book review dr zhivago

Boris Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago' Should Inspire Reverence

September 8, 1958.

On this day in 1958, Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Six days later, he refused to accept it, stating in a telegram : "Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure." Below is Irving Howe's review of Pasternak's masterwork, Doctor Zhivago , the novel that surely inspired the Nobel committee to bestow such an honor upon him.

Doctor Zhivago , the novel which climaxes the career of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak, is a major work of fiction; but it is also—and for the moment, perhaps more important—a historic utterance. It is an act of testimony as crucial to our moral and intellectual life as the Hungarian revolution to our political life. It asks for, and deserves, the kind of response in which one's sense of the purely "literary'" becomes absorbed in a total attention to the voice of the writer.

The book comes to us in extraordinary circumstances. A great Russian poet who maintains silence through years of terror and somehow, for reasons no one quite understands, survives the purges that destroy his most gifted colleagues; a manuscript sent by him to an Italian Communist publisher who decides to issue it despite strong pressures from his comrades; the dictatorship meanwhile refusing to permit this book, surely the most distinguished Russian novel of our time, to appear in print—all this comprises the very stuff of history, a reenactment of those rhythms of brutality and resistance which form the substance of the novel itself.

Doctor Zhivago opens in the first years of the century, spans the revolution, civil war and terror of the thirties, and ends with an epilogue in the mid-1940s. On a level far deeper than politics and with a strength and purity that must remove all doubts, it persuades us that the yearning for freedom remains indestructible. Quietly and resolutely Pasternak speaks for the sanctity of human life, turning to those "eternal questions" which made the 19 th Century Russian novel so magnificent and besides which the formulas of Russia's current masters seem so trivial.

The European novel has traditionally depended on some implicit norm of "the human." In our time, however, this norm has become so imperiled that the novel has had to assume the burdens of prophecy and jeremiad, raising an apocalyptic voice against the false apocalypse of total politics. Some of the most serious Western writers hive turned impatiently from the task of representing familiar experience and have tried, instead, to make the novel carry an unprecedented amount of speculative and philosophical weight. Sacrificing part of the traditional richness of the European novel, they have kept searching for new, synoptic structures that would permit them to dramatize the modern split between historical event and personal existence. As a result, their work has occasionally thinned out into parables concerning the nature and possibility of freedom.

But where certain Western novelists have wrenched their narrative structures in order to reach some "essence" of modern terror, Pasternak has adopted a quite different strategy. With apparent awareness of the symbolic meaning of his choice, he has turned back to the old-fashioned leisurely Tolstoyan novel. His aim is not to mimic its external amplitude, as do most Soviet writers, but to recapture its spirit of freedom and then bring this spirit to bear upon contemporary Russian life. Given the atmosphere in which Pasternak must live and work, this kind of a return to the Tolstoyan novel comes to seem a profoundly liberating act.

Pasternak refuses to accept any claim for the primacy of ideological systems. Avoiding any quest for the "essence" of modern terror, he prefers to observe its impact upon the lives of modest and decent people. Again and again he returns to what might be called the "organic" nature of experience, those autonomous human rhythms which, in his view, can alone provide a true basis for freedom. The Tolstoyan narrative structure takes on a new and dynamic character, embodying his belief that everything fundamental in life remains inviolate, beyond the grasp of ideology or the state.

I do not mean to suggest that Pasternak permits a facile spirituality to blind him to the power of circumstances. He knows how easy it is to debase and kill a man, how often and needlessly it has been done; some of his most poignant chapters register the sufferings of the Russian people during the past forty years. Yet he is driven by an almost instinctive need to ding to other possibilities, and he writes about ordinary experience with such affection and steadfastness that, even under the blows of accumulating historical crises, it takes on a halo of sanctity. Not the fanaticism of the will, but existence as rooted in the natural world, seems to him the crux of things.

Yuri Zhivago, the central figure of the novel and in some ways Pasternak's alter ego, comes to this realization while still a young man. As he is driven from the battlefields of the First World War to revolutionary Moscow to partisan fighting in Siberia, and then back again to Moscow, Zhivago tries to keep hold of a few realities: nature, art, the life of contemplation. No matter how desperate the moment may be, he feels that the preservation of his inner identity is still possible if he can watch a cow grazing in the fields, read Pushkin's poems and speak freely to himself in the journal he intermittently keeps.

