Love, Frozen in Varykino

“They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.” 

― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Credits and citations
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, 1957, Pantheon Books

Love. Countless writers across the millennia have sought to pen some truth upon this thing around which most lives pivot. The indescribable truth that will effect lives even yet to be lived.

All the poetry ever penned, all the stories every spoken, all the guesses ever given, are not adequate at defining its nature. They cannot describe it.

Boris Pasternak, of Dr. Zhivago fame, took his turn.

This is what Pasternak said about it, in a literary description of the love between the Zhivago characters Yuri and Lara. They were having an affair, with Lara in an unhappy marriage and Yuri with an expectant wife. He writes:

“They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.  To them - and this made them unusual - the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of even greater understanding of life and of themselves.” 

Pasternak's works, in the style of the Epic Russian tradition, helped him win the Nobel Prize in 1958, which the Russian authorities forced him to decline. His parents were talented artists. His father was a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy’s works and his mother a concert pianist.

In the epic Nobel Laureate prose, he said it well - it's like a revelation. "Of even greater understanding of life and of themselves."

The moments of revelation, and the feelings, are like those of a lucid dream. Real and not real. The sense of being part of a thing greater than who we are - out there in the everything of the universe.

It's the thing for which many are willing to sacrifice everything. Even if its means stepping outside everything they are to find it. Escaping the known; fleeing to find it - no matter the ending.

In Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Yuri, on his way to see Lara, is conscripted by the Red Army. With woolen coats, they both flee to Varykino, to the Ice Palace. To a place of final refuge from those who would seek to end their love.

The Ice Palace is breathtaking. It's cast in cold blue hues and surrounded by desolation. It has a bitter, stark, and singular type of beauty. Stunningly dream-like.

Perhaps lucid.

Ironically, its grandeur is barely visible beneath the many layers of ice. Dangerous-looking icicles scythe from the curved ceiling, hanging over their heads like the army that seeks them.


Pasternak's story, a complex, fictional masterpiece is, in the end, a story of a thing that never changes. The thing that, over time and eternity, will always endure.

It will endure even throughout war and revolution, like the winter of the Russian revolt.

Even in the coldest and most desolate of places in the world, like Varykino. There, in the frozen Northern Passages, it can found - beneath the layer upon layer of ice.

In the ice-entombed palace, Yuri and Lara show the world, through Pasternak's eyes, the precious, rare and universal moments that are worth the peril and escape.

There, they find their moments: "...moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness... moments of revelation, of even greater understanding of life and of themselves.”

It never changes. And it never will. Nor will the attempts to describe it.

No doubt another Nobel Prize awaits the attempt.