In February 2022, I reflected upon how the Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel quartet And Quiet Flows the Don provides insights into the historical context for what became Russian’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In this post, I want to use Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago as a moral compass for better understanding the motivations of a war rooted in Russia’s enduring imperial, religious and Soviet identity.

Last year, the veteran international relations and Russian expert Professor Walter Clemens wrote a blog on the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis website entitled Back in the USSR: Zhivago’s Lessons About Russia. Here Clemens discusses the ambivalent reception of Pasternak’s novel by fellow students when he produced an English translation during a visit to Moscow in the late 1950s. It would be many years before Doctor Zhivago was published in Russia and its author was long-dead when the Nobel Prize for Literature was collected on his behalf.

Meanwhile, Sholokhov (known as the ‘Red Tolstoy’) had been awarded the prize himself in 1965, having spoken out against Pasternak’s earlier nomination. The Quiet Don quartet – an ironic title for a narrative anything but peaceful – was and remains widely feted in Russia, giving rise to a heritage industry mobilised during the early stages of the 2022 ‘special military operation’ in support of the Putin regime.

Whilst Sholokhov’s relationship with the state was by no means unambiguous, his novels do not fundamentally challenge the Soviet view of history in the same way as Doctor Zhivago. This dissidence was undoubtedly capitalised upon in the West as the book was adapted in to a widely acclaimed film directed by the British cinematographer David Lean and released in 1965. Unsurprisingly for a novel of some 500 pages in its most recent English translation, the film makes significant departures from the text but adheres to the central storyline dominated by the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, as well as the vast landscape of a country straddling Europe and Asia.

Walter Clemens’ 2024 blog uses an image from Lean’s film which juxtaposes the characters of Pasternak’s hero, Dr Yuri Zhivago, with that of his half-brother who will become a leading apparat within the Soviet regime whilst retaining a deep love of culture. Although the story is predominantly remembered in the West as a historical romance, the main characters of the novel also embody different aspects of the Russian psyche, including a profound fascination with religion and philosophy, on the one hand, and science and technology on the other. The narrative also recognises the potential of the state – whether imperial or Soviet – for savage repression and violence at home and abroad.

Pasternak was born in the Ukrainian city of Odesa, later the setting for Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which dramatizes the same brutality. However, the novelist’s life was mostly spent in and around Moscow, plus briefly in the Russian Urals where the second part of Doctor Zhivago is mainly set. Whilst Sholokhov is essentially a provincial writer – this is an observation rather than a criticism – Pasternak belonged to a cosmopolitan and international literary milieu and some of his characters, like members of his own family, are forced in to exile in the West.

However, notwithstanding existential threats, Boris Pasternak chose to remain in Russia and his best remembered work still impresses upon its readers the ultimate victory of humanitarian, civilised, artistic and, above all, spiritual values when confronted with violent conflict and repression. To adapt the title of Professor Clemens blog for CEPA, ‘Zhivago’s Lessons For Ukraine: Right Now in 2025’ (and particularly for the Washington-based regime’s apparent plan to make Russia great again).