It is this effort to preserve the personal basis of reality which forms the main stress of Zhivago's experience—an effort always secured in a radiantly intense feeling for nature. One of the loveliest episodes in the novel occurs when Zhivago and his family, to avoid starvation during the civil war, decide to leave Moscow. They take a long journey eastward, and at one point their train becomes stalled in drifts of snow. For three days the passengers work in the open, helping to clear the tracks. A light of joy comes over them, a feeling of gratification for this gift: "The days were dear and frosty, and the shifts were short because there were not enough shovels. It was sheer pleasure."

Somewhat earlier in the book Zhivago reflects upon his life while traveling homeward from the First World War:

Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins—all this suddenly turned into a huge, empty, meaningless space. The first real event since the long interruption was this trip . . . the fact that he was approaching his home, which was intact, which still existed, and in which every stone was dear to him. This was real life, meaningful experience, the actual goal of all guests, this was what art aimed at—homecoming, return to one's family, to oneself, to true existence.

The novel begins with a series of dipped vignettes of pre-revolutionary Russia, apparently meant to suggest a Tolstoyan breadth and luxuriousness of treatment. A few of these vignettes seem hurried and schematic in effect, but many of them are brilliantly evocative, quick and sharp glimpses of another Russia.

But which Russia: the Russia of the Czars or of War and Peace , the country Pasternak remembers from his youth or the marvellous landscape of Tolstoy's imagination? The alternative, of course, is a false one, and I raise it merely to indicate the presence of a real problem. For in the mind of a writer like Pasternak, historical reality and literary heritage must by now be inseparable: the old Russia is the Russia both of the Czars and of Tolstoy. And as he recreates it stroke by stroke, Pasternak seems intense upon suggesting that no matter what attitude one takes toward the past, it cannot be understood in terms of imposed political clichés.

He is any case, rigorously objective in his treatment. He portrays both a vibrant Christmas party among the liberal intelligentsia and a bitter strike among railroad workers; he focuses upon moments of free discussion and spontaneous talk such as would make some contemporary Russian readers feel envious and then upon moments of gross inhumanity that would make them think it pointless even to consider turning back the wheel of history. Pasternak accepts the unavoidability, perhaps even the legitimacy of the revolution, and he evokes the past not to indulge in nostalgia but to insist upon the continuity of human life.

Once, however, the narrative reaches the Bolshevik revolution, the Tolstoyan richness and complexity promised at the beginning are not fully realized. Partly this is due to Pasternak's inexperience as a novelist: he burdens himself with more preparations than he needs and throughout the book one is aware of occasional brave efforts to tie loose ends together.

But mainly the trouble is due to a crucial difference between Tolstoy's and Pasternak's situations. Soaring to an incomparable zest and vitality, Tolstoy could break past the social limits of his world—a world neither wholly free nor, like Pasternak's, wholly unfree—and communicate the sheer delight of consciousness. Pasternak also desires joy as a token of man's gratitude for existence; his characters reach for it eagerly and pathetically; but the Russia of his novel is too grey, too grim for a prolonged release of the Tolstoyan ethos. As a writer of the highest intelligence, Pasternak must have known this; and it is at least possible he also realized that the very difficulties he would encounter in adapting the Tolstoyan novel to contemporary Russia would help reveal both the direction of his yearning and the constrictions of reality.

It is Pasternak's capacity for holding in balance these two elements—the direction of his yearning and the constrictions of reality—that accounts for the poise and strength of the novel. Like most great Russian writers, he has the gift for making ideas seem a natural part of human experience, though what matters in this novel is not a Dostoevskian clash of ideology and dialectic but Zhivago's sustained effort, amounting to a kind of heroism, to preserve his capacity for the life of contemplation.

Zhigavo’s ideas, it seems fair to assume, are in large measure Pasternak's, and as they emerge in the book, subtly modulated by the movement of portrayed events, it becomes clear that the central point of view can be described as a kind of primitive Christianity, profoundly heterodox and utterly alien to all dogmas and institutions. I would agree with the remark of Mr. Max Hayward, Pasternak's English translator, that Zhivago's Christianity "would be acceptable to many agnostics." Acceptable not merely because of its ethical purity but because it demands to be understood as a historically-determined response to the airless world of Soviet conformity. In such a world the idea of Christ—even more so, the image of Christ facing his death alone—must take on implications quite different from those it usually has in the West. Zhivago's uncle, his intellectual guide, suggests these in an early passage:

What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe . . . that history as we know it began with Christ. . . . Now what is history? It is the centuries of the systematic exploration of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies. Now you can't advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one's neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. And then the two basic ideas of modem man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.

Together with this version of Christianity, Zhivago soon develops a personal attitude toward Marxism—an attitude, I should say, much more complex than is likely to be noted by American reviewers seeking points for the Cold War. Zhivago cannot help but honor the early Bolsheviks, if only because they did give themselves to "the idea of life as sacrifice." His enthusiasm for the revolution dies quickly, but even then he does not condemn it. He is more severe: he judges it.

Unavoidably Zhivago also absorbs some elements of the Marxist political outlook, though he never accepts its claims for the primacy of politics. Indeed, his rejection of Marxism is not essentially a political one. He rejects it because he comes to despise the arrogance of the totalitarian "vanguard," its manipulative view of man, in short, its contempt for the second "basic ideal of modern man . . . the ideal of free personality":

Marxism a science? [says Zhivago during a discussion on a train in Siberia] Well, it's taking a risk, to say the least, to argue about that with a man one hardly knows. However—Marxism is too uncertain of its ground to be a science. Sciences are more balanced, more objective. I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility, that they do their utmost to ignore the truth.

Still more withering is Zhivago's judgment of the Soviet intelligentsia:

Men who are not free . . . always idealize their bondage. So it was in the Middle Ages, and later the Jesuits always exploited this human trait. Zhivago could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia, though it was the very thing they regarded as their highest achievement.

Such statements are plain enough, and their significance can hardly be lost upon the powers in Moscow; but it must quickly be added that in the context of the novel they are much less abrupt and declamatory than they seem in isolation. Pasternak is so sensitive toward his own characters, so free from any intention to flourish ideologies, that the novel is never in danger of becoming a mere tract. The spectacle of Zhivago trying to reflect upon the catastrophe of his time is always more interesting than the substance of his reflections. His ideas are neither original nor beyond dispute, but as he experiences them and struggles to articulate them, they take on an enormous dignity and power. If ever a man may be said to have earned his ideas, it is Yuri Zhivago.

Zhivago's opinions reflect the direction of Pasternak's yearning, the long-suppressed bias of his mind; but there is, in the novel itself, more than enough counter-weight of objective presentation. Pasternak is extremely skillful at making us aware of vast historical forces rumbling behind the lives of his central figures. The Bolshevik revolution is never pictured frontally, but a series of incidents, some of them no more than a page or two in length, keep the sense of catastrophe and upheaval constantly before us—Zhivago fumbling to light an old stove during an icy Moscow winter while in the nearby streets men are shooting at each other, a callow young Menshevik "heartening" Russian troops with democratic rhetoric and meeting an ungainly death as his reward, a veteran Social Revolutionary pouring bile over the Communist leaders, a partisan commander in Siberia fighting desperately against the White armies. And as Zhivago finds himself caught up by social currents too strong for any man to resist, we remember once again Tolstoy's concern with the relationship between historical event and personal life.

Once Pasternak reaches the revolutionary period, the novel becomes a kind of spiritual biography, still rich in social references but primarily the record of a mind struggling for survival. What now matters most is the personal fate of Zhivago and his relationships with two other characters, Lara, the woman who is to be the love of his life, and Strelnikov, a partisan leader who exemplifies all of the ruthless revolutionary will that Zhivago lacks.

Zhivago himself may be seen as representative of those Russian intellectuals who accepted the revolution but were never absorbed into the Communist apparatus. That he is both a skillful doctor and a sensitive poet strengthens one's impression that Pasternak means him to be something more than an individual figure. He speaks for those writers, artists and scientists who have been consigned to a state of permanent inferiority because they do not belong to the “vanguard” party. His sufferings are their sufferings, and his gradual estrangement from the regime, an estrangement that has little to do with politics, may well be shared by at least some of them. Zhivago embodies that which, in Pasternak’s view, man is forbidden to give to the state.

Mr. Hayward reports that Pasternak has apparently referred to Turgenev’s Rudin as a distant literary ancestor of Zhivago. Any such remark by a writer like Pasternak has its obvious fascination and one would like very much to know exactly what he had in mind; but my own impression, for what it may be worth, is that the differences between the two characters are more striking than the similarities. Rudin, the man of the 1840’s, is a figure of shapeless enthusiasms that fail to congeal into specific convictions; he is the classical example of the man who cannot realize in action the vaguely revolutionary ideas that fire his mind. Zhivago, by contrast, is a man rarely given to large public enthusiasms; he fails to achieve his ends not because he is inherently weak but because the conditions of life are simply too much for him. Yet, unlike Rudin, he has a genuine "gift for life," and despite the repeated collapse of his enterprises he brings a sense of purpose and exaltation to the lives of those who are closest to him. There is a key passage in his journal which would probably have struck Rudin as the essence of philistinism but which takes on an entirely different cast in 20th Century Russia:

Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great. The best object lesson in this is Pushkin. His works are one great hymn to honest labor, duty, everyday life! Today, "bourgeois" and "petty bourgeois" have become terms of abuse, but Pushkin forestalled the implied criticism. . . . In Onegin's Travels we read: "Now my ideal is the housewife. My greatest wish, a quiet life and a big bowl of cabbage soup."

There is undoubtedly a side of Pasternak, perhaps the dominant side, which shares in these sentiments; but it is a tribute to his utter freedom from literary vanity that he remorselessly shows how Zhivago’s quest for “a quiet life” leads to repeated failures and catastrophes. For Zhivago’s desire for “a big bowl of cabbage soup” indicates—to twist a sardonic phrase of Trotsky’s—that he did not choose the right century in which to be born.

The novel reaches a climax of exaltation with a section of some twenty pages that seem to me one of the greatest pieces of imaginative prose written in our time. Zhivago and Lara, who have been living in a Siberian town during the period of War Communism, begin to sense that their arrest is imminent: not because they speak any words of sedition (Zhivago has, in fact, recently returned from a period of enforced service as doctor to a band of Red partisans) but simply because they ignore the slogans of the moment and choose their own path in life. They decide to run off to Varykino, an abandoned farm, where they may find a few moments of freedom and peace. Zhivago speaks:

But about Varykino. To go to that wilderness in winter, without food, without strength or hope—it's utter madness. But why not, my love! Let's be mad, if there is nothing but madness left to us. . . .

Our days are really numbered. So at least let us take advantage of them in our own way. Let us use them up saying goodbye to life. . . . We'll say goodbye to everything we hold dear, to the way we look at things, to the way we've dreamed of living and to what our conscience has taught us. . . .We'll speak to one another once again the secret words we speak at night, great and pacific like the name of the Asian ocean.

From this point on, the prose soars to a severe and tragic gravity; every detail of life takes on the tokens of sanctity; and while reading these pages, one feels that one is witnessing a terrible apocalypse. Begun as a portrait of Russia, the novel ends as a love story told with the force and purity of the greatest Russian fiction; yet its dependence upon the sense of history remains decisive to the very last page.

Through a ruse Zhivago persuades Lara to escape, and then he returns to Moscow. He falls into shabbiness, illness and long periods of lassitude; he dies obscurely, from a heart attack on the streets of Moscow. Lara's fate is given in a fierce, laconic paragraph:

One day [she] went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north.

Like the best contemporary writers in the West, Pasternak rests his final hope on the idea that a good life constitutes a decisive example. People remember Zhivago. His half-brother, a mysterious power in the regime who ends as a general in the war, has always helped Zhivago in the past; now he gathers up Zhivago's poems and prints them; apparently he is meant to suggest a hope that there remain a few men at the top of the Russian hierarchy who are accessible to moral claims. Other old friends, meeting at a time when "the relief and freedom expected at the end of the war" had not come but when "the portents of freedom filled the air," find that "this freedom of the soul was already there, as if that very evening the future had tangibly moved into the streets below them."

