A version of pastoral in Doctor Zhivago

As noted in a previous post, there are "versions of the pastoral" in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago - and now I note, following up on yesterday's post, that just as he turns the historical epic inside out, he also turns the pastoral inside out, or at least he does so to a degree: Doctor Z is a pastoral novel in the sense that Zhivago and Lara escape from the brutal, harsh world into a retreat of their own making, much like, mutatis mutandi, Rosalind and Celia escape from the cruel Duke in As You Like It or Spenser's (and Ovid's) shepherds find peace and tranquility in the forests and meadows: it's rural v urban, country v court, innocence v. experience - many versions, as Empson noted in his famous book on the topic. In Doctor Z the version is something like freedom v. oppression: they escape the world in which men are deprived of their property, conscripted into service, sometimes sentenced to death for no reason other than the convenience of the state authorities; in Lara's little apartment, across the street from The House with the Figures (a kind of city hall, apparently) they are, for a time, seemingly safe. But how is this inside out? For one thing, they are "escaping" also from the mores of society and, in Zhivago's case, from a version of domestic bliss. He is torn by guilt about this, at times - but only at times; otherwise, he finds it pretty convenient to be with the beautiful Lara, and to be far from the obligations of marriage and parenthood. One could say that the craziness of the times makes marriage difficult or impossible - but his and their contempt for conventions, and in his case for a perfectly lovely wife and son, is a dark thread shot through their pastoral fabric. Moreover, their pastoral is anything but idyllic: a house teeming with rats, a foreboding visit from the man who abused Lara in her youth, death threats - and ultimately an escape back to the small house in the country - a pastoral within a pastoral no less - where Zhivago had lived for a time with his family, before he was impressed into the army. The pastoral, in this novel, is an escape - but an escape into a world that is dark and tenuous and filled with anxiety and trouble, not a vernal summer idyll.