Being a novel written by a poet, it is, in a way, a kind of poem rather than just a clever perceptiion of manners. Being a poet's novel, the film that came of it---the film that also shares its artistic DNA, so to speak---is also a poem. In the poetry of the films's visual beauty, I am struck by my sense---severely limited, I presume, as an American of the Cold War era---of the Soviet, the Bolshevik, response to beauty: to see it only as another useful tool to build the so-called Workers' Paradise, and we all know what happened to that. I once read that a highly respected American scholar of the Soviet culture---who had provided advice and counsel at.the Presidential and Cabinet level---said that to understand the Bolshevik response to the beauty of art, or of their own geography, or of the culture they had inherited, one must understand Lenin; and to understand Lenin's idea of beauty, one must look to his wife, Krupskaya. I have seen many photographs of her---and only one shows even the hint of a smile. The dismal sense of the Soviet Union as a land of belching factory stacks, steel gray slabs, and the rough surface of poured concrete is premised and contained within the glare with which Krupskaya stares that the cameras that took her photographs. And it is against this phsychological disonnance that the film and the novel react. Yje Bolsheviks always spoke of the masses, the works, the vast proletariat and peasantry in order to create a poitical logic that crushed or strangled the individual. I read, somewhere (I am an old man, forgetful these days) that Krupskaya was the Soviet Commisar for education, for for children's welfare, or for other such concerns, and yet she was passively if not actively complicit in the murder of four adolescent girls and their prepubescent, hemopheliac brother. This heinous murder, this martyrdom (literally, in the Orthodox Faith) haunts the novel and the film; the red flag and the red star of communism bear witness to the blood shed by the Bolsheviks, and by Uncle Joe---blood of those who were different from, or disagreed with, or were more beautiful than Bolshevik Party; and to this, the Poetic Beauty of the novel and of the film bears witness.
Review of Doctor Zhivago
