The Russian National Genius

With Pasternak and Dostoevsky on the Salvation Road

Guest essay — exclusive to Michael Hoffman’s Revelation of the Method

Reading time: approximately 25 minutes

By Caterina Rialto • Copyright ©2025

Editor’s Note: our American friend and colleague Caterina Rialto is a Cornell University PhD. Fluent in Russian and eight other languages, she studied in Russia for an extended period. Caterina introduced me to the work of Boris Pasternak and helped to deepen my understanding of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

WHOSE KINGDOM SHALL HAVE NO END (from the Nicene Creed)

VS “HISTORIES OF PSYCHOPATHY” (N. Finkelstein)

“One of the most wicked black magic sacrifices occurred in the early 20^th century, in a mass immolation known as the First World War, a useless fratricide, tantamount to an open air Satanic ritual, placating the devil with human sacrifices and approved by the churches”

— (Michael Hoffman, interview, IM Magazine, Issue 3).

It is not worthy of the goodness of God that those created by Him should be corrupted through the deceit wrought by the devil on human beings.

And it is supremely improper that the workmanship of God in human beings should disappear either through their own negligence or through the deceit of demons.

--St. Athanasius the Great

I first read Doctor Zhivago in Russian in Paris in 1976. I'd been awarded a Watson Fellowship when I graduated from college, and to save money for an indefinite stay abroad, was living in a boardinghouse dedicated to “The Friendship Between The French and The Vietnamese.” One girl there, at age 19 slightly younger than I was, described to me how she escaped “the fall of” Saigon, put on a departing helicopter by her parents, and as she flew safely away, she watched the next helicopter containing her family explode on take-off.

I often went to the great Cathedral of Notre Dame to knit my soul together after the unimaginable and appalling sickness and injury I lived with in the refugee boardinghouse. Never mind the endless roaches. Almost all of the Vietnamese children were sick with “digestive” disorders, unable to keep food down; listless and languishing (from starvation and Agent Orange or scars from napalm?); mothers like burned-out candles, not even flickering; assorted bandaged limbs, crutches; the few teenagers were stronger and did the forays into the city for necessities.

American friends of mine begged me to leave the place, fearing for my safety. “They hate you, you're American!” We'd all gone through that war on television. Here with me were the living human beings who had been targeted, surviving women and children.

What a surprise it was to discover the Orthodox Christianity with bits of Old Church Slavonic woven into Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago.

You can ask your phone, and AI will give you an answer to the question why it matters to thoughtful people to read Pasternak's work. I'm leary of the machines, however, who can't distinguish so well the nuances. If Solzhenitsyn was right in his novel, The First Circle, the Soviets were already hard at work developing technology that would “read” voices so as to know what you really meant despite your words. So we could give it up here and now.

Or, putting one foot poetically in front of another, we could read Doctor Zhivago to find out what he's telling us about the times we live in, about the language with which totalitarianism creeps on little cat's feet into our lives, about the changing of customs, the wrecking of traditions, the ruin of personal relationships.

Our professors told us that the name Zhivago is the gerund (-ing) form of the verb zhit'--to live, zhivya—living, which could possibly be of an older Old Church Slavonic form (the -ago part, pronounced as g, a soft velar).

To the Soviets that verbal trick in itself might be 'counter-revolutionary' and punishable, but perhaps went unrecognized by the atheist government. My grammar professor was a military man who had been to the USSR many times. The hero of the novel, Yuri, is orphaned in the early 20^th c.entury and in the story, he lives through the bloody beginnings of Leftist revolution in 1905 and 1917, intersected by the First World War.

The killing of Tsar Nicholas II and his family (in the Urals, not so far from where Yuri and his family will escape) and the bloody civil war between the Red Army and the White Army (the Whites were against the Bolsheviks), are the backdrop for Pasternak’s depiction of the totalitarian, anti-Christian takeover of society.

The book is a long narrative poem about life eternal and resurrection, in a state that had been murderously subdued by a political religion of atheistic Communism that became The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

It is the remnant of Christianity under dire conditions, Zhivago— following the living Christ.

In a parallel takeover of culture, literacy and critical thinking, none of us in the 20^th century West has been taught (allowed) to read our classic and essentially Christian literature (Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens) in a Christ-like way, as seekers of truth following after Christ and bearing the cross.

