Dec 30, 2009

Doctor Zhivago | Historical Context

Karl Marx (1818–1883)
Pasternak studied philosophy in school while he was in Germany and was interested, as many students were at that time, in the writings of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who supported the working class and whose ideas fueled the socialist movement that began in the early twentieth century and swept across the world.

In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) Marx contrasted the different approaches to labor under a capitalist government and a communist one. In Marx’s ideal communist environment, laborers worked in a...