|
Doctor
Zhivago
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Quotes
|
Movie
| Book
| Author
| Director
& cast
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Book: Doctor Zhivago (1957)
Movie: Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Quotes:
"Good marriages are made in
heaven..or some such place."
"The doctor's a gentleman. -Right. It's written all over him."
"What I want to know is how we're going to stay alive this winter."
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Premise
movie:
"A Russian epic, the movie traces the life of
surgeon-poet Yury Zhivago before and during the Russian Revolution.
Married to an upper-class girl who is devoted to him, yet in love with
an unfortunate woman who becomes his muse, Zhivago is torn between
fidelity and passion. Sympathetic with the revolution but shaken by
the wars and purges, he struggles to retain his individualism as a
humanist amid the spirit of collectivism."
from:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059113/plotsummary
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Premise
book:
"Doctor Zhivago tells the story of Yury Zhivago, a man
torn between his love for two women while caught in the tumultuous
course of twentieth century Russian history. Yury's mother dies when
he is still a young boy, and he is raised by his uncle Kolya. He
enrolls at the university in Moscow, studying medicine. There he meets
Tonya, and the two marry and have a son,
Sasha. Yury becomes a medical officer in the army and is stationed in a small
town. He meets Lara, a woman whom he has seen twice before. The first
time, he visited the house of a woman who tried to commit suicide, and
he saw Lara, the woman's daughter, exchanging glances with an older
man, Komarovsky. The second time, Lara tried to shoot Komarovsky at a
party and instead wounded a prosecutor from the courts. Lara is
married to Pasha, a young soldier who is missing, and she has come
west to find him. She has a daughter, Katya, whom she has left in
Yuryatin, her birthplace in the Urals.
Yury is captivated by Lara, but he returns to his wife and son in
Moscow. Times are difficult, and the family must struggle to find food
and firewood. They decide to move east to Varyniko, an estate once
owned by Tonya's grandfather but now being worked as a collective. The
journey is long and difficult, but when they arrive they find plenty
of food and wood. Yury goes to the nearest city, Yuryatin, to use the
library. There, he sees Lara once more. They begin an affair that
lasts two months before Yury decides to break off contact and confess
all to his wife. On his way, he is captured by the partisan army,
which conscripts him as a medical officer.
Yury is forced to remain with the army through the end of the war
between the Tsarist Whites and the Communist Reds. When he is
released, he returns to Yuryatin to find Lara. The two spend several
months together, and then they go to Varykino to hide. Lara's former
husband, Pasha, became a leader in the Urals but is now wanted.
Komarovsky returns and urges them to go east with him to avoid being
killed. Yury's family has been exiled to Paris, and he is promised the
opportunity to join them. Yury tricks Lara into taking her daughter
and going with Komarovsky, while he remains at
Varykino.Yury returns to Moscow and finds work. He begins living with Marina,
the daughter of a family friend. He and Marina have two children.
Yury's old friends Misha and Nicky encourage him to resolve his
divided loyalties toward Tonya and Marina. He finds a new job but on
the way to his first day at work he dies of a heart attack. Lara comes
to the funeral and asks Yury's half-brother, a lawyer, if there is any
way to track the location of a child given away to strangers. She
stays for several days and then disappears, likely dying in a
concentration camp. Years later, Misha and Nicky are fighting in World
War II and encounter a laundry-girl, Tanya, who tells them her life
story. They determine that she is the daughter of Lara and Yury. "
from:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/zhivago/
summary.html
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Author:
"Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960), born in Moscow, was
the son of talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of
Tolstoy's works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Pasternak's
education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was
continued at the University of Moscow. Under the influence of the composer
Scriabin, Pasternak took up the study of musical composition for six
years from 1904 to 1910. By 1912 he had renounced music as his
calling in life and went to the University of Marburg, Germany, to study
philosophy. After four months there and a trip to Italy, he
returned to Russia and decided to dedicate himself to literature.
Pasternak's first books of verse went unnoticed. With Sestra moya
zhizn (My Sister Life), 1922, and Temy i variatsii (Themes and
Variations), 1923, the latter marked by an extreme, though sober
style, Pasternak first gained a place as a leading poet among his
Russian contemporaries. In 1924 he published Vysokaya bolezn (Sublime
Malady), which portrayed the 1905 revolt as he saw it, and Detstvo
Lyuvers (The Childhood of Luvers), a lyrical and psychological
depiction of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood. A collection
of four short stories was published the following year under the title
Vozdushnye puti (Aerial Ways). In 1927 Pasternak again returned to the
revolution of 1905 as a subject for two long works: Leytenant
Shmidt, a poem expressing threnodic sorrow for the fate of Lieutenant Schmidt,
the leader of the mutiny at Sevastopol, and Devyatsot pyaty god (The
Year 1905), a powerful but diffuse poem which concentrates on the
events related to the revolution of 1905. Pasternak's reticent
autobiography, Okhrannaya gramota (Safe Conduct), appeared in 1931,
and was followed the next year by a collection of lyrics, Vtoroye
rozhdenie (Second Birth), 1932. In 1935 he published translations of
some Georgian poets and subsequently translated the major dramas of
Shakespeare, several of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and Ben
Jonson, and poems by Petöfi, Verlaine, Swinburne, Shelley, and others.
Na rannikh poyezdakh (In Early Trains), a collection of poems written
since 1936, was published in 1943 and enlarged and reissued in 1945 as
Zemnye prostory (Wide Spaces of the Earth). In 1957 Doktor
Zhivago, Pasternak's only novel - except for the earlier "novel in verse",
Spektorsky (1926) - first appeared in an Italian translation and has
been acclaimed by some critics as a successful attempt at combining
lyrical-descriptive and epic-dramatic styles. An autobiographical
sketch, Biografichesky ocherk (An Essay in Autobiography), was
published in 1959, first in Italian, and subsequently in English.
Pasternak lived in Peredelkino, near Moscow, until his death in 1960."
from:
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1958
/pasternak-bio.html
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Director:
David Lean
Cast:
Omar Sharif (Dr. Yuri Zhivago), Julie Christie (Lara
Antipova), Geraldine Chaplin (Tonya), Rod Steiger (Victor Komarovsky), Alec
Guinness (Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago), Tom Courtenay (Pasha
Antipova/Strelnikov), Siobhan McKenna (Anna), Ralph Richardson
(Alexander Gromeko), Rita Tushingham (Tonya Komarova), Jeffrey
Rockland (Sasha), Tarek Sharif (Yuri at 8), Bernard Kay (Bolshevik),
Klaus Kinski (Kostoyed Amourski) and others.
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