So the book ends—a book of truth and courage and beauty, a work of art toward which one's final response is nothing less than a feeling of reverence.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

Analysis of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

Considered by many the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, Boris Pasternak’s (1890-1960) Doctor Zhivago is certainly the most famous fictional treatment of the defining moments of modern Russian history at the outset of the 20th century, inviting a comparison with Tolstoy ’s similar effort in War and Peace to dramatize the crucial events of the Napoleonic era. Doctor Zhivago shares with War and Peace an epic tonality; both attempt to encapsulate a national history, culture, and philosophy of human nature and experience in the stories of individuals caught up in the maelstrom of history. Depicting pre-revolutionary Russian culture, the revolution, and the ensuing civil war from a decidedly subjective viewpoint, Doctor Zhivago broke with the enforced literary dictates of socialist realism and party doctrine at a time when such a challenge demanded enormous courage and conviction. “A miracle of non-conformity,” the Russian scholar Victor Frank has called Pasternak’s novel, “full of supreme indifference to all the offi cial taboos.” Refused publication in the Soviet Union, the novel was surreptitiously sent to an Italian publisher who brought it out in 1957, with an English translation appearing in 1958. Hailed by the critic Edmund Wilson as “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history . . . a great act of faith in art and the human spirit,” Doctor Zhivago became a worldwide popular and critical sensation that culminated in Pasternak being awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature “for his notable achievement in both contemporary poetry and the field of the great Russian narrative tradition.” Regarded by the Soviet state as a political rather than a literary judgment on behalf of a novel it considered unpatriotic and subversive, Doctor Zhivago provoked a barrage of hostile reviews and resolutions in Russia that branded it “literary trash” and a “malicious lampoon of the socialist revolution.” Pasternak was expelled from the Writers’ Union and condemned as “worse than a pig” because “a pig never befouls where it eats or sleeps.” Pasternak’s deportation from the Soviet Union was averted only by the writer’s refusal of the Nobel Prize and by his impassioned appeal to Nikita Khrushchev in which Pasternak equated banishment from Russia to a death sentence. Doctor Zhivago would not be officially published in Russia until 1988 to great acclaim and acceptance into the post-Soviet literary canon as a landmark and unavoidable masterpiece.

Despite its undisputed importance as a social document chronicling a crucial period in Russian and world history, Doctor Zhivago continues to divide critics at the most basic level of how it works, its affinity to the novel tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries, and even the genre to which it belongs. Described as both one of the greatest political novels and one of literature’s great love stories, Doctor Zhivago has also been called “a fairy tale,” “a kind of morality play,” “an apocalyptic poem in the form of a novel,” “one of the most original works of modern times,” and “a nineteenth-century novel by a twentieth-century poet.” Compared to predecessors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the great 19th-century Russian realistic novel tradition, Pasternak has been found wanting in his failure to provide believable, rounded characters. Compared to modernist innovators like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, he has been viewed as old-fashioned and outmoded. To appreciate fully Pasternak’s achievement in Doctor Zhivago, it is necessary to recognize that its nonconformity extends beyond its unorthodox and unsanctioned ideas to its formal challenges to established narrative assumptions. Doctor Zhivago is neither a failed 19th-century nor a disappointing modernist novel, but a radical syn-thesis of both traditions in a daringly original construct.