Hoffman tells us that “the Cryptocracy [has had] outstanding success of advancing the mission of heavily conditioning western humanity in nearly every generation since the Renaissance” (IM Magzine). As the endless peace talks took place (in Paris), I resolved to go to the USSR. That summer, of the American Bicenntenial, I flew from Gatwick, near London, to Kiev, Ukraine.

From the airport in Kiev, I was taken down a highway lined with tall, beautiful, blooming horse chestnut trees, and in the fields behind the trees, women in scarves with scythes making hay.

I arrived at a magnificent city, the historical capitol of the ancient Rus. Splendid old buildings all around, the obligatory statues of Young Pioneers (Communist youth corps), the socialist heroes, and Lenin, of course.

The streets were kept very clean by women in scarves with brooms made of twigs. The sight of a foreigner was an exotic and scary thing. People would look and then run away if I approached to talk. With a smile! What is a smile? Perhaps they thought I was making fun of their grim lives.

Children followed me closely, asking for bubble gum and Bic pens, and they too would scatter like birds when I turned to them. Somehow I got myself into the centuries' old monastery of the Kiev Caves (the Pechersk Lavra). Our Lord, working through the Holy Fathers, must have intended this. After my brief stay in the caves in my long homemade tie-dyed skirt and sandals with the icons and the relics, I emerged a very changed young woman.

Orthodox Father Seraphim Rose in God's Revelation to the Human Heart, writes:

“It is in accepting given situations, which requires a loving heart, that one encounters God...to God, the past, present and future of the human heart are all present, and He sees where He can break through and communicate. …

“The opposite of a loving heart that receives revelation from God is cold calculation, getting what you can out of people; in religious life, this produces fakery and charlatanism of all descriptions. If you look at the...world today, you see fakery, posing, calculation, so much taking advantage of the winds of fashion...To find the truth you have to look deeper.”

I traveled through the eastern and southern fields and woods of the Ukraine in a bus, to catch the Georgian Military Highway from Ordzhonikidze (now Vladikavkas) to Tbilisi. There were many villages, with none of the commercial road garbage and advertising that uglifies the outskirts of towns in America.

Villages were “poor” by our western standards, old wooden structures with maybe goats or sheep, but houses often had beautifully painted shutters on them, fairy tale-like. And all had kitchen gardens. I saw many stone churches in the vast countryside of the Ukraine and then on, climbing into the Caucasus. In the mountains, I was taken to the chain-link fence around some military installation on Mt. Elbrus. God knows why – oh yes, it was the Cold War. Soviet Might. And yet we were friendlier then than we are now, with our media inflamed Russophobia.

Even then Moscow was the city of 400 churches. St. Isaac's in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), is one of the world's largest cathedrals. But another took my breath away: the Resurrection of Christ Church. It wasn't for the liturgy, all things liturgical were mocked in those years. It was for the wealth, the astonishing assortment of colorful minerals and gemstones sculpted into a most majestic interior.

It is popularly known as the Church on Spilled Blood, constructed where Tsar Alexander II was murdered in 1881 by a clique of revolutionary socialist bomb-throwers—Andrei Zhelyabov, a descendant of a family of hereditary serfs; Sophia Perovskaya a Russian aristocrat, and the Polish terrorist Ignacy Hryniewieck.

I read in The London Review of Books years later after the fall of the Soviet Union that a certain kind of predatory money-power (the oligarchs) looted much wealth from the now former USSR. Spoils of war type of business. What happened to human lives, as Russians were again under attack? All the basic amenities (electricity, plumbing, clean water for drinking and washing, heating for the brutal winters) got disrupted and “life expectancy” plummeted. Men might see 45, and if one had a heart attack, vodka was the treatment. “It is estimated that Russia suffered over 5 million excess deaths between 1991 and 2000” (Emmet Sweeney for The Saker blog, August 23, 2022).

***

I can understand how an American baby boomer might recoil at the sight of Moscow's Red Square. When we were children, it was the source of the scariest monster in the world, the Soviet Union that threatened our lives, with nuclear annihilation.

