Boris Pasternak

Mm-hmm

... by Boris Pasternak.

Mm-hmm.

He had, like, smuggled that out.

Well, that's too late in the game, my friends.

And, and just to let you know how crazy the communists were, Boris Pasternak, uh, survived the revolution.

He was a writer in communist Russia, but his novel, Doctor Zhivago, could not be published in Russia because, uh, he had a love for a woman that was greater than his love for the state.

So even though the doctor was kidnapped into the Red Army and forced to be a doctor in, in the army, uh, uh, the Bolshevik Army against his will, he deserted the army and went looking for his mistress, his lover.

in the old days.

And Pasternak, who was known in Russia as a poet rather than the novelist of Dr. Zhivago, he had a bad memory by Russian standards, and people would be continually shouting out his lines from the audience.

And it's a really powerful reminder that poetry is often working with things that we already know, metaphorically as well as literally.

that we just need to be reminded about in a very, very physical way, because you're actually being reintroduced to the physical experience.

Yeah.

Yeah, it reminds me of reading the Pasternak novel of Dr. Shabago.

Oh, yeah.

You've got the reds, you've got the blacks, you're never quite sure who is on what side, and it alters and seems to morph throughout the novel.

That's fun in an extremely bleak kind of way.

Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago.

Oh,

I'm surprised that was forbidden.

Those would be the three of the moderns that get a lot of play.

And Boris Pasternak, I would say, is maybe the fourth.

But I would say that Tarkovsky is very much in their class, maybe the fifth of those.

Yeah.