Overcoming the Inevitability: An Interpretation of History and Art in Doctor Zhivago

Culture of the 20^th century worked with the opinion of masses. In the Soviet Union, experiments with new forms and styles of art were directed by the state policy in order to spread ideology. After the catastrophe of the Second World War, European intellectuals exposed the way of thinking that inspires fascism. In the Soviet Union, where culture was still closely related to ideology, this critique was maintained by talented writers who turned to the themes of history and the fate of a personality, to the motive of the value of subjective thinking as opposed to mass thinking. Boris Pasternak created Doctor Zhivago between 1945 and 1955 and published it in Europe, despite the threat of persecution, which, unfortunately, came true. On the one hand, the novel is lyrical and full of symbols, on the other hand, it offers a peculiar analysis of the philosophy of history, responding to the ethical question of the time: how to live and act in the situation of impotence of an individual in the face of historical events? The evangelic motive is incomplete, since the life of the protagonist ends with fading rather than resurrection. Victory over death is revealed in Doctor Zhivago as victory over inevitability. The evangelic history is a special space where something “redundant” in relation to the world, something new and therefore changes per se are possible. Art is a natural channel of special “soulfulness,” of the pure closeness of souls that is free of destruction (which anticipates even the most superb forms) and therefore always the opposite of death.

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