"Dr Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak

Published in 1957, Doctor Zhivago is normally regarded as one of the greatest Russian novels of the modern age with its themes of nationality and romance, life and death, truth and lies at the very heart of the text rounded off with the mysterious Doctor Yuri Zhivago, a figure of grand symbolism in a world that is constantly trying to drag him down to their level.

Heavily censored at its time, Doctor Zhivago was refused publication in the USSR due to its opinions about the October Revolution, 1917. The manuscript was finally published in 1957 due to it being smuggled into Milan and published there. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year and this made the Communist Party incredibly angry and embarrassed.

The novel opens in 1902 where Yuri is taken in by his maternal uncle and they all live in Imperial Russia. Yuri's uncle is a philosopher and an artsy person and through this he learns too, about his father. The next part involves the 11-year-old Yuri witnessing a man's suicide from a train whilst traveling. As the book develops, Yuri discovers more about who he is, and who Lara is as well. He witnesses wars and the violation of human rights, he cannot seem to get the image of death out of his head and the reader comes full circle back to the suicide upon the train. Involving a cellist and a woman called Amalia, Yuri works on his profession to become a doctor whilst being dragged between emotion and duty during the Russo-Japanese War.

As Yuri learns even more about himself - particularly that he may have a brother or half-brother, he also studies even further to be a doctor. Through attempted murder, fainting spells and lavish parties - control and toxicity become more and more present as aspects of Lara's life that she suffers dearly.

It seems great that Yuri has married Tonya and Pasha has married Lara, Yuri grows into a man, fathers a child and begins to really live the life of a doctor through war. But he does feel that something extreme is missing, a piece is being left out of his life. Once he starts to get to know Lara, he finds her not only interesting, but is more romantically interested in her than he would like to be. She does not yet reciprocate the feeling. Be that as it may, Yuri and Lara are working in close quarters due to the revolution and uprisings in which hundreds of people are being killed and injured.

The October Revolution causes Yuri's family to flee their home and travel to Tonya's. Yuri begins to pen poetry and letters, writings of incredible artisticness. As he progresses to becoming a part of the guerrilla movement unwillingly, Yuri reflects on his life and his marriage, the things he has not done and the people he did not save. He comes into close contact with rampant narcissism and toxicity in character whilst Tonya and Lara grow closer together.

As the story progresses, death breaks marriages and suffering encaptures the very essence of the storyline, emotion and heartbreak litter the novel and come to a blinding climax from Part 14 onwards. We eventually come to the line of being a nameless number and the book comes to an eventual, tearful and heartaching close. An absolutely beautiful novel with a brilliant message of love and death.

I first read this in my teens and I couldn't stop crying throughout the whole thing, from the first suicide to the epilogue which is strangely upsetting, there is so much to explore about existence in this book and how we have to come to terms with the fact that people we love will die and not always after living a long and fruitful life. Sometimes, things will go wrong and we just have to deal with it, no matter how much it hurts - and believe Pasternak, it is going to damn well hurt.

“About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn´t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.” - Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak