I carefully wrote down all the license plates I saw, wishing I lived in New Mexico for its yellow-and-red one with LAND OF ENCHANTMENT on it, or Colorado with its green license plate and white snowcapped mountains at the bottom. After one trip, I wrote to the governor of Rhode Island and suggested we change from our dull black-and-white plate to a blue one with whitecapped waves. He never wrote back. But that was how great my desire for somewhere special was, I would design a new license plate just to make my little state stand out somehow.
My hometown of West Warwick had once been special, long before I was born. In 1809, the Lippitt Mill was built there, and it holds the distinction of being the second-oldest mill in the state, and one of the oldest textile mills in America. And Fruit of the Loom was born in my town in 1865, eventually having more than one thousand looms at work in its mill. But when I was a kid, the biggest mill had long since burned down, and many of the other mills that lined the polluted Pawtucket River had closed. We had a main street, with a square stone town hall and a square stone post office and a square stone bank that stayed open late on Friday evenings. There were two women’s shops and one men’s—Maxine’s, Seena’s, and St. Onge; a Newberry’s five-and-dime with a lunch counter, cages of parakeets, and bins of notions; Irene’s, a hat shop, where my mother got the hats she wore to church (this was her standard Mother’s Day gift until Irene’s closed); and the Palace Theatre, where for thirty-five cents my cousins and I saw double-feature matinees like A Hard Day’s Night and Up the Down Staircase. There was a New York System too, a Rhode Island oddity that sells special small hot dogs—hot wieners—in steamed buns with a secret meat sauce, chopped onions, mustard, and celery salt on top. Usually a person would eat three hot wieners, except my brother and father who ate six or even nine.
But by the time I was in ninth grade, although the square stone buildings and the New York System remained, everything else was gone, the buildings boarded up, the XXX movie theater replacing my beloved Palace Theatre. St. Onge had moved to the new mall, the other stores had simply vanished. Even though my father still went to the bank on Friday evenings, he came right home. No more window-shopping or ducking into Newberry’s for shiny buttons or artificial flowers for my mother to arrange as a centerpiece. Living in what I saw as a dead-end town, I wanted, even more than ever, to go. I wanted to eat dog stuffed with rice in Morocco and go skiing in Greece.
Then I found the perfect novel sitting on the library shelf: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. At 1,059 pages, it didn’t so much sit on the shelf as dominate it. And the title—the mysterious combination of Zh . . . I tried to imagine how to pronounce it. Like Shh? Like Za? The writer’s name too: Boris. I lived in a world of Michaels and Stevens and Johns; Vinnys and Tonys and Joes. The only Boris I’d ever heard of was Boris Badenov from Rocky and Bullwinkle. So I knew that this writer was Russian. Somehow even then, as a thirteen-year-old girl who knew almost nothing, I did know the magic of books. I understood as I held that hefty book in my hands, staring at the unusual cover—a drawing of a small house in a snowy field with a horse-drawn carriage approaching, all of it covered with what looked like a child’s crayoned lines in mustard, mauve, and teal—that this Russian novel would transport me from my own little town to Russia, a place about which I knew nothing except that they had nuclear bombs pointed at us, they were Communists, and just the summer before they had invaded Czechoslovakia—Mama Rose and I had watched on television as the tanks rolled down the streets of Prague.
THERE HAD BEEN a movie of Doctor Zhivago five years earlier, with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. My parents had walked out halfway through—too slow, too boring, too long, too much snow. But the novel—the novel!—was none of these things. At least, not to me. It was confusing, jumping in time and point of view. Vladimir Nabokov called Doctor Zhivago “a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers, and trite coincidences.” Reviewers described it as “having no real plot, confused chronology, oddly effaced main characters, and contrived coincidences.” All of which is true, even though Boris Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature shortly after Doctor Zhivago was published.
I admit that I loved those coincidences that Nabokov and many critics hated. I loved how Yuri could end up in the same town as Lara and wander into the library and see her there, or how Yuri gets wounded and is a patient, and later a doctor, in the military hospital where Lara is a nurse. I believed, or wanted to believe, in chance encounters, true love, and romance. I was confused by the characters, all of whom had three names and even nicknames, almost impossible to keep straight. But that didn’t really matter to me because all I cared about was Lara and Yuri, their unrequited love. How he looked at her in wonder and amazement! How he vowed to try not to love her! But love is stronger than that, Pasternak told me. Yuri couldn’t resist. And ever so briefly, Lara is his.
In his introduction to a reissue of the novel, John Bayley wrote: “The best way to understand Doctor Zhivago is to see it in terms of this great Russian literary tradition, as a fairy tale.” Except in this fairy tale, no one lives happily ever after. Yuri Zhivago dies alone in Moscow; Lara dies in a gulag during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge; their daughter, Tanya, abandoned in the Urals by her mother when she was a child, is a laundress.
Perhaps ultimately Doctor Zhivago was what it never intended to be, as Richard Pevear wrote in his introduction: “a moving love story set against the grim realities of twentieth-century Russian history.” The novel opens in 1903 at the funeral of Yuri’s mother and moves from there to the Russian Revolution of 1905, the civil war, World War I, and World War II, with uprisings and protests and skirmishes and Cossacks and the White Army and Tsarists and more throughout. So many historical events and facts that I had never heard of that I made a list while reading: Nikitsky Gate, The Presma, Bourgeoisie, Faust, Komuch, Tolstoyan, Pushkin . . . And I spent long afternoons looking up all of these things and more.