Aspects of Pasternak’s life and career provide crucial contexts for his single novel published three years before his death. Born in Moscow in 1890, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was the eldest child of the painter Leonid Pasternak and the concert pianist Rosa Kaufman and was raised in the midst of Moscow’s intellectual and artistic community. Tolstoy was a household visitor, and the distinguished composer Alexander Scarabin encouraged the 14-year-old Pasternak in his study of music. Convinced that he lacked the necessary technical skills, at age 19, Pasternak abandoned music for poetry and philosophy, eventually enrolling in Germany’s prestigious Marburg University until 1912 when he returned to Russia and committed himself exclusively to poetry. Associated with the Russian symbolist and futurist movements, Pasternak began to gain a reputation as a leading figure of a new generation of Russian poets who sought a greater freedom of poetic subjects and expression, more closely tied to actual experience and colloquial language. Declared exempt from military service during World War I because of a childhood leg injury, Pasternak managed a draft board in the Urals. When the revolution came, Pasternak was largely sympathetic, embracing the promise of needed social reform and liberation of the spirit that his poetry advocated. As the new Soviet regime grew increasingly conservative in cultural matters and repressive in silencing dissent, Pasternak, throughout the 1930s, published little, perfecting the delicate art of survival under Stalin, of maintaining core principles while avoiding the fate of fellow writers and artistic colleagues who faced death sentences and banishment to labor camps. Convinced that the Soviet state had betrayed the ideals of the revolution and that the drive for collectivism in Soviet society violated essential imperatives of human nature, sometime during the 1930s Pasternak decided to turn from poetry to prose to tell the story of his generation and its historical fate under the czar, during the Great War, and through the revolution and the establishment of the communist state, in part as an expression of survivor’s guilt. Writing in 1948, Pasternak admitted, “I am guilty before everyone. But what can I do? So here in the novel—it is part of this debt, proof that at least I tried.” Drawing on his earlier interests in musical composition, philosophy, and a career devoted to poetry, Pasternak conceived a novel capacious enough to contain his “views on art, the Gospels, human life in history and many other things.” Rejecting the “idiotic clichés” of socialist realism and an edited, sanitized view of the revolution and its aftermath, Pasternak embraced the role as truth teller in which “Everything is untangled, everything is named, simple, transparent, sad. Once again, afresh, in a new way, the most precious and important things, the earth and the sky, great warm feeling, the spirit of creation, life and death, have been delineated.” Doctor Zhivago began to take final shape during the late 1940s as Pasternak faced increasing government hostility for his “anti-Soviet” views. To punish him indirectly, Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaia, was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to five years in a hard-labor camp “for close contact with persons suspected of espionage.” Pasternak would later confess that Olga was the Lara of his novel, which was finally completed in early 1956.

Pasternak’s comments about his work in his letters reveal key points about his intentions and methods for Doctor Zhivago. Throughout his correspondence, Pasternak refers to his “novel in prose,” a nod to Pushkin’s “novel in verse,” Eugene Onegin , and a connection to Pasternak’s following the same literary trajectory of Russia’s literary fountainhead, Pushkin, from poetry to prose. Regarding his poetry as preparatory work and incapable of supporting his historical and philosophical aspirations, Pasternak claimed, “a poem is to prose as a sketch is to a painting.” Yet at the core of Doctor Zhivago is Pasternak’s insistent lyricism in which narrative elements are joined through imagery, counterpoint, and symbolism. Pasternak’s poetic method explains why Doctor Zhivago, measured against the standard of the realistic novel, often falls short. Characters, rather than appearing distinct and original, tend to merge together, expressing shared preoccupations and feelings. Defending himself against charges of “not sufficient tracing of characters,” Pasternak insisted that “more than to delineate them I tried to efface them.” To the charge of the novel’s many violations of probability with coincidence, Pasternak claimed, “Realism of genre and language doesn’t interest me. That’s not what I value. In the novel there is a grandeur of another kind.” Underlying the novel’s blending of elements from poetry and prose and a manipulation of events that lends a fairy tale or providential aura to the book is Pasternak’s contention that “existence was more original, extraordinary and inexplicable than any of its separate astonishing incidents and facts. I was attracted by the unusualness of the usual.” Pasternak’s subjective, poeticized perspective aligns Doctor Zhivago in certain ways with magic realists like Márquez as much as with Tolstoy in his pursuit of “the atmosphere of being,” which he described as “the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a developing, passing by, rolling and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless variants and versions.”

