Zhivago is a not very good book, but it is a lovely movie. And it is exactly the kind of movie that profits most from a good quality picture.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
why 
January 12, 1958
Dear Mr. Weidenfeld,
...Now, the following little matter may seem to you trivial, but it bothers me. I suspect the phrase "Mr. Nabokov is a second Pasternak" is a reporter's distortion. It might be correct to say, perhaps, as some have been doing that Pasternak is the best Soviet poet, and that Nabokov is the best Russian prose writer but there the parallel ends; so just to prevent any well-meaning publicity from taking the wrong turn, I would like to voice my objection to DOCTOR ZHIVAGO--which may brim with human interest but is wretched art and platitudinous thought. Its political aspects do not interest me; I can only be concerned with the artistic character of this or that novel. From this point of view ZHIVAGO is a sorry thing, clumsy, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite characters. Here and there a landscape or metaphor recalls Pasternak the gifted poet but that is not sufficient to save the novel from provincial banality, so typical of Soviet literature during the past forty years. The novel's historical background is muddled and frequently quite false to fact (thus ignoring the liberal revolution and its Western-European ideals in the sequence of events leading to the Bolshevik coup-d'etat is quite in keeping with the Communist party line)--but again I am not concerned with any of the artistic aspects of the book.
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
14 July, 1959
Dear Gleb Petrovich,
I wish I knew what idiot could have told you that I found 'antisemitism' in Doctor Zhivago: I am not concerned with the 'ideas' in a bad provincial novel, but how members of the Russian 'intelligentsia' can avoid being jarred by the complete dismissal of the February Revolution and by the overlown treatment of the October one (what, exactly, caused Zhivago to rejoice while reading, beneath that theatrical snow, of the Soviet victory in that newspaper sheet?). And how could you, orthodox believer that you are, not be nauseated by the cheap, churchy-sugary reek? "The winter was a particularly snowy one. A frost hit on St. Pafnuty's Day" (I quote from memory). The other Boris (Zatsyev) made a better go of it. And the good doctor's poems! "To be a woman is a gigantic step..."
Sad. Sometimes I feel as if I had disappeared behind some remote dove-gray horizon while my former compatriots are still sipping cranberry drinks at a seaside stall.
Yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
