Forty years after David Lean's epic film, a native version of Pasternak's classic is dividing Russians

Photo: Oleg Menshikov and Chulpan Khamatova in the Russian version, left, and Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in David Lean’s film (Reuters)

THEY sneered at Omar Sharif’s balalaika. They scoffed at Julie Christie’s platinum blonde locks. And they laughed out loud at the onion domes on the dacha. Russians have long ridiculed David Lean’s 1965 screen adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, which won five Oscars and defined revolutionary Russia for generations in the West.

But now they are furiously debating the authenticity of the first Russian screen version of Boris Pasternak’s epic novel about a doctor-poet caught up in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Millions of Russians tuned in to the NTV television channel on Wednesday to watch the first episode of an 11-part serialisation of the book, which was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Thousands more have bought it on DVD, impatient to view the latest in a string of once-forbidden Soviet works that have found a new lease of life on TV in the past year.

Aleksandr Proshkin, the director, said that he respected Lean’s film, but considered his own version to be more authentic. “That was a Hollywood melodrama. It was a very good film, but of course we Russians saw some things that are just not Russian,” he told The Times.

For a start, his version was filmed in Russia, rather than Canada and Spain, and Yuri Zhivago and his lover, Lara, are played by Russians.

Sharif, who was born in Egypt, is replaced by Oleg Menshikov, star of the Oscar-winning Russian film, Burnt by the Sun. Christie is supplanted by Chulpan Khamatova, the star of Goodbye, Lenin!.

Gone is the balalaika — a musical instrument usually played by peasants. Onion domes, which are only found on churches, have been removed from the dacha.

Yuri Arabov, who wrote the screenplay, also claims to have been truer to Pasternak’s novel, which was first published in Milan in 1957. Like many Russians, he remembers hurriedly reading a samizdat version, illicitly copied in the 1960s.

“I understood then that this is a book that needs to be read during a year or two, one page daily,” he said. “It is not prose. It is mood and philosophy.” Vita Ramm, Ekho Moskvy radio’s film critic, praised the director’s attention to detail. “You can look at this like a historical document,” she said.

But not everyone is convinced. Nana Nemsitsveridze, a pianist, told The Times that she and her husband had waited eagerly for the first episode and watched it together. Then they watched the Hollywood version again. “I remember my feelings when I watched it for the first time — it seemed very primitive,” she said.

“But now I can tell that the characters are more exact in the English version. They are simpler and maybe it’s better. Also, the sentences are very short. I don’t feel the style of Pasternak.” The film also failed to impress the author’s son, Yevgeni, who accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature on his father’s behalf in 1989.

He has denounced the new version and the 1965 film as caricatures.

Doctor Zhivago is one of several Soviet classics enjoying a television renaissance that some attribute to the increasingly repressive political climate under President Putin. In late December, nearly half of Russia’s television viewers watched a serialisation of The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical novel.

In January viewers were able to see the debut of The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel about life in a prison camp under Stalin.