(Photo: Boris Pasternak, banned in USSR.)

RUSSIA is reclaiming what Hollywood purloined more than 40 years ago with its first homegrown film of Boris Pasternak's epic tale of love and revolution, Doctor Zhivago.

In a bid to correct numerous cultural and stylistic inaccuracies in the late Sir David Lean's 1965 MGM blockbuster, an 11-part TV film has been made in Moscow with some of Russia's best actors and will start airing in May.

The idea is to de-Westernise one of only three Russian novels to have won its author a Nobel prize and give Russian audiences an authentic take on a book banned by the Communist authorities until the late 1980s.

The original Hollywood movie defined for many in the West what Russia was about: snow, sleigh rides, rolling landscapes, feel-good folk music and revolution. But Russians argue that Lean got some, if not all of it, badly wrong.

Though they are gracious about the film that won five Oscars, they insist it was a peculiarly Western version of a quintessentially Russian work.

In the American film Omar Sharif plays Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet from a wealthy Siberian family, who strives to find love against the brutal backdrop of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war between the Reds and the Whites.

Its haunting Tchaikovsky-inspired Maurice Jarre soundtrack and particularly the recurring Lara's Theme stuck in the mind of a generation - at least in the West - and the film was hailed as one of Lean's best.

But in an interview Aleksander Proshkin, director of the Russian Doctor Zhivago, rattled off a long list of inaccuracies and cultural misconceptions and argued that an authentic Russian version was sorely needed.

He pointed out, for example, that the repeated use of a balalaika, a Russian peasant instrument, in the film's soundtrack was incongruous since the Zhivagos were from the upper echelons of society. "It (the balalaika) has no place in the lives of wealthy millionaires. It's as if we made a film about Asia and had a president playing a banjo."

Nor, he argues, do Siberian farmhouses boast onion-domed cupolas as they do in the Hollywood movie. But what is really missing, he argues, is an authentic portrayal of the Russian soul or state of mind.

He argues that Pasternak's characters are more complex, less black and white. The scale and budget of the Russian production, which stars Oleg Menshikov, one of the country's most popular actors, is not Hollywood, but Proshkin definitely feels he has created a more faithful Doctor Zhivago.