Boris Pasternak's novel, 'Doctor Zhivago', may be the greatest love story of all time, writes Enda O'Doherty, but it is also much more - not that you can tell from David Lean's epic 1965 film, or from Andrew Davies's new television version
In the Dublin of the 1960s and 1970s it was a byword for romance. Tucked away in an alley off Baggot Street, the entrance just a doorway behind H. Williams's supermarket, its proud claim to be "Europe's No 1 night spot" might have seemed a large one, but there were surely few of the patrons of Zhivago's who did not hope it might, for them too, turn out to be the place "where love stories begin".
The love story which inspired the nightclub and gave it its name was, of course, Dr Zhivago, David Lean's epic film of 1965, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie as tragic lovers Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova. Behind this stirring tale of war, revolution and doomed romance, we may have been aware, was a novel by a Russian called Boris Pasternak, a book which many had perhaps seen and some even bought, but fewer, one guessed, read to the end.
Lean's film was a critical failure but a huge popular success. It helped establish Christie as one of the great iconic faces of 1960s womanhood and made Sharif, on the basis of a single film, the Valentino of his generation.
Above all, Zhivago provided the contemporary audience with a dominant paradigm of romantic love, pure, disinterested, self-sacrificing and, floating ethereally on Maurice Jarre's increasingly irritating musical score, more than a little soppy. It was a film you could not - if your intentions were to be taken seriously - decline to take your girlfriend to.
Understandably, Lean's Zhivago has faded somewhat from public consciousness in the intervening years, and though it may still be admired for its visual style, the central performances now look, in the words of British screenwriter Andrew Davies, "stilted and dated". And so Davies, a prolific and talented literary adaptor, has brought us, 37 years on, a new version of Zhivago for our times , a three-part TV serial, but with the budget and artistic ambition of a movie.
Boris Pasternak was born in 1890 in Moscow, into an artistic family of Jewish origin. His father, Leonid, was a successful painter and his mother a concert pianist. Indeed, Boris himself considered music as a career, studying for six years under the influence of the composer Scriabin, a family friend.
Eventually, however, he gravitated towards literature, mixing among the young men and women of the futurist movement, and meeting some of the most celebrated of Russia's new generation of poets. Pasternak's first book of poems was published in 1917, the year of the February and October revolutions. Poetry, memoire and short stories continued to appear sporadically over the next 15 years. From the 1930s, however, conditions for writers worsened dramatically, as the secret police and their literary/bureaucratic allies enforced the doctrine of socialist realism, whereby all art must either "serve the people" or cease to exist.
Many of the leading figures of Russian literature sank under the onslaught. Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam disappeared into the camps; Mayakovsky and Tsvetayeva committed suicide.
From 1934 to 1943, Pasternak published no original work, preferring, in the prevailing atmosphere of fear and constraint, to make his living from translations. But, curiously, his life was not threatened: according to one story, he enjoyed the protection of Stalin himself, who, when informed of plans for Pasternak's arrest, responded: "Leave that cloud-dweller in peace!"
It was probably in 1945 that Pasternak began work on the great book with which his name is chiefly identified. Its completion was to take him 10 years and the circumstances of its smuggling out of Russia and eventual publication, first in Italy, then throughout the Western world, almost merits a book in itself.
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was an astute and adventurous Italian publisher who, in spite of his family's vast wealth, enjoyed excellent relations with his country's powerful Communist party (PCI). It was through a party contact, Sergio D'Angelo, an Italian-language broadcaster with Radio Moscow, that Feltrinelli, in 1956, heard of the existence of a very controversial novel, still in manuscript, whose author was apparently encountering considerable difficulty with the Russian censors.
Using D'Angelo as intermediary, Feltrinelli persuaded Pasternak to allow a copy of the Doctor Zhivago manuscript to be sent to Milan. When the Soviet authorities came to hear of this, they asked Feltrinelli to postpone publication, putting simultaneous pressure on Pasternak to emend his manuscript.
At this point, Pasternak entered into a complex open and secret double correspondence with his publisher, on the one hand sending telegrams declaring himself dissatisfied with the manuscript and seeking its return, on the other, smuggling out messages urging Feltrinelli to expedite its release and, above all, to "take no account of any message signed by me unless it is, like this one, written in French".
In spite of further pressure on its publisher from his PCI comrades, Doctor Zhivago, for which Feltrinelli had secured world rights, finally appeared in November 1957, selling 170,000 copies in Italy and eventually seven million worldwide. For Giangiacomo Feltrinelli it was another sweet piece of business. For Pasternak the blessings were more mixed. He was awarded the Nobel prize but prevented from accepting it, accused by the authorities of "parasitism" and expelled from the Writers' Union. Doctor Zhivago was eventually published in the Soviet Union in 1987.
Pasternak lived on at the Peredelkino writers' colony, "in disgrace", but with the satisfaction of knowing his novel published, until his death in 1960. The radical millionaire Feltrinelli, moving further and further to the left throughout the 1960s, finally blew himself up while trying to plant explosives at an electricity pylon outside Milan in 1972.
In a letter dating from 1946, Pasternak wrote of his new project: "This novel will be my expression of my views on the arts, the Gospels, the life of a person in history, and many other things." Among the many other things - too unformed as yet, we must assume, to merit specific mention - was love.
