| Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960), the writer from the former U. S. S. R., is famous for numerous excellent works. However, the poet, who had taken the places of Mayakovsky and Bedny as model poet, was positioned to where the struggle of the times was fiercest because of his novel Dr. Zhivago. It is well known that due to this novel, Pasternak obtained Nobel Prize in Literature, the highest honor that a poet or writer could possibly have obtained. Forced by political pressure, Pasternak ultimately withdrew his acceptance of the prize delivered by the Swedish Academy. In his later years, Pasternak, stricken by the frequently broken-out heart disease and isolated from the outside behind a closed door, lived in a remote village on the outskirts of Moscow and passed away there in much depression. After his death, the U. S. S. R. administration even refused to recognize his status as a poet or writer.It seems that it is the Cold War, a special historical period when two social institutions and ideologies are in severe conflict that one excellent, even classical, work might have triggered a fierce polemic between Eastern and Western nations. The Western critical circle unanimously praised Dr. Zhivago, and Edmond W’lson, the American critic regarded the novel as good as War and Peace. On the other side, the U. S. S. R. newspapers and periodicals let out lots of invective on the novel, and even the writer himself was threatened to be expelled from the nation. There is no doubt that what happened to Pasternak was unfair. Just as Pasternak himself had predicted, he was indeed free from any wrongdoing. If he had made any mistake, it would have been that he had failed to say yes to the tendency of main-street literature, and instead depicted humans’fate in a tumultuous society out of one intellectual’s honesty and intuitive goodness.In later milieu that was comparatively easy and relieved, when researchers started to re-examine the novel, most of their attention has been attracted from the debate resulted from that special times to Dr. Zhivago’s paradoxical character of sensitivity and delicacy as a typical image of the intelligentsia. In that aspect, lots of research has been done in terms of the novels genre or theme, bi-linguistic representation in the novel, the relations between the author and the hero, and the documentary base in the creation. Based upon what has been done in the research of the novel, the current paper tries to apply structuralist poetics to provide a new explanation of the novel. First of all, the paper integrates a surface-plot structure including a series of important social and historical events such as the revolutions of1905and1915, the WWI, the revolution of February, Russian civil war, the new economic policy and the collectivization and industrialization of agriculture. Meanwhile, the hero experienced a chain of life stories including the death of his mother, his removal from Moscow, the revolutions of February and October, his guerrilla-prisoner life, the departures with (?)s family and Lara. In social turmoil, the hero followed two threads of spatial (?)ovement, one of which is "Moscow--Siberian b(?)ttle fields--Moscow," and the other "Moscow—Varykino--Yuriatin—Moscow." When interpreting both threads, the paper employs "binary opposition", the principle in structuralist poetics, to expound "the conflicts and compromises" as the core structure in the novel. Secondly, the paper with the help of Greimas’matrix theory puts forward further analysis of characters, arguing that the hero belongs to "non-and anti-X" locating at the included angle of "non-X" and "anti-X". Lastly, the paper draws from the above argument the conclusion that the novel represents tragic subject that means the hero has unavoidably become one solitude hero in the times.In conclusion, the paper, instead of employing the traditional mode based on the hero himself, focuses upon the external events and environments which are treated as the source of the hero’s paradoxical character and psyche and tries to interpret the artistic value of the novel from plot mode, hero character and the novel subject. |
