The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [502]
Stripped to its essence, the story of Yuri Zhivago was that of a decent, intelligent, spiritually-sensitive man whose outer and inner life had been destroyed by the chaos of the revolution. Before it, he had been a promising young middle-class doctor, conventionally married, with a small son. Called up into the army, he then meets and falls in love with the bewitching Lara. Zhivago returns to his family in Moscow, but when they retreat to the country he again meets Lara and they begin an affair, which he eventually breaks off and admits to his wife. He is then conscripted to serve with Communist partisans in Russia's civil war, after which he resumes his affair with Lara. Despite the deprivations of the time, they spend several happy months together but eventually, to save her life, he tricks her into fleeing under protection to a safer part of Russia. His wife and child have by now disappeared into exile abroad. Yuri returns to Moscow, where he begins living with a third woman, by whom he has two more children. Two male friends tell him he must choose between his new mistress and his wife. Amid the miseries and cold of post-revolutionary Moscow he is lucky to get a menial job. On his way to start work he collapses in the street with a heart attack and dies. At his funeral Lara turns up, mysteriously asking Yuri's half-brother if there is any way to track down a child who has been given away to strangers. She disappears, and is supposed eventually to have died in a slave-camp (it was from Dr Zhivago that Western readers first learned the word `Gulag'). Serving in the army in World War Two, after themselves spending years in the Gulag, Zhivago's two friends meet a laundry-girl, Tanya, who tells them her horrendous life story. Abandoned by her mother as a child, and after then becoming involved in an episode of chilling violence, she had been cast out on the world without family, friends or support. From her evidence they guess she must be the daughter of Yuri and Lara, and arrange measures whereby her life may now modestly improve.
In archetypal terms, what was significant about this bleak tale was the way it showed Russia's revolution and civil war as the cause of the hero's disintegration. From being happily married, with a son, he is first guiltily divided when he becomes bewitched by the elusive anima-figure of Lara. He attempts to behave responsibly by returning to his wife, but is then bewitched again. He again attempts to behave selflessly by sending Lara to safety, but when this leaves him unhappy, confused and alone, he takes up with a third woman, by whom he has children. His friends confront him with the need to resolve the crisis brought on by how his anima is now split three ways. Symbolically, his heart gives way under the strain. The real carrier of his anima mysteriously rematerialises at his funeral, only to slip back into the unconscious, where she is crushed by the new tyranny of the proletarian state. We are left years later with the image of Tanya, the tragic, orphaned animafigure who is the sole relic of their love - although a final sentimental twist gives the tale some vestige of a positive ending.
Decades later, it may seem hard to recall why the publication of this novel created such a stir in the West (where it later became the basis of an even more sentimentalised film version), let alone why it seemed to pose such a challenge to the Soviet system that it was instantly suppressed. But, along with the release of millions of Stalin's prisoners from the Gulag archipelago in the mid-1950s and Khruschev's secret attack on Stalin's tyranny at the 1956 Communist Party Congress, the very fact that such a private book could have been written marked a faint but striking crack in the seemingly all-powerful Communist monolith.
Five years later came another,