By 1963, however, when David Lean and his scriptwriter, Robert Bolt, began working on their film version of Zhivago, love had come floating to the top. Bolt was inclined at first to see the story as primarily a political one, but Lean strongly disagreed. "[The politics] must be stated as simply as possible in my opinion. The audience will understand almost every nuance of the love story. If we try to shift the weight on to the other conflict I think they will become impatient."
Lean had good reason to hope to keep the audience "patient": MGM had lost a bundle on its last big picture, Mutiny on the Bounty, and was counting on recouping these losses with Zhivago; and the studio had given the director a generous percentage deal on the profits.
Lean and Bolt, who cheerfully admitted to being a prima donna, eventually settled their differences over the script. The next nightmare to be faced was casting.
Lean felt the picture's producer, Carlo Ponti, had his wife, Sophia Loren, in mind for the role of Lara. Mindful, however, that when the action of the film begins Lara is a schoolgirl of 16, Lean was not so enthusiastic. "If anyone can convince me she's a virgin, I'll let her play the part," he said.
Next to be considered was Jane Fonda, though Lean feared she would be unable to lose her American accent; he wondered if she would agree to be dubbed.
Then there was Sara Miles, later to star in Ryan's Daughter. But Bolt dismissed her as "a north country slut". (Not long afterwards he married her.) Finally, on the recommendation of John Ford, they settled for the young and radiant, though largely unknown, Julie Christie. For Zhivago, the names of Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster and Peter O'Toole were all considered, but there were objections and problems with each. Finally, and in some desperation, Omar Sharif was promoted from the more minor role of the student Antipov to play the lead.
Filming, too, brought its share of problems, with the weather, an absolutely vital part of the work's visual appeal, often refusing to co-operate on the two main locations in Spain (too mild) and Finland (too cold). But eventually, having swallowed up more than twice its allotted budget of $7 million, Doctor Zhivago was made.
The film's long-awaited New York release in December, 1965, nearly turned to disaster after the publication of the initial reviews. The respected Pauline Kael found it "stately and dead", while Judith Crist of the Herald-Tribune wrote of cardboard characters and a ridiculous plot. Alexander Walker thought the later Lean was proving content to be a photographer rather than a director, while another critic's caustic dismissal read: "It does for snow what Lawrence of Arabia did for sand." Yet, in spite of the sneers of what Robert Bolt now called "the highbrows", MGM kept its nerve and poured a further $1 million into publicity, keeping the New York première cinema open at its own expense until word of mouth began, at first slowly, then in an avalanche, to turn the situation around. In state after state, then country after country, the public loved it. Lean's Zhivago won five Oscars and grossed more than $200 million worldwide.
Andrew Davies's Zhivago, which he says he hopes will "speak to us in our time", is unlikely to be anywhere near as bad as a reading of some of its advance promotional material might suggest. This is a "contemporary" version, we are told, of "the greatest love story ever told", and "contemporary" plus "love" can only mean sex.
"This is a love story and people are going to want to see some lovemaking. We are not in the 1960s now," says Davies, somewhat snappily.
Director Giacomo Campiotti seems to agree. On TV today, he says, "we see thousands of people being killed close up but we are not supposed to speak of sex", an observation that is in fact a rather spectacular inversion of observable reality, but never mind.
So we must expect more sex. Pasternak, incidentally, did not have any "on page", and Bolt and Lean were remarkably restrained for what was supposed to have been the swinging 1960s, but Davies is a man who in his time has managed to insinuate the Serpent, even into the orderly and decorous gardens of Miss Austen.
What we will not have, I would guess, is very much of Pasternak's views on "the arts, the Gospels \ the life of a person in history", that is, the things the author insisted his book was about.
It is an attractive and plausible line, and one that is understandably being pushed by the producers, that the Davies/ Campiotti version keeps closer to the author's original than did Lean's now fading "cinema classic" of 1965.
It is a claim, however, that we should take not just with a pinch, but with a small mine of salt.
In what has now apparently been posthumously hailed as the love story to beat all love stories, less than a fifth of the action of the book is in fact devoted to the relationship between Yuri Zhivago and Lara.
The bulk of this comes in the last chapters, which is indeed fortunate as much of it - and particularly the excruciating conversations between the lovers - is today unreadable.
The story of Doctor Zhivago is the story of Russia's progress through some of its most difficult and bloody years; it is also an account of a mind, which may well be Pasternak's, of its philosophical and religious reflections, which are more interesting, perhaps, to those conversant with the Russian tradition, of its political analysis, which is reasonable if not profound, and, above all, its way of seeing nature - as a very fine poet. It is a big and baggy and exasperating book, marred by poor structure and a truly hair-raising authorial enthusiasm for "coincidence" as a plot device.
Davies's Zhivago, judging from the advance extracts I have seen, will be well acted, well photographed, tightly directed and as full as one could wish of delicious sex, shock and soft furnishings. What it will not be is Pasternak or anything much like him. And, as in 1965, the audience will love it.
Part one of Doctor Zhivago, adapted by Andrew Davies, will be shown on UTV tomorrow night at 9 p.m. Parts two and three will be screend on the following Sundays