God, these Russians and their words - amazing. I will confess that I had a hard time following the individuals, what with all the patronymics and diminutives and all that running around. I missed something key early on, I infer, in the connection between Yuri and Lara. I didn't really get a number of the characters.

But, my goodness, those words, so many beautiful images, thoughts, expressions, ideas, possibilities, expressed so deftly, so variously. I am of two minds about how one arrives at such words. The first is that Pasternak (e.g.) just experiences the world much more fully, in some kind of pre-linguistic way, and then the words follow. The other, closer to my understanding of things, is that sense is already linguistically constructed, and so, in the end, Pasternak just has a millionfold richer verbal palette in his head, and can perceive and re-render the world so much more fully because of that.

At one point I felt this was in the running with Anna, but I cooled down on this one a bit toward the end, for reasons that aren't clear to me.

I am going to need to cleanse my palate with some other stuff before diving into Brothers Karamazov, which is on my night stand. Then, more palate-cleansing before I eventually tackle War and Peace. What can I say? These Russians have a way with words.