You might say that for our fears we deserve to demonize Russia today. Who cares that in the Second World War, after appalling civilian and soldier casualties from the Nazi invasion, the Red Army defeated Hitler. If the Red Army had not got to Berlin, pundits say we'd be all be speaking German today (it's a beautiful language).

Editor’s Note:

At the Mises Institute Revisionist History of War Conference in Alabama in May, Mr. Ron Unz endorsed a hypothesis 180 degrees at variance with the preceding statement of Rialto:

“Sean McMeekin’s outstanding 2021 history, Stalin’s War, has provided a wealth of additional evidence strongly supporting the theory that the Soviet dictator (Stalin)…was probably preparing to invade and conquer Europe when Hitler struck first” (emphasis supplied). In other words, if Hitler had not intervened we’d all be speaking Russian today.

Of course Hitler was totally defeated, and after the war eastern Europe was indeed conquered by Soviet Russia, along with one-third of the territory of Germany and 26% of the German population.

Hitler was a colossal failure and a terrible example. In the comfort of his bunker, while 14-year-old boys were engaged in frontline combat, obeying his “no surrender” mandate in the charnel house that was Berlin, the führer effeminately stuck a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

His invasion of Russia never had a snowball’s chance in hell of success. It was a result of Hitler’s delusional occultism; his view of the Russians as subhuman Slavs and Tartars. His magical thinking led him in 1941 to launch a criminally incompetent June war against the Russian behemoth, hallucinating victory by December.

Hitler was a world champion at getting Germans killed, and he surpassed himself with his doomed-to-failure offensive. The magical thinking of his admirers results in their enrolling Hitler’s Götterdämmerung in their Lost Cause vision of his alleged anti-communist nobility; forgetting that in 1940 Hitler handed Catholic Lithuania and Catholic eastern Poland to Stalin’s atheist ghouls.

Caterina Rialto:

The horrors of the suppression of freedom under the Communist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics engendered phobia and hatred. I'm sure the late great Soviet scholar Stephen F. Cohen, much published in recent years in The Nation, is crying out from his grave over our proximity to nuclear war with Russia. (See Cohen's final book, War With Russia?, Hot Books, 2019.)

“Krasnaya Ploshad” is Russian for Red Square. Krasnaya means beautiful as well as red. (Krasnaya zhenshina = beautiful woman.) There are at least forty words for snow in Russian. Ruled by our emotions in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, uncannily similar to the hysterics that Thomas Carlyle describes so poetically in The French Revolution, red symbolizes for us rage and the devil. “Atrocity is the bloody underbelly of the Social Contract,” says Carlyle. And though it is nowhere written in Pasternak’s novel, Evgraf Zhivago, Yuri's half brother played by Sir Alec Guinness in the movie, always wore a red star in his cap.

Towards the end of his much persecuted life, almost 70 and sick, Pasternak said, “My situation is worse, more unbearable and endangered than I can say or you can think of” (quoted in Robert Conquest, The Pasternak Affair: Courage of Genius, p. 109).

“The adversaries who after his death, were to try to blur and misrepresent [Pasternak's] attitude and to pile squalor upon the grandeur, were still working implacably against him...” (Conquest, p. 109).

For decades now, all of our lives, Hollywood-culture with its idol-celebrities has used movies to 'bring us classic literature,' much abridged and with such changes of story! And history – have we gotten all of our knowledge of history from movies which misrepresent, erase, and impose upon us a sense of entitlement?

Not to mention the inculcation of the artificial (false eye-lashes) fashionable beauty which has fueled a near trillion dollar industry in appearance (Dorothy Sayers has a wonderful comment in her notes on Dante's Divine Comedy of where in Hell advertisers will go).

Hollywood Ruins “Doctor Zhivago”

And then there is sinister and dangerous delusion that we are superior, that America always “wins.” British Cinema's Sir David Lean made a dastardly but beautiful-to-look at vivisection of the novel. He accomplished a final subversion with the “blockbuster” movie of Doctor Zhivago, which won five Academy Awards in 1966.

Hypnotic music with balalaikas, starring Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Tom Courtney, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger (who, by the way was way too charming to play the vile Komarovsky, money-predator and seducer of women) – all of it so much at variance with Pasternak’s story, and so un-Russian. The kill was complete. Think misdirection and dissimulation on an epic scale. Read Hoffman. Read Pasternak. Reclaim your God-given privilege of a mind, of real truth and beauty. The genius writers of our cultures are like a bridge across history. What a grand heist there has been.

