Doctor Zhivago Extra Credit

To earn the extra-credit:

1. Watch the film (you may want to tape it as well).

2. Write a two-three page paper on how the events that we have studied in class impact the storyline of Dr. Zhivago. Use as many examples as you can from the film.

3. Extra-credit must be turned in by Monday, November 16. In addition to extra-credit, you may substitute this for one AOW prior to November 21. Make sure that you do a very good job on this because it is harder than an AOW.

Overview: (adapted from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/zhivago/)

Boris Pasternak’s epic love story, set against the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, comes to Masterpiece Theatre in a thrilling new adaptation airing on PBS (WFYI-Channel 20) Sunday, November 2 and 9 in two-hour installments. This film is rated TV 14 (Contains some material that many parents would find unsuitable for children under 14 years of age).

In the 1920s Boris Pasternak was considered one of Russia's finest poets, but in the early 1930s he stopped publishing—apparently for political reasons. Russian Communism held that art existed to serve politics (Socialist Realism). The idea was repugnant to Pasternak. He was a humanist. Stalin's dictatorship had no use for humanism. Writers who persisted in it ended up executed or slaving in Siberian camps.

Pasternak simply fell silent. Doctor Zhivago was published abroad in 1958, but not in Russia because, while Stalin by then had been long dead, his spirit still ruled in Moscow. Party flunkeys in the Communist writers union not only stopped the book's publication, but also expelled Pasternak from the union. Some called for revoking his citizenship.

Copies were smuggled out of the country and in October 1958, it was published in the United States. One month later Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Heavy pressure from the Communist party forced him to decline the prize. He died two years later, at the age of seventy. A popular film version was released in 1965, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. Doctor Zhivago was finally published in Russia in 1988 while Mikhail Gorbachev was ushering the Communist party into the dustbin of history.

Major Characters:

Yuri Zhivago—The son of a once-wealthy man who became an alcoholic and committed suicide. A poet and doctor.

Victor Komarovsky—Business advisor to Yuri’s father, lover of Amalia Guishar, later Lara’s seducer.

Nikolai Vedeniapin (Kolya)—Yuri’s uncle.

Antonina Gromeko (Tonya)—Yuri’s wife.

Alexander Gromeko—Tonya’s wealthy father, a chemistry professor.

Larisa Guishar (Lara)—The beautiful daughter of a dressmaker.

Amalia Guishar—Lara’s mother, a French widow.

Pavel Antipov (Pasha)—The revolutionary son of a railway worker. Lara’s husband, who later takes the revolutionary name Strelnikov.