A great section that shows the strengths and weaknesses of Doctor Zhivago

The long chapter that ends book one of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago is a stunning set piece and in an dof itself is probably why Pasternak won a Nobel Prize (declined) and why this novel became a best seller and ultimately a vast and romantic movie - in other words, it shows both the strengths and the weaknesses of this novel. In this section, the Zivago family - Dr. Z., wife Tonya, son (?), father-in-law Andreyev (?) leave the poverty of post-war, mid-revolution Moscow in 1918 and head to Tonya's old family estate in a remote village in the Urals. The journey is by train - first we see the complicated and scary decisions about what to take (you have to be able to carry everything yourself), what to sell, what to leave behind, then the cab (harse-drawn) ride through the city at dawn to the train, then the tumult of trying to find an outbound train - tickets are really scarce, there's terrible crowding, everyone has to carry a sheaf of documents which may e of no use anyway, trains are cancelled or commandeered - finally they get on one, bedding down in a freight car along with some other sketchy passengers  - the train is also carrying soldiers bound for the front and conscripted workers, prisoners mostly it seems, being sent of to dig trenches in the west. The long train ride - several days at least - during which Tonya leaves the train at certain stops and barters cloth for food (in one memorable transaction she acquires a "halfy," half of a roasted hare). At one point they're snowed in by a blizzard and everyone has to get out and shovel the lines clear over several days - intensively beautiful - some of the finest passages are conveyed from Dr. Z's POV, and we truly see his (i.e., Pasternak's) poetic observations and sensibilit; at the end of the section, Dr. Z wanders from the train and is picked up as a suspected escaped prisoner - he could easily have been killed but it the commander knows he's not the one - commander vividly drawn and he hints - and we can be sure - he will cross paths again with Zhivago. The whole episode is more cinematic than poetic - it's not so much the language of the passage as the accumulation of detail that enable us to see and feel this journey as if we are in it. All to the good, but it also feels that it's a passage that lives by itself and, though necessary to the structure of the novel, is somewhat apart from the novel: Pasternak is weak, compared to the great Russian masters whom he emulated, on creating characters and relationships among them; half-way through the novel, no character is especially vivid: it's a novel about a historical backdrop, a time and place, and characters who move through and among this time and space - not a plot- or character-driven story but a panoramic epic. Clear that Pasternak is poet (and translator) more than a novelist, but his strengths are so great in these regards that they outweigh, most often, the clumsiness of his narrative construction.