Martin Amis once described Finnegans Wake as a “700-page crossword clue, and the answer is ‘the.’” Where does that leave Doctor Zhivago with its recurring symbols and allusions that compete with Joyce for spawning an exegetical industrial complex? As Boris Pasternak told Olga Carlisle in an interview for The Paris Review in 1960: “Now some critics have gotten so wrapped up in those symbols—which are put in the book the way stoves go into a house, to warm it up—they would like me to commit myself and climb into the stove.” What a tease coming from an author whose symbolism gorgeously encoded his entire philosophy of life and art and whose fiction so closely mirrored his own fate.

Born in 1890 to a painter father and pianist mother, Pasternak set out at first to become a composer. He studied under the great Alexander Scriabin who later encouraged his protégé, now under the influence of Rilke, to give up music for the full-time pursuit of poetry. By 1913, when Pasternak came out with his first collection of verse, A Twin in the Clouds, Russian poetry was in a state of sectarian upheaval, in some ways more contentiously disputed than the legitimacy of the czar. Were you a Futurist, an Acmeist, or a Symbolist following the footsteps of Blok? Pasternak was the latter, later explaining, in People and Situations, one of a series of early autobiographical sketches, his belief that reality was subjective but in a