Let me emphatically say what Pasternak’s authentic Doctor Zhivago is not.

1) It is not a romantic love tale between a man and a woman cheating on their spouses, with the beginnings of the soft-porn sexualization that is now de rigueur part of fiction and film.

It is a love story—about the love of Christ and Christ's Creation. It centers on what human beings, caught in the worst of circumstances, might rise to and become if they recognize that love. And Doctor Zhivago the book it's a polemic contra anti-Christ and hatred.

2) It is not a biography of a sensitive Hollywood poet-type exuding self-exaltatio. Doctor Zhivago was caught in turbulent, bloody communist change. There are so many characters left out of the movie who are essential to creating the Russian tapestry it weaves. For us westerners the movie was a purposeful “enstupidification” and fuel for the Cold War. If you want to see a truly beautiful movie about Russia, watch Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace, a beautiful epic of Tolstoy's work made in the 1960's USSR.

***

Boris Leonidovich was the preeminent Russian poet of the 20^th century. “He was the Soviet Union's premier poet,” writes Andy Smith in his book, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch (The New Press, 2015). “Artistically, his only peers were (Anna) Akhmatova, (Osip) Mandelstam, and (Marina) Tsvetaeva.”

Pasternak spent ten years writing his long poem, Doctor Zhivago, while Akhmatova nearly starved in internal exile, Mandelstam was disappeared and killed. Tsvetaeva— next to Akhmatova the most celebrated woman poet of the time—committed suicide. Pasternak did his best to help them all, but they didn't heed his sagacious counsel, all were sunk to various degrees in the self-idolatry that has possessed educated western people since the so-called Enlightenment. They each and all trusted in their god, popularity.

Pasternak, enigmatically enough, was not touched by (the Georgian, educated) Stalin, and he did manage to help many. Stalin died in 1953. The manuscript of Dr. Z was smuggled out of the USSR and published in Italian in Italy in 1957, with translation rights awarded by contract to publishing houses all over the world. With the international spotlight turned on, the authorities under (the Russian peasant) Khruschev couldn't very well just do away with Pasternak.

In 1958 Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He humbly accepted, and then humbly begged off with great diplomacy, because of the storm of wrath from the communist-occupied dictatorship in the Kremlin. The Soviet apparatus hounded him and was going to exile him, in spite of his plea that to leave his beloved Mother Russia would kill him. Famous men of letters protested the forthcoming exile, and Pasternak was permitted to remain on his native soil.

But they “killed” him all the same with their torrential verbal showtrial and condemnation. During the Terror (nearly the whole of the 20^thcentury, but dated by historians as 1938-39), Pasternak bundled together over 100 letters from poetess Tsvetaeva and other famous Russian dissident writers and gave them to a student for safekeeping. “Aware of their significance, the student kept them with her everywhere she went. Soon after the end of the war, she was returning from Moscow to her home in Bolshevo and absentmindedly left the precious collection either in a railway carriage or under a fir tree in a wood where she sat down to rest. “There you have the fate of the objects and of the people around me,” Pasternak said.” He died after a log period of debilitation on May 30, 1960.

In the summer of 1960 in Washington D.C., I was a little girl taking piano lessons. My father took me to hear the virtuoso Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter who was allowed at last to come to the West to play. Only two months earlier, he had performed Beethoven and Chopin funeral music on an upright piano at Pasternak's dacha where 1,500 people, defying the Kremlin's interdict on any kind of funeral or memorial gathering, came to pay their respects.

I like to imagine that surely Pasternak was in the audience in Moscow in 1957 when Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, age 24, played to packed houses of classical-music mad Russians. Gould astounded his listeners with Bach, whose music had been banned in the USSR for being too religious.

Everything Bach wrote was to the glory of God (he famously signed his compositions Soli Deo Gloria)—permeated with the knowledge of Divine structure in our lives, which became a guiding motif for Pasternak.

Gould became good friends with Richter, who confessed to the great cellist Rostropovich that he could learn to play Bach as well as Gould but he would have to practice all the time. I include this seemingly off-subject paragraph because you can watch a YouTube video of the devoted aging Richter playing the Bach concerto in D minor for piano and orchestra that Gould had played in Russia to such acclaim. Gould's original Russian recording is there too.

