Jonathan Myerson revisits Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
“This is a novel about how individuals are broken and degraded by politics, by history, by inevitability. At the heart of this is Lara and Yuri's daughter. In Lean's film, Tanya is the smiling, balalaika-playing worker at the dam (played by a toothy and burnished Rita Tushingham). In the novel, she is a foul-mouthed street orphan, a thief who could not be more different from her long-dead parents. She is what Russia has sunk to, Pasternak is telling us, she is all that is left of these two great souls.” – from “Doctor Zhivago Comes in from the Cold,” by Jonathan Myerson, The Times