Poems in Doctor Zhivago

I think Boris Pasternak could have omitted the epilogue to Doctor Zhivago with no great loss - the epilogue taking place in the 1940s as two of the surviving characters in the novel make their way through (yet another) war-torn landscape, engage in a lengthy nighttime discussion, then pass through the village - people sleeping on the streets because the houses are in ruins - to the river where they will wash their army fatigues. As with many sections of Zhivago, the plot elements are a little obscure and hard to connect with other strands of the narrative, but I think there's nothing essential that we learn here that changes or modifies our vision of this epic novel - except that the last paragraph has the two men looking off toward the horizon with a vision of hope and expectations, quite different from the very dark mood at which the novel would have ended - yet perhaps not an earned vision, you have to wonder what it is exactly that makes them optimistic, both in the world they're living in and in the Soviet society that suppressed Pasternak's work. That said, the final section of the novel is a collection of 25 of Zhivago's poems, and this section - especially in the great Pevear-Volokhonsky translatoin, make a great conclusion to the novel. I wasn't aware that Pasternak, until Zhivago, was known primarily as a poet (and later a translator) - so these are not just random crappy verses forced into a novel for plot points (a la that Alan Hollinghurst novel about a dead war poet), but are truly beautiful lyric poems: some sounds Keatsian, but as if Keats were steeped in Asian literature; each lyric is in short stanzas or short lines, and each stanza ends at a full top - making each one seem almost like a haiku. These beautiful pieces, many on Christian themes and others folkloric or, in a few instances, romantic don't directly tie point by point to moments in the novel - with the exception of the candle burning in the window which recalls Zhivago's view of Lara's first apartment - but they evince the creativity and sensibility that Zhivago was trying at all costs to articulate - they help us see that his struggle to survive, and his irascibility and his serial abandonment was in part a commitment to his artistic vision, suppressed at every turn. In Zhivago, Pasternak created his own literary double, and through his character enabled his own work to endure or, to paraphrase Faulkner, even to prevail - reading these poems we understand not only the character but the consciousness of the author himself.