In 1958 our own Van Cliburn won the First International Tchaikovsky contest in Russia, and the judges had to ask Khruschev for permission to award the 23 year-old American the prize. “Does he deserve it,” the dictator asked? “then give it to him.” You can see this performance on YouTube as well, along with the little speech in Russian that Van Cliburn gave to a wildly appreciative audience. Was Pasternak there?

Writing about endangered Christianity, Father Seraphim Rose stated that exposing children to classical music helps to develop and preserve their souls from a smotheringly materialistic and pampered society. “Such a musical education...refines the soul and prepares it for spiritual impressions” (The Orthodox World-View, July 1982).

Pasternak's mother was a concert pianist. Rachmaninoff and Scriabin were friends of the family. “Scriabin brought the starlight down from heaven and sprinkled it over the keys,” said young Boris.

Scriabin hoped Pasternak would become a musician, and there must be somewhere in the Russian archives a composition that he wrote. Pasternak however saw his path in the realm of words, of poetry. Doctor Zhivago is rather like a symphony with chords of thought and musical words, utterly lyrical. If you could hear it read aloud in Russian, I'm sure you'd agree with me.

In 2003 Putin made the novel Doctor Zhivago part of the high school curriculum. Pasternak’s Russian prose and poetry are liturgical, whereas Dostoevsky was called a realist, and Gogol something fantastic. Read Gogol, Dostoevsky and Pasternak.

Pasternak's father, Leonid, was a painter, and an illustrater of Leo Tolstoy. They were also friends, and some biographers say that the Pasternaks became Tolstoyans. Tolstoy, incidentally, was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. Leonid was called to the rural train station (Astapovo) when the ancient pilgrim died, and he took young Boris with him on the mission to draw one last portrait of the dying lion of literature.

***

Wars touch one another across the spans of our lifetimes like outstretched fingers of connecting hands. We grow up in the spaces, and if we aren't called or impressed actively into war, we remain vaguely conscious of being touched but unable to say how everything around us, how all the stuff and substance of our lives, has been affected. When my mother, whose older brother had been killed in WWII, was so anguished over the Cuban Missile Crisis, I felt it was my God-given task to talk to Khruschev and tell him sternly to stop bothering my mother, though I was just a little girl. It never occurred to me that language might be a problem. The obstacle that I couldn't overcome was that our telephone was black, not red (the hotline phone between the USA and the USSR was of course red).

I studied Russian. When I married, I made sure we had a red phone. As a graduate student in Russian at Cornell University (on a National Defense Education Act fellowship), I studied in the John M. Olin library. I discovered that Olin had made his fortune manufacturing mustard gas—chemical weapons for WWI.

So much that surrounds us now in our “technologically advanced world” came out of chemical weapons research during our century of war: our fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, detergents and other household cleansers; our drugs, our “chemo” and radiation cancer therapies, and on and on. We've adopted a kind of war-model mentality to everything, adversarial and defensive, with accompanying warlike lingo. We attack our own lives with chemical medicines and constant therapies. We're at war with ourselves.

***

“They walked and walked and sang “Memory Eternal” (Vechnaya Pamyat) and whenever they stopped, the singing seemed to be carried on by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind.” This is the first line of Doctor Zhivago, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky in 2010. Ten year-old Yuri Zhivago watches his mother lowered into her earthen grave in a monastery in Moscow, where his mother's brother, Uncle Nikolai the priest, will become his guardian.

By the end of the 19^th century the agents of chaos that Dostoevsky describes in his novel, Demons, were hard at work overturning long held moral values and Christianity. In the Doctor Zhivago novel as Pasternak wrote it, Uncle Nikolai is taking his nephew, Yuri, to an estate in the country (Duplyanka) that could be called the poetic center of of the book. The novel could be read as a pattern of concentric circles, and it is here, from a high point on the other side of the river, that Uncle and nephew will witness unknowingly the suicide of Zhivago, Yuri's father, when he throws himself from the train passing below.

