Dr Zhivago makes Russian history
©James Rodgers, BBC News, May 10, 2006
The first Russian screen adaptation of Boris Pasternak's classic novel Dr Zhivago has just been made for television.
Sir David Lean's 1965 film of Boris Pasternak's novel Dr Zhivago has always been considered the definitive version of the book outside the author's native Russia.
Inside the Soviet Union, as it then was, not much at all was known about Dr Zhivago - it was banned.
Fifteen years after the collapse of USSR, the book, which once only circulated illicitly, is easy to buy.
It has just been adapted for television - the first Russian screen version of one of the greatest Russian novels of the 20th Century.
The book tells the story of Russia torn apart by war and revolution. At its heart is the love affair between Dr Yury Zhivago and Lara Guishar.
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Natalya Avetisian, who recently published an edition of Pasternak's collected works, says the writer lived at the heart of the violent times he describes.
"He was working here in the 20th Century, which was an extremely tough time for Russia.
"All these wars, revolutions etcetera. They ruined so many lives, and so many fortunes were crushed," she says.
Alexander Proshkin directed the new TV version. He says he first read Dr Zhivago secretly in the 1960s.
He was so scared of being caught with the book that he got rid of it as soon as he had finished it.
Mr Proshkin says what drew him to adapt the novel is its relevance for the Russia of today.
"The characters fall into a terrifying threshing machine of time, into a historical cataclysm.
'Scariest time'
"We are at the beginning of the 21st Century. We too have fallen into a time of change," adds the film-maker.
As with every screen adaptation of a well-known novel, this new Dr Zhivago has its disappointed detractors. The author's son, 82-year-old Yevgeny Pasternak, is among them.
Of the significance of the new series, he says: "I can't say it's important because it's not a screen adaptation.
"It's a contemporary TV series in which certain separate, episodes of the novel have been crudely used."
Mr Proshkin and the rest of his team answer that it is impossible to bring a novel to the screen in its entirety.
Chulpan Khamatova, who plays Lara, says that Dr Zhivago's strength as a book, and Boris Pasternak's as an author, is the ability to chronicle Russia's violent and turbulent times.
For her, Dr Zhivago tells the story of "the scariest time in our country when everything went head over heels".
"He predicted what would happen as a result of all this. And unfortunately, he wasn't mistaken," she says of the country's tough 20th Century.
There is one modern problem which Pasternak was unable predict.
Weeks before it was due for broadcast, pirate copies of the TV series were already on sale.
It is an odd echo of the way the novel was first circulated - in copies that were illegal because of censorship, not copyright.
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