His prose is terrible and the subject material was better handled by Varlam Shalamov. You really should make it a point of reading Pasternak. He's the only Twentieth Century author of Russian literature who reads like one of the great Nineteenth Century authors in terms of depth of meaning. Doctor Zhivago is a true classic, a beautifully written (poetic, really) novel about the failure of utopias, the eternal value of the promise of Christianity (whether or not one is actually a Christian) and the struggle between the personal and the collective.