Komarovsky is the lawyer who drove his client, Zhivago, to suicide after having swindled him of a fortune. But before this, in anticipation of their arrival, the boy watches closely out of the window of the buggy: “Fields were succeeded by fields. Again and again they were embraced by woods. The succession of these open spaces tuned you to a vast scale.” Pasternak often writes of the child's soul, before it is rushed around and hardened, as being like a musical instrument, tuned by God and played upon by life.

Yuri's Uncle, conversing with their host in the country, says history begins with Christ. “We must be faithful to Christ. … You don't understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel.

And what is history? I”t is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming.” The non-historian might say here, this means the overcoming of Satan and sin. Christ, through redemption, is life eternal. That's what the Zhivago poems are about at the end of the book.

In 1917, Boris Pasternak was 27 years old. We in the west can't really conceive of the deady-force totalitarian regime that swept in with the Bolsheviks. In the middle of the bloodbath of WWI, followed by the Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, and then the consolidation of power under Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky.

Pasternak saw countless writer friends arrested and shot or sent to the gulag. These people’a language was like a wide and swollen river of vocabulary, points of view, sayings, poems, prayers, proverbs . In contrast, although we didn't have a political Bolshevism here that we recognized, we have certainly had a grand Orwellian theft and erasure of language and thought.

Hoffman has traced this through The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, and Twilight Language. In the USSR, classical music (except for Bach) played constantly on the radio and television. Western music, jazz and rock n' roll, were condemned as decadent.

Persecuted writers living under constant surveillance talked with each other as they could, clandestinely and at great risk, and they memorized their own and each others' books to circumvent the rigid censorship.

Some emigrated, as did Pasternak's family without him, and then came back to starve to death or be arrested or shot. Khruschev, denouncing the crimes of Stalin while being a hardliner himself, famously said, “We can't win the arms race, but we can win the intellectual race.” It was all so inconceivable to us American baby boomers fed on propaganda and television, chemicals, Chevrolets and Wonder Bread. And in our war-mongering, demonizing-of-anyone-we-don't-like days of this year 2025, as the forever war neocons steer us towards annihilation, we don't see that we are hostages.

Somewhere on the interwebs, I found this quote: “One learned man after another from Alexander Dugin to Emmanuel Todd to Pepe Escobar to Dr. Fadi Lama correctly suggests that Western natives have been as equally victimized by the demons of Clown World as any colonized or exploited people anywhere else.” Whoever saw the massive bribing behind all the material wealth that came our way as the spoils of war? Whoever saw the price we would have to pay, our children as payment as we lived so beyond our means, sacrificing their futures? (See Hoffman, Usury in Christendom.)

One of Pasternak's friends said after reading Doctor Zhivago (in samizdat, as the underground literature was called, since it was banned in the Soviet Union): “Don't forget yourself to the point of believing that it was you who wrote this work. It was the Russian people and their sufferings who created it. Thank God for having expressed it through your pen.”

My mother told me a story that happened when she was interning at Vanderbilt in 1949, about a young woman war refugee from Eastern Europe she knew of who ran screaming from an American grocery store that she had been taken to.

When Pasternak was 40 (1930), he was sent to the countryside, where he saw multitudes of peasants accused of being kulaks, (“fists”, wealthier peasants who resisted Stalin's forced collectivization of farms) being lined up, put into boxcars and sent to the gulag. “Such inhuman, such unimaginable distress, such terrible misfortune … The burden weighing down the lives of town-dwellers is a positive privilege compared with what's going on in the countryside” (the careful language of a letter to his sister in Germany), (Smith, p.139). All this is vividly described in the novel as Yuri walks from Yuriatin in the Urals to Moscow after the final parting with Lara. The fields and fields of unharvested grain, the oceans of swarming mice everywhere...

“A sense that the end is immanent [also perhaps imminent] constantly haunts me. I played no part in creating the present, and for this life I have no love” (from a letter to his cousin). Witnessing the 'wonders' of the Five-Year-Plan , he wrote to his wife, Zinaida (the model for Lara), “Run of the mill human stupidity nowhere emerged to such a degree of bovine standardization as in the circumstances of this journey...behind the vacuity and banality which always put me off there is nothing but organized mediocrity...” (as quoted in Smith, p. 140).

Sound familiar?

