Review: Tohtori Zivago
The musical as a mirror of the dictatorship
Helsinki City Theatre’s musical Dr. Zhivago is a reminder of the paranoia of Russian leaders. Fifi’s critic went crazy over the grand musical, which was rejected by several critics.
Dr. Zhivago tells about the life of the writer Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960). The adventure, which is strongly tied to time, is a story about the end of Russia and the initial breaths of the Soviet Union: when the feudal, aristocratic and bourgeois system collapses and is replaced by a totalitarian and dictatorial planned economy.
In the midst of it all, the good and righteous Dr. Zhivago is persevering: the son of a noble but poor family, who, with the support of wealthy acquaintances, has trained as a doctor, even though he has already published his poems. When a young man starts his profession as a doctor, he feels – like a modern Finnish dream young person – that now is the time to work hard and repay society the debt he has caused with his expensive education.
Paying off the debt is not so easy after all. Power structures are shaking, the country is plunging into civil war, and the differences between good and evil are dissolving. Alongside the party machinery, a person’s life has become worthless. During the inverted logic that the system worships, even Zhivago is forced to kill against his medical oath. And sometimes even the person being saved may not want to live.
At the beginning of the story of Zhivago, the golden age of Russian literature has already ended, but its authors are still fresh in the memory, still popular favorites. Zhivago has a lot of references to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Zhivago thinks that honor and love are the most important things, but he is still unable to be a man of honor, and he directs his love wrong. “Why give only half of my love to a woman who has given me a whole life!” he screams, thinking of his wife Tonja and his little son.
From his wonderful lover Lara, Živago receives more than love: great happiness and the strength to do the best of all, art.
The grand musical Doctor Zhivago , which is being performed at the Helsinki City Theatre, reaches the main points of Boris Pasternak’s great novel. Živago is new as a musical: Lucy Simon – yes, the sister of musician Carly Simon! – and Michael Weller did not write it until 2006–2010.
The sold-out hall cheers and sighs, and so do the young Russians sitting around me. I cry the whole second half. The grandiose music that is part of the style underlines the essentials, but the power of the story is still the greatest.
The power of music and classic stories takes the viewer to wild spheres. The breath is taken away because the music does not give mercy to the viewer. You have to live with it.
The musical genre is sometimes considered more entertaining than it actually is: musicals are not just fun treats or Disney cartoons on stage. They deal with very tough topics: the classic Fiddler on the Roof, which was seen at the Helsinki City Theatre last winter, tells the story of pogroms, i.e. the persecution of Jews in Ukraine in the early 1900s. “The day rises, the day falls”, they sing at the wedding, and towards the end of the joyful love story, some of the main characters disappear to the east, the remaining ones flee and the villages are burned down.
Cabaret, which has been performed several times in Finland and whose name refers to the Berlin underground theatre of the 1920s and 30s, tells the story of the last happy days of Jews, gays and transvestites before the Nazis came to power in Berlin. “Money makes the world run”, is sung champagne in a sparkling theatre. In the end, no one has money anymore, and money worries are still not the biggest worries. In this story, too, we leave the violent city by train. The Swedish Theatre in Helsinki’s version of this was absolutely mind-blowing: after the grande finale, the master of ceremonies stripped naked and disappeared into the flames, as if in an oven.
Even The Sound of Music , the mother of all children’s musicals, tells the story of dissidents in Austria in the 1930s and the early moments of the Second World War. “Edelweiss, the flower of innocence”, almost tramples in the Alps as the singing von Trapp family wanders past and crosses the border into Switzerland, the land of happiness.
Sometimes reality seems more implausible than fiction, andDr. Zhivago also reminds us of how Bolshevik leaders used to take a cartoonish pseudonym that symbolizes strength. Dshugashvili became Stalin or “Superman”, Scriabin became Molotov or “Hammer” and Rozenfeld became Kamenev, “The Stone Man”. In Zhivago, the Bolshevik leader becomes Strelnikov, the “Arrowman”.
The character of Strelnikov contains references to important historical figures of the Russian Revolution, such as the educated Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev, who, like Strelnikov, was the son of a railroad worker.
The position of the main villain is volatile and frightening, the most frightening for the leader himself. Strelnikovin, who is constantly afraid of plotters, is constantly looking for spies around him and executing them in public. As a Dostoyevskyist character, the dictator’s counterpart, Dr. Zhivago strives for moral goodness, but it is precisely because of this that he makes great enemies. The dictator thinks that the one who writes poetry is the most dangerous. After all, the poet reminds the people of the beauty of Russia and its times, which are strictly forbidden to miss. The poet gives hope to the people.
Just as dictators have always feared, the civilisation of the people has often led to the fall of power. Through Dr. Zhivago , one can also reflect on the last breaths of the Soviet Union: when the people were given room to manoeuvre at the end of the 1980s through openness, i.e . glasnost , it overthrew those in power.
In today’s Russia, a revolution may not be near, but perhaps it is simmering somewhere. Today, in Russia, ruled by Putin and his oligarch friends, 110 people own 35 percent of the national wealth, according to a recent financial report by the Swiss bank. Surely not even the Romanovs could have imagined such great inequality.
Like Dr. Zhivago in the story, the writer Pasternak was in real life favored by the ruling despot, Stalin. It is said that – for a reason that has remained unclear – Stalin vetoed Pasternak to prevent him from being deported to a prison camp. This fate awaited all dissidents, and even lighter books and poems became a departure. In both the book and the musical, you end up in a prison camp, disappeared or in front of an execution squad for even the smallest reasons.
Stalin even respected Pasternak as a mad poet. This was also an achievement, as only a few of Pasternak’s literary entourage survived the persecutions. However, Dr. Zhivago was banned by the Soviet Union, as was typical of the time. The problems of communism were only talked about in secret whispers, not in books.
Pasternak completed Doctor Zhivago, which he had been writing for decades, in 1956. It was smuggled to Italy, where it was published in translation in 1957. In Finland , Zhivago was published in 1958 – the same year that Pasternak, who had been known as a poet until then, received the Nobel Prize.
The book was officially published in Russian in the Soviet Union only in 1988, even though it had been known for years as a memorized version of samizdat that spread by word of mouth.