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INTERVIEWER
What about Zhivago? Do you still feel . . . that he is the most significant figure of your work?
PASTERNAK
When I wrote Doctor Zhivago I had the feeling of an immense debt toward my contemporaries. It was an attempt to repay it. This feeling of debt was overpowering as I slowly progressed with the novel. After so many years of just writing lyric poetry or translating, it seemed to me that it was my duty to make a statement about our epoch—about those years, remote and yet looming so closely over us. Time was pressing. I wanted to record the past and to honor in Doctor Zhivago the beautiful and sensitive aspects of the Russia of those years. There will be no return of those days, or of those of our fathers and forefathers, but in the great blossoming of the future I foresee their values will revive.
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Victor Hugo, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Bely, Nikolay Berdyayev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexandre Dumas, Nikolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky, Søren Kierkegaard, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Racine, Friedrich von Schiller, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Marina Tsvetaeva, Edmund Wilson, Sergei Yesenin |
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