In the Ural Mountains, at the isolated forest farm of Varykino, towards the end of the story, Yuri Zhivago meets and talks with Pavel Antipov, Lara's husband, who became Strelinikov (rasstrelnik means executioner), the much feared independent force fighting both the Reds and the Whites. He is now a wanted man, and is hoping to see his wife and child again before facing certain death, and so goes to Varykino. Yuriatin is the city nearby, where Lara lived with Katya, and where Strelnikov often hovered in the railyards in his armoured train (the movie, minus the dialogue, got this part right). Strelnikov/Antipov says:

“What unified the epoch, what shaped the 19^th century into a single historical segment?” Here I urge the reader to read pp. 853-877 in Hoffman's Judaism Discovered and/or read his Revisionist History® Newsletter no. 40 (March 200), on Moses Hess. you'll be stunned.

“It was the birth of socialist thought. Revolutions took place, selfless young men mounted the barricades. Publicists [journalists and some priests] racked their brains over how to curb the brutal shamelessness of money and raise up and defend the human dignity of the poor man. Marxism appeared [and has never disappeared]. It discovered what the root of the evil was and where the cure lay [occult human alchemy and social engineering]. It became the mighty force of the age [zeitgeist and situation ethics]” ( Doctor Zhivago, p. 546).

“This was the olympianism of parasites,” Strelnikov says in the book.

He continues, “Larissa Fyodorovna (Lara) was a young girl, a child, but the apprehensive thought, the anxiety of the age, could already be read on her face, in her eyes. All the themes of the time, all its tears and injuries, all its impulses, all its stored-up revenge and pride were written into her face and in her posture … An accusation of the age could be pronounced on her behalf, with her mouth (Dr. Z, p. 547.”

In the film, Strelnikov (played by Tom Courtney) might be read to be a one-man counter force to Lenin, but not a White, fighting a lost cause against the Revolution, and at the same time, for a new form of government 'by the people.'

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes of the prevalence of child predation in the new enlightened, liberal and godless age. It has always been around as the spoils of war. But in the enlightened and liberal thinking of the modern age, it became not only permitted, but elevated into a kind of method for domination. We see it now, all around us. Pasternak's wife, Zinaida, the model for Lara, had been raped as a child. Such practices have flourished largely unstopped among us.

Yuri Zhivago, having returned to Moscow by foot after Lara's departure and Strelnikov's death, tells his friends, “The unfree man always idealizes his slavery.” (see Hoffman's Twilight Language). “Yuri could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet Intelligentsia, which was at its highest achievement (in 1929), or, as they would have said then, the spiritual ceiling of the epoch” (Dr. Z).

His friends from childhood, Misha and Nika, are an important part of the story omitted from of the movie. Misha had spent years in the gulag. Nika, who had been sent to the front, heard that his fiancee had been blown up by the Germans in the war for an heroic act. Their humanity had been obliterated by hardship and grief, and they have been slowly “re-educated” by the Party. Yuri sees the soul killing cult of the powers that worship their ideologies as something sacred in a society that once worshiped Christ; as we were once organized by Christian values, the state now replaces religion. Communism replaces Christianity. A lobotomized people. An annihilated spirit.

Pasternak: “At an earlier time, alone at Varykino, where the ferocious Russian grey wolves howled, “He again thought that his notion of history, of what is known as the course of history, was not at all the same as the accepted one, and that he pictured it as similar to the life of the vegetable kingdom … No one makes history, it is not visible, just as it is impossible to see grass grow. Wars, revolutions, tsars, Robespierres are produced by men of action, one-sided fanatics... In a few hours or days they overturn the old order. The upheavals last for weeks, for years at the most, and then for decades, for centuries people bow down to the spirit of limitation that led to the upheavals as to something sacred.”

And to the leader of the “Forest Brotherhood,” in Doctor Zhivago, an idealist who wants to change the world, he says “The mere talk of improvement has been paid for with such seas of blood...The remaking of life!”

But for me, a girl of the American Sixties, the following quote from Lara sums up the heart of Doctor Zhivago: “In the midst of the whirlwind and chaos that descended, Lara is talking to Zhivago of her life after she broke free from the predation of Komarovsky (she shot him in the hand; the movie got that right) and married Pavel Antipov/Strelnikov:

“He had a handsome, honest, resolute face, the most honest I've ever seen in the world. Not a trace of showing off; a manly character, a complete absence of posturing.”

