Doctor Zhivago

"The best way to understand Pasternak's achievement in Doctor Zhivago is to see it in terms of this great Russian literary tradition, as a fairy tale, not so much of good and evil as of opposing forces and needs in human destiny and history that can never be reconciled . . . Zhivago is a figure who embodies the principle of life itself, the principle that contradicts every abstraction of revolutionary politics."--from the Introduction by John Bayley