Emma’s Reviews > Doctor Zhivago > Status Update

The white northern night was ending. Everything was clearly visible, the mountain, the thicket and the ravine, but as if they did not quite believe in themselves and existed only in a fairy tale.

Three years of changes, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins - all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, waste space. The first real event since the long interruption was this vertiginous home-coming by train, in the knowledge that his home was still safe, still existing somewhere, with every smallest stone in it dear to him.

The lights shining through the frosted windows turned the houses into precious caskets of smoky topaz. Inside them glowed the Christmas life of Moscow, candles burned on trees, guests milled and fooled about in fancy dress, [...] Christmas in the life of this northern city, Christmas underneath the starry skies of its modern streets and round the lighted trees in its twentieth-century drawing rooms.

In those days it was true that 'man is a wolf to man'. Traveller turned off the road at the sight of traveller, stranger meeting stranger killed for fear of being killed. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The laws of human civilisation were suspended. The laws which men obeyed were jungle laws; the dreams they dreamed were the prehistoric dreams of cave-dwellers.

[Art] is all one and the same throughout, an art which remains itself through thousands of years. You can call it an idea so all-embracing that it can't be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work which includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work.

Here was the very thing which he, Tonya and Misha had endlessly discussed and had dismissed as 'vulgar', the force which so frightened and attracted them and which they controlled so easily from a safe distance by words. And now here it was, this force, in front of Yura's very eyes, concrete, real, and yet confused and helpless - and where was Yura's childish philosophy now and what was he to do?