The Truths of Literature, the Lies of History
On Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the Russian Revolution
When we speak about politics or history, we speak about ideas and ideology and speaking about events like this war or that revolution, we come to believe that the entire thing can be neatly accounted for by these ideas. Pasternak’s Nobel Prize winning novel Doctor Zhivago, though fictional, is a great humbling force and shows us plainly how arrogant thi…