First!

Over the summer I read Dr. Zhivago, one of the many extremely complex, long, and entertaining Russian novels which dot the literary landscape. This novel had such great storytelling because of its interwoven plot lines, its breadth of scope, and its depiction of extreme personal change. The interwoven plot lines, as with any novel in its style ( Anna Karenina comes to mind ), provoke many moments of realization that the assumptions the reader has made are entirely wrong, as when in Dr. Zhivago a long presumed dead soldier is many chapters later revealed to just have been captured. The breadth of scope is likewise incredible in the novel, with the story spanning from the peasant towns of the Urals to the burned out husk of Moscow after the Russian Civil War. The sheer scope of the story is breathtaking and always keeps the plot turning in ever different directions. The extreme personal change in Dr. Zhivago is almost icing on the cake, but the myriad drastic transformations undergone by the characters over the time span of the book always added more tension and excitement to the plot even as the page count of this already rather difficult book crept higher and higher. It is this ability to forestall fatigue in the face of length and density that marks Dr. Zhivago as a novel with a truly remarkable knack for storytelling.

One passage in Dr. Zhivago, which references scenes long since past and serves to introduce a new storyline, is especially endemic of the novel's storytelling prowess:
"I've brought a  letter for your friend. It's lucky for him I once had a job at the post office. I don't know how many hands it's been through, it's from Moscow and it's been five months on the way. They couldn't find the addressee. At last they thought of asking me and I knew, of course--he once came to me for a haircut."
The long letter, written on many sheets of paper, crumpled and soiled in its tattered envelope, which had been opened at the post office, was from Tonia. The doctor found it in his hands without knowing how it had got there; he had not noticed Lara handing it to him. When he began reading it he was still conscious of being in Yuriatin, in Lara's house, but gradually, as he read on, he lost all realization of it.