The difficulties and the beauty of Doctor Zhivago

Despite the rocky beginning, which I discussed in yesterday's post, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957) does begin to take narrative shape by the 2nd or 3rd section, about 70 pages in - it's probably not the material that so many remember from the famous movie - Yura and Lara are both about 20 by the end of the 2nd chapter and they've not actually met each other, though their paths have crossed at a few dramatic moments - but at least the two main characters are coming into focus and the many secondary characters are fading into the background. Yura, raised by a wealthy benefactor (a relation of some sort?) and raised alongside her daughter, a young woman who seems like a sibling. But the mother, in her dying moments, urges Yura to marry her daughter, and so that seems destined. But then there are the Lara chapters: she's raised in poverty, her mother works in or maybe owns a small dressmaker's shop, and has an ugly affair with their landlord, at least twice her age - she eventually breaks away from that, has a relationship that seems to be heading toward marriage with a young man (Platinov?). When her brother loses a great deal of money gambling, she plans to go the lecherous landlord, actually a wealthy bachelor lawyer, and ask for money to pay off the debt - she brings a gun - eventually her plan changes and she gets the money elesewhere, but brings the gun to an xmas party, one of those all-night Russian bashes, and of course a gun in a novel (of play) is bound to go off - leads to some chaos, Zhivago, now a young doctor, treats one of the wounded, or is about to, when he gets word that his stepmother is dying - rushes home. It's one of the times he crosses paths with Lara; he also has seen her some years earlier in some kind of deathbed scene, is it her mother dying of pneumonia?, I don't remember, when she is sulking tearfully in a corner, her head resting on a table I think. There are certain plot elements linking them, too, but these are even more obscure to me: her landlord-lover was I think a lawyer involved in the affairs to Yura Z's late father (killed himself because of some kind of debt issue). The novel is like a photo image gradually coming into focus: some of the early scenes are completely obscure to me (not obscurely written, but their function in the novel is unclear), but as we go further into the work the pieces, or many of them, begin to cohere. Some of the writing feels like warmed-over Dostoyevsky (the death scenes, the smoky apartments, the all-night bouts, the expounded philosophy) but others are extremely beautiful, especially as Z begins to realize himself as a poet and begins observing the images around him and thinking about how to shape them into art: a journey across Moscow on Christmas eve, a lone candle in a window.