Extract

They walked and walked and sang Eternal Memory.

Snow falls over Moscow, over field hospitals, over frozen rail lines stretching into the Urals, and through it all a poet tries to remain faithful to the private life the revolution has declared obsolete. Pasternak spent a decade writing this novel, and when the Soviet state refused to publish it, he smuggled the manuscript to Italy, where it appeared in 1957. The authorities offered him ruin, and he accepted it. Yuri Zhivago moves through war, upheaval, and the dissolution of everything he loves, composing poems that insist on the sacredness of the particular. Lara is not a symbol but a woman, radiant and mortal. The novel itself became an act of witness, proving that beauty is a form of resistance.