Doctor Zhivago: Accursed Questions

 Footnote #13:


13. the accursed questions: Dostoevsky coined this phrase (prokliatye voprosy) for the ultimate questions of human existence—the nature of man, the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of life, the riddle of death—“the great Russian questions,” as Nicolà Chiaromonte called them, which Pasternak raises again in Doctor Zhivago, “when it seemed that history … had suppressed them forever” (“Pasternak’s Message,” in Pasternak: Modern Judgements, edited by Donald Davie and Angela Livingstone, Nashville and London, 1970).

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