The Varykino Gambit

Ever watch Dr. Zhivago? It’s a David Lean movie. Made all sorts of money. It’s a tale from Russia, with love. The love part was a minor problem back in the day. Lots of critics, who are almost people, but not quite, objected to what they saw as mundane romantic subject matter ladled over titanic upheavals. They didn’t get it. They wanted the movie to be about the Soviet Union, portrayed as either very bad or very good, to taste. Some would have preferred the usual war is bad theme. Yes, deep thoughts there: war is bad. Thanks, I had no idea.

David Lean liked stories about (more or less) regular people caught up in great events, just trying to get by.  For a backdrop, Zhivago had the end of WWI for Russia, the founding of the Soviet Union, and a civil war. It’s an excellent example of the old saying,”May you live in interesting times.” That sentiment sounds attractive to some ears. I see a lot of people nowadays wishing for great upheavals, morning, noon and night, because things aren’t going their way, or they are, but not fast enough to suit them. It’s actually a curse, not well-wishes. The Strelnikovs of the world, portrayed here by Tom Courtenay, want to live in interesting times, because big upheavals are the only opportunity they’re going to get to get ahead. They’re just cranks with pamphlets in uninteresting times.

Robert Bolt, about the greatest screenwriter I know of, tried to cut the critics off at the pass with that scene, but they’re up a stump and can’t ever come down. They can’t get it through their heads that trying to live a normal life in abnormal times can not only be commendable, it can be heroic. Movie critics have always had more in common with Strelnikov than Zhivago. They can’t relate to a normal person, even if they happened to meet one, which is highly unlikely.

When the nutters finally get the upper hand, their one, true wish is to extinguish the private life. Everything is political. This makes perfect sense to them, because they’ve suffered from scoliosis of the soul for so long, they don’t even recognize someone standing upright anymore. Or more to the point, they recognize any attempt at normality as a frontal assault on their worldview. On the bus, or under it. And by the way, the bus is full.

There’s a more nuanced explanation of the problem earlier in the film. Zhivago’s half-brother, Yevgraf, is an important secret policeman. Strelnikov is a famous terrorist, and he is admired or feared depending on whose ox you’re currently minding in Minsk. Yevgraf doesn’t do anything spectacular like burning villages for collaboration or just for shiggles or whatever. As Strelnikov says, “The village betrays us, the village is burned. The point is made.” It takes a village is a double-edged sword, apparently.

No, Yevgraf is the real deal. He’s not a would-be commissar on the make like Strelnikov. He’s already part of the big club, and wields a big club in everyone’s affairs. He shows up unexpectedly just as the locals in Moscow are hounding his estranged half-brother, rioting in his living room, and Yevgraf simply has to walk into the room to make his point.

Strelnikov uses his little army to scorch the earth to make a point, which may or may not be pointless, by his own admission. Yevgraf simply snaps his fingers, like a conjurer, and his will is obeyed without even being uttered.

Yevgraf visits with his brother, and listens to his views on the events in Russia. By any regular standards, Yuri Zhivago is a harmless person. Commendable, even. He even professes a bit of admiration for the revolution. Yevgraf comments, in his head by voiceover, that his brother’s enthusiasm for The Party, the only game in town, is subtle, and that is the equivalent of walking around with a noose around your neck in revolutionary Russia. So, to paraphrase The Dude here, Strelnikov isn’t wrong, he’s just an asshole.

Yevgraf advises Yuri to leave the city and live obscurely in the country, in Varykino in the far-flung Urals, and he fixes them up with a pass to do so. He understands that his brother will never be able to stay alive in a milieu where every act and utterance, no matter how mundane, is a political football. His brother is a poet. Ambiguity is his business. Hell, in that atmosphere, even doing or saying nothing is a political act. Any of this sound familiar yet?

The author of the novel that the  Zhivago movie is based on, Boris Pasternak, knew what he was talking about. He was Russian intellectual who refused to leave the country, no matter how bad it got. He was 27 years old in 1917, so he had a front-row seat for all the fun. He was a poet with a convoluted love life, just like Zhivago, despite a fairly close resemblance to Lurch the butler. And he tried, somewhat successfully, to just live in a world where that was made pretty hard indeed. Pasternak’s real-life version of a finger-snapping savior might have been Joe Stalin himself, who reportedly crossed his name off a list of people to be executed with the remark, “Do not touch this cloud dweller.”

It’s funny, but the critics got the world exactly backwards, like they mostly do. How you order your private life is a profoundly political act. Hell, in a world where everything is political, just living life on your own terms is a revolutionary act. You can say, “The private life is dead, for a man, with any manhood,” and make me listen to you at gunpoint. But you can’t make me cooperate.

My family has long since moved to our own Varykino. And what have I been doing there? Just living, and the living’s not easy. But I’ve got one thing going for me that Boris Pasternak, and his creation, Dr. Zhivago would have been wise to emulate. I’ve completely avoided the library in Yuriatin.