Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Revolution: Les Misérables vs Doctor Zhivago

My wife and I went to see the movie Les Misérables the other night. All beautiful, idealistic, young revolutionaries, some falling in love with each other, all battling royalist reactionaries to bring about the dawning of a new age of republican liberty, equality, and fraternity. From the barricades the young comrades sing in unison:

    Red - the blood of angry men!
    Black - the dark of ages past!
    Red - a world about to dawn!
    Black - the night that ends at last!

A movie perfectly suited to the shallow, naive sensibilities of American progressives! One can feel the liberal outrage and the revolutionary fervor building throughout the theater as the story of the wretched Parisian slum dwellers plays out. By the end of the movie, I half expected a bunch of aging activists from the Sixties to jump to their feet around me, march out the door arm in arm, and erect and man barricades of their own, shouting Obama's socialist campaign slogan "Forward!"

How different from David Lean's more nuanced Doctor Zhivago, in which, yes, the villainy of the rapacious aristocrat Komarovsky is vividly portrayed, but in which also the idealistic student Pasha Antipov is transformed by the revolution into the ruthless, ideologically pure, Bolshevik murderer Strelnikov, who coldly declares to Zhivago:

    I used to admire your poetry. I shouldn't admire it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don't you agree? Feelings, insights, affections. It's suddenly trivial now. You don't agree. You're wrong. The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.

For those desiring a more realistic, sobering portrayal of revolution (including its horrors), here's a short reading list of books (in addition, of course, to Hugo's original Misérables and Pasternak's Zhivago) that I have found particularly instructive:

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