Welcome to week 16 of my 16-week guided slow read of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. The epilogue of our slow read through Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago — a short chapter, about twelve pages, and there turns out to be rather a lot in it. It's 1943. Misha Gordon and Nicky Dudorov are officers now, fourteen years after Yury's death, sheltering overnight in a barn in the ruins of Chern. Over a quiet conversation at sunrise they work through everything that has happened to them since: Dudorov's fiancée Christina, who slipped behind German lines, blew up a stronghold and was hanged for it — and has now been canonised by the Church; the camps; the penal battalion where survival was the price of freedom; and the Yezhov terror, and why a failure that couldn't be admitted had to be buried under something worse. Then there's Tanya, the regimental laundry girl, and the resemblance Gordon can't stop noticing. In this episode I look at Gordon's line about how a thing conceived in a lofty, ideal manner turns coarse and material — Rome out of Greece, the Revolution out of the Russian Enlightenment — and at the closing scene in Moscow, five or ten years later, where the two men leaf through a book of Yury's writings and feel something like happiness. If it's ten, we're in 1953, the year Stalin died. And I get into the irony that Pasternak himself came off worse under Khrushchev than he ever did under Stalin. One last thing: although this is the epilogue, it isn't quite the end. The book Gordon and Dudorov are holding is the novel's final chapter. 📖 Read the essay on Substack: camscampbellreads.substack.com Doctor Zhivago | Boris Pasternak | Russian Literature | Russian History | Great Terror | Second World War | Slow Read | Book Club A printable version of this essay, plus the audio podcast, is available at camscampbellreads.substack.com — free to download and read at your leisure. 📖 Follow along with the essay and printable version at https://camscampbellreads.substack.com/p/doctor-zhivago-chapter-16 Sources: Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago, Anna Pasternak The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, Peter Finn, Petra Couvée A People's Tragedy, Orlando Figes It's also available as a YouTube video here. All quotations are from the Hayward/Harari translation. Buy the Everyman's Library edition from Amazon, Blackwells, Waterstones or Bookshop.org with this affiliate link: https://geni.us/bZsI --- I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit camscampbellreads.substack.com/subscribe