Pasternak’s “moving entireness” in Doctor Zhivago begins with the 10-year-old Yury Zhivago attending his mother’s funeral in a driving snowstorm, imagistically uniting human destiny and the vitality and power of nature that threaten to engulf and overwhelm the individual. This theme of the survival of the individual will be orchestrated throughout the novel, embedded even in the title character’s family name, an older Russian form of the word “alive.” It is the first of many scenes in which Zhivago’s isolation and vulnerability to both natural forces and human events aligned against his aspirations toward selfhood will be emphasized. The novel relies on several traditional structural principles including the novel of development and education of the artist as well as the quest novel in which the artist Zhivago eventually emerges after a succession of tests. Yet Doctor Zhivago is a tragically conceived modern Odyssey in which not home but isolation and separation from virtually every sustaining relationship and external consolation are his destination. Ultimately, Zhivago’s only reward or redemption is his art and the affirmation of the mystery and majesty of existence that his poems assert.

The first portion of the novel dramatizes the last decade of czarist rule and the events leading up to World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Following the suicide death of his father over the loss of his fortune, Yury is raised in the professorial home of Alexander and Anna Gromeko and their daughter Tonya. The novel’s catalyst and moral touchstone is the “Girl from a Different World,” Lara Guishar, the teenaged daughter of a Belgian hat-maker, whose story connects the comfortable bourgeois world of the Gromekos with Moscow’s labor class and incipient revolutionaries. Her seduction by the rich lawyer, Komarovsky, establishes a connection with Yury who is on hand after Lara’s mother’s failed suicide attempt and at the Christmas party where Lara tries and fails to shoot her lover. They next meet at the front during World War I where Yury, having married Tonya, is serving as a doctor and Lara is working as a nurse, having gone to the front in search of her husband, Pasha Antipov, who has abandoned her and their child, unable to reconcile himself to his wife’s past with Komarovsky. As Yury and Lara’s attachment grows, news of the revolution reaches them, and both return to their respective homes—Yury to Moscow, and Lara to Yuryatin in Siberia.

Having experienced the dehumanizing conditions of war, Yury returns to similar conditions in Moscow under the Bolsheviks where his family’s privileged existence has been transformed to a struggle for survival in which Yury’s integrity, individualism, and artistic sensibility are not just valueless but dangerously subversive. Seeking relief, the family travels east to Tonya’s former family estate in Siberia, near Yuryatin, Lara’s home. The train journey is one of the triumphs of the novel in which the immense Russian landscape is brilliantly evoked and a rich collection of the various classes of Russian soci-ety displaced by the revolution are brought together during the dangerous and lawless days of the civil war. Yury barely avoids execution in an encounter with the merciless revolutionary leader Strelnikov, Lara’s renamed husband Antipov. Settling at the Varykino estate and subsisting off the land, the fam-ily thrives for a year before a chance reunion between Yury and Lara leads to their love affair. Guilt-ridden and determined to reconcile with Tonya, Yury is kidnapped on his way home by Bolshevik partisan fighters in need of a doctor. Serving with them for over a year and experiencing the horrific violence and human debasement of the civil war, Yury finally escapes back to Yuryatin where he is nursed back to health by Lara and learns that Tonya, her father, and their children have returned to Moscow. (They will subsequently be deported to the West.)

The reunited lovers are interrupted by the appearance of Komarovsky who warns Lara of her danger as the wife of the now-condemned Strelnikov. They respond by leaving Yuryatin for Varykino and two weeks of happiness in which Yury resumes his poetry, inspired by Lara. Komarovsky offers Lara and her child safe passage to the East, and Yury, to convince her to take it, lies that he will join them. Left alone, Yury is visited by the hunted Strelnikov who, in despair over the failure of his revolutionary ideals and his betrayal of Lara’s love, shoots himself. The novel concludes with Yury’s life in Mos-cow, having been stripped of everything he had formerly relied on to sustain him—his wife, family, and lover. Resuming his medical career and his writing, Yury finally dies of a heart attack, ultimately vindicated by the poems that close the book, testimony of both his heroic resistance to the forces of death and despair and affirmation of the value of life, embodied by the essential human qualities of his muse, Lara. She arrives in Moscow in time for the funeral before disappearing: “She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

In the fates of both Lara and Yuri, the reader feels an overwhelming sense of human waste, having been instructed by the author in the value their lives and living has, set beside the necessities of history and ideology that has diminished both. Doctor Zhivago attempts to redress the balance, translating the “nameless number on a list” into memorable human terms that never neglects the “unusualness of the usual.”

