Pasternak's place in literature

In some ways Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago seems like a classic of Russian literature, a 19th-century magnum opus 75 years behind its time - with its echoes of Dostoevsky (the smoky crowded Moscow apartments, the extremely dramatic nearly insane actions like Lara's botched attempt to assassinate her much older, estranged lover) and Tolstoy (the battlefield scenes, in this case during World War I, and the lengthy passages in which the characters discuss or reflect upon the nature of existence and the state of the world) and Chekhov (the interest in the sciences, especially medicine, the loneliness and isolation of provincial life) - but in others ways it's a near-contemporary (near-contemporary because no best seller today would be so long, compelx, or ambitious - 1957 was a different era) blockbuster best seller, a grand love story that covers the entire scope of the lives of the two central characters, spanning a vast region of geographic space and many tumultuous events (war, revolution). What it isn't: it does not seem like a great 20th-century novel - there's none of the narrative inventiveness, self-consciousness, or artifice that we associate with postmodernism - it seems nothing at all like the other great books of its era, on any continent. Granted there were few great Russian novels of that era: Bulgakhov might be one, and his masterwork Master and Margarita is so bizarre and inventive that it almost self-destructs. Solzhenitsyn came a little later, and his works are political and relistic; Pasternak stands alone as a romantic. As the novel moves along, it becomes clear (to me at least) that Dr. Z and Lara had crossed paths only twice - once in the tiny apartment where L mourned the death of her mother (?) and then on xmas even when L. tried to assassinate her former lover. We move forward in time and each marries a childhood companion: Z marries Tonya or Tanya, in a marriage that seems happy but somehow (to us) unpassionate; L. marries Pasha (?) Platinov, and he is a disturbed young man - is there a hint of repressed homosexuality? - who leaves for the army and is apparently killed in action (in novelistic terms, since we never see that, we do expect him to return from the "dead"). Z and L., doctor and nurse, find themselves assigned to same military hospital; Z. mentions L in a letter home, making his wife jealous - he says she has completely misinterpreted him, he has no attraction to L (true at that time) - but obviously she picked something up that Z himself was not aware of: the fact of his mentioned L in the letter was a clue that a wife would find disturbing.