warner Brothers.
* Dr John Wallace is a medical doctor with an interest in biography.
About Gary Culliton
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