With the war and revolution comes a change: “It was as if something abstract had entered into that look and discolored it. A living human face had turned into the embodiment, the principle, the portrayal of an idea...I realized it was the consequence of the powers whose hands he had given himself into, sublime but deadening and merciless powers, which someday would also not spare him.

As Detailed by Pasternak, Russia’s Communist Past is America’s Prologue

“But it's astonishing. Is it for me, a weak woman, to explain to you, who are so intelligent, what is now happening with life in general, with human life in Russia, and why families fall apart, yours and mine among them?...All that's productive, settled, all that's connected with habitual life, with the human nest and its order, all of it went to rack and ruin along with the upheaval of the whole of society and its reorganization. All everyday things were overturned and destroyed...”

Pasternak saw the ramifications of the nuclear age. All of us in the world now are children of the nuclear age. After the explosion at Chernobyl, a student of mine who had been visiting Sweden at the time was dead from cancer six months later.

Zhivago so vividly saw what Dostoevsky was trying to tell us, about the forces that erase and rewrite history as they please, which would tear the world apart with chaos and forever wars.

Far worse, they each saw the soul-killing anti-Christianity in the bloody order that first took over men's language and minds, and then took over their politics in fiery, bombs-away, warmongering fashion. War is a satanic lust. Dostoevsky described to a friend while writing Demons that he was afraid he would become himself accomplice to murder by the attention he was giving to its motives in the revolutionary politics he was portraying.

Our editor asks, 'Why should we read Pasternak and Dostoevsky? What message do they have for post-modern Americans?”

Because what are we doing today about the Satanic war-lust that encloses our lives in America? We all pay for it. Genocide equals the wiping out of genes. This is happening in more than one place, with our silence, as if we've lost the ability to think and to speak, or are governed by fear of reprisal. Spot Quiz: Where is genocide happening now? Be searching and complete in your answer.

Dostoevsky and Pasternak provide us with real time blue-prints for how to live, how to construct our lives under duress, in frightening and inhumane circumstances—that is why I say, read them!

But all the Russian names, you say! All the words! Worse than too-many-notes Mozart!

“Make the effort!” Dickens would say.

Get over willingly letting yourself be dumb-downed. Your children's lives may depend on it. Like Bach, do it for gloria Dei. We all know where war with Russia leads.

For us post-modern Americans, “It is as though art has become two-dimensional, remarkable only for its triteness, it's lack of depth” (Ivan Ilyin, Foundations of Christian Culture, (p. 5).

When we were a largely Christian society, we were taught Love: through courtesy, manners, deference, considerate behavior, gentle language and reframing fromname-calling.

Now hate is taught: through the language of blame and resentment, of putting others down for our own advancement, of pride (I'm better), of disrespect, of exalting our own egos and needs above all else. It was exactly these things, these words and their mental habits, that were the harbingers of Soviet Russia. It starts with words, with language. That's what Pasternak and Dostoevsky have to teach.

Why on earth should we not be friends with the Russians on this our beautiful and fragile domicile? We've fallen right into the Cryptocracy's hands.

“Life is no stroll through a field.” —from the poems of Yuri Zhivago at the end of the book.

“To hope and to act is our duty in misfortune. Inactive despair is a forgetting and failure of duty.” —Evgraf Zhivago, Yuri's half-brother

“In the realist, faith is not born of miracles, but miracles from faith.” —Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Caterina Rialto • Copyright ©2025

My bare-bones resumé: High School: Classical Liceo in Italy

College: BA in Russian, summa cum laude

Grad school: MA Russian, PhD English

I learned nine languages. I began teaching at the college level as an undergraduate. I was canceled in 2002. Then in 2021, I discovered the books and newsletters of Michael Hoffman, and began to understand the vicissitudes and realities of what has passed for our lives. Revisionist History.

“For in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said...” St. Paul, Areopagus, Acts 17:28

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Revisionist historian Michael Hoffman explores the ascendance of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic mind virus in his book The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome. He explicates the alchemical processing of humanity in Twilight Language. He is the author of eight other volumes of history and literature including Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, as well as Usury in Christendom, Judaism Discovered, and Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People.

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