Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and the Politics of Russian Literary Dissent

Russia has never gotten Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago out of its system. This course will take us deep into the most controversial novel written during the Soviet era. Tolstoyan in its sweep, Dr. Zhivago is a stunning indictment of the system that attempted to engineer human life and an equally stunning meditation on the power of art to survive turbulent times. Pasternak was, above all, a poet. Dr. Zhivago was the only novel he ever wrote, and as such, we will be reading the prose of a poet. We will look at the poetic tradition to which Pasternak belonged, as well as the Zhivago poems that are key to understanding the philosophical core of the novel. Pasternak called it “a novel about us,” yet he could not get Dr. Zhivago published in his own country. The fate of Pasternak’s novel tells us much about how literary dissent functioned in the Soviet Union, but what can Pasternak and his novel speak to the world where Russia finds itself today?