Pasternak’s Muse: The Real-Life Inspiration for ‘Doctor Zhivago’

By Sophie Pinkham

Jan. 27, 2017
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LARA The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago By Anna Pasternak Illustrated. 310 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

Stalin supposedly called Boris Pasternak a “cloud dweller,” ordering the secret police to spare the poet. This helps explain how Pasternak survived to old age even as fellow writers were killed or sent to the gulag. Pasternak’s protected status did not, however, extend to all of his loved ones. In “Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago,” Anna Pasternak, the poet’s grandniece, explores the life of Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s longtime mistress and an inspiration for the character of Lara, Dr. Zhivago’s lover. But the “untold” in the subtitle simply isn’t true. The story of Pasternak’s affair with Olga has been told repeatedly — for instance, in Olga’s own memoirs, which serve as a central source for “Lara” and are available in English, as are memoirs by several of Pasternak’s family members and friends.

Thirty-four-year-old Olga Ivinskaya had been widowed twice and had two children when, in 1946, she met Pasternak, 22 years her senior. Pasternak began courting her immediately. At the time, he was unhappily married to his second wife, Zinaida, whose favorite activities included chain-smoking and playing cards, and who had attracted him with her exceptional housekeeping skills. (The poet prized domestic routine, a necessary precondition for the exercise of his genius.) Olga had worshiped Pasternak’s writing since she was a teenager, and she leapt at the chance to become his lover and artistic amanuensis.

Until his death nearly 14 years later, Zinaida would be unsympathetic to Pasternak’s feeble efforts to divorce her and marry Olga. Zinaida had many incentives to stay married to Pasternak; despite his unwillingness to submit to Soviet requirements, his international fame brought substantial economic and social benefits. Olga, on the other hand, became a victim of her lover’s prestige. In 1949, unable to arrest Pasternak for his private readings of drafts of the anti-Soviet “Doctor Zhivago,” the secret police arrested Olga instead. She spent several years in a labor camp but returned as devoted as ever, helping Pasternak finish “Doctor Zhivago” and then attempting to have it published.

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FictionFan's Book Reviews

Reviews of books…and occasional other stuff., doctor zhivago by boris pasternak, a candle burned….

I make it a general rule to try not to find out too much about authors because knowing about their lives tends to intrude on my feelings about their books. Unfortunately a couple of years ago I read The Zhivago Affair , an interesting (and recommended) book that tells the story of the publication of this book, and makes it clear that the parallels between Pasternak’s and Zhivago’s lives are so great that Yuri Andreevich can only really be seen as the author’s alter-ego. Pasternak himself moved his mistress in more or less next door to his wife and children and insisted on them all living in harmony, so he’s not up there on my list of favourite human beings. Therefore, I found Pasternak’s raptures over Zhivago’s character, intellect and poetic ability as nauseating as his justification of his adultery and treatment of his various women, all of whom simply adored him while recognising they really weren’t fit to shine his shoes.

…. The night was filled with soft, mysterious sounds. Close by in the corridor, water was dripping from a washstand, measuredly, with pauses. There was whispering somewhere behind a window. Somewhere, where the kitchen garden began, beds of cucumber were being watered, water was being poured from one bucket into another, with a clink of the chain drawing it from the well. …. It smelled of all the flowers in the world at once, as if the earth had lain unconscious during the day and was now coming to consciousness through all these scents. And from the countess’s centuries-old garden, so littered with windfallen twigs and branches that it had become impassable, there drifted, as tall as the trees, enormous as the wall of a big house, the dusty, thickety fragrance of an old linden coming into bloom. …. Shouts came from the street beyond the fence to the right. A soldier on leave was acting up there, doors slammed, snippets of some song beat their wings.

Trying hard to put my antipathy to the author and main character to one side, there are some positives. Some of the descriptions of the freezing snow-covered landscape are excellent, as are the often poetic scenes of daily life in either city or country, and the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation serves them well. Pasternak assumes his readers will know the history of the period, so doesn’t tell it in any structured form. Instead, he gives sketches of various aