I have never read the book even though I am a fan of Russian literature. I have read too many bad reviews of the book to the point that I have no urge to check it out. However I am sure there are those who have so to those, how does the movie compare? Is it better than the book? Worse? Just different?
shareAuthor won the Nobel Prize for literature a year after DZ was published. Can it be all that bad?
shareit is one of the best novels i have read. it explains a lot of the background which wasn't understood in the film. although it's a difficult read (like many other russian literature), i strongly advise any fan of the film to buy a copy of pasternak's timeless epic.
shareThe relationships between the characters are much more fleshed out (as to be expected) and while the Yuri/Lara relationship is the main love story, it is by no means the only one. Yuri does love Tonya, Lara loves Pasha even when she is with Yuri. Yuri's best friend Misha (not in the movie) loves Tonya but respects Yuri too much to act on his feelings. Pasha, even in his life as Strelnikov, longs to return to his wife and daughter but can't escape the identity he has created for himself. Many lives and fates are intertwined. Zhivago's poetry is in the book as well. It's well worth reading.
I guess the biggest difference is that the movie focuses on the romance which making the Revolution its backdrop. The novel's a romance too, but the two strands receive about equal emphasis.
The first hour-plus of the movie (set in pre-revolutionary Moscow) is a fairly brief segment of the novel, maybe 50-100 pages (of a 600-plus page novel). World War I and the Civil War get a lot more coverage; Pasternak devotes, if I recall, three whole chapters to Yuri's service with the partisans rather than the ten minutes or so the movie devotes to it. Also dwells more on the grimmer sides of revolution (disease, famine, even cannibalism) that the movie understandably downplays.
There are also a lot of discursions on both politics and Zhivago's poetry, which were understandably cut from the finished film. A lot of passages that are transplanted from novel to film, but staged differently. For instance, when Lara tries to kill Komarovsky, she accidentally shoots another guest and no one guesses who her real target is. I also remember Zhivago's confrontation with Strelnikov was markedly less tense in the book than movie.
There are also a lot more characters; I remember Yuri having a friend named Misha Gordon, Pasha's father, also a Communist agitator appeared a few times. Lara had a brother though he wasn't a major character. Yevgraf was in the book but I recall him being a very young character, in his teens/early 20s, which Alec Guinness couldn't really pull off. There was a great scene of Pasha meeting Yuri at the end of the novel, which they excised in the movie for who knows what reason.
If pressed, I like the novel better. Even though it rambles and wanders, it's well-written, complex and very engrossing. The movie is great for the first two hours then slowly falls apart afterwards; trying to compress the novel into a straightforward narrative doesn't really work.
I'm afraid that you underestimate the number of subjects in which I take an interest!