Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak · 1957
Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning epic uses a love story to explore the soul of a nation being destroyed. Zhivago and Lara's passion is inseparable from the chaos of revolution; love as the only private thing left in a world where everything is being collectivized. Haunting and enormous.
The case against
Coincidence does the plotting: across the whole of revolutionary Russia, the same dozen people keep stumbling into one another as if the country were a village. Zhivago himself drifts, observes, and abandons women while the narrative insists on his fineness of soul. Pasternak was a poet first, and it shows; the lyric set pieces soar, the novel connecting them creaks.
Romance · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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