A novel turned inside out: Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago is a great or at least a near-great novel despite turning the conventions of the novel inside out; it's clearly one of the great examples of the historic-epic, but in the other great examples that come to mind the novels work because there's a great story, generally a love story, that plays out in the foreground against a richly detailed background of historical events, unfolding and evolving over time and affecting the lives and fortunes of the main characters. Prime examples: War and Peach, Tale of Two Cities (which I have to re-read, it's been many years), and, despite its obvious obtuseness and reactionary sentiments, Gone with the Wind. In Doctor Z., Pasternak devotes almost all of his attention to the background; the truly memorable and power moments in the novel are the flight from poverty in Moscow, the long train journey into the Urals, settling into the tiny village farm amid poverty and uncertainty, Zhivago's 18 months pressed into service with the Red Army in Siberia, Zhivagos two-month journey by foot back to the Urals (this told in retrospect not in real novel time), and settling in, with Lara, in the ravaged small city under Red Army control. Some of the elements and incidents in this passages are indelible: the soldier with his limbs amputated, the wailing of the peasant women who come upon a deserted village, the snowbound trains in Siberia, the apartment full of rats, the people crowded around the public square reading dicta posted on the walls, and many more - and these combine and cohere into what I can only call a cinematic vision of life in this time and in these places. Yet what's lacking is the foreground - for all this excellent description and historical recollection, Z and Lara are actually quite sketchily drawn, their relationship is not entirely convincing, and the minor characters are extremely confusing and sometimes arbitrary. The novel is not about these characters, it's about their world - and it seems that literally nobody else was brave enough or capable enough to describe this bloody period in Soviet history. It's completely obvious why Soviet authorities would have repressed this novel - because it's hard to imagine a more unsympathetic portrayal of the revolution, which in Pasternaks' treatment is dismal and cynical and brutally cruel.