Surprisingly difficult beginning chapters in Doctor Zhivago

On friend AF's recommendation last night started reading Boris Pasternak's DoctorZhivago (1957), which I hadn't read since college - amazing that it has stood so long, from its days as a best-seller sensation and now a classic, joining the lists of Pevear-Volokhonsky translation projects and sitting beside Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. My memory of the novel, which is very vague and entirely polluted by my memory of the super-romantic film version, is that it's a romance story about two characters, the eponymous Dr. Z. and his beloved Lara, separated for many years by his exile to Siberia, then reunited much later in life? In great poverty and illness? A story about the war? About Stalinist repression? Obviously a book that did not find favor in USSR during Pasternak's lifetime, so he must have gone after some of the icons and sacred truths. I'm very surprised, however, at the difficulty of the first 30 pages or so - if you didn't know ahead of time that young Yuri and Lara - I think they're each about 10 when the novel begins - this would be even rougher going, as Pasternak introduces many, many characters in a series of short chapters, and their relations to one another are, at least initially, very obscure - in other words, the opening chapters are not like any of today's best sellers and would probably put off any publisher who happened on this in his or her inbox. Nevertheless, we do get early glimpses of Lara, living in poverty in Moscow with her (widowed?) mother and suffering the advances of the lecherous landlord; we see Yuri mourning the death of his mother (and in another chapter, what appears to be the suicide in a leap from a train of his father - doing Anna Karenina one better). And then there are many other characters whom I cannot recall or track; as P-V note in their translators' note, the names are whimsical and obscure even to Russians - thanks, Boris, I appreciate that! - but I guess it helps to know this as we do then realize we don't have to pay a great deal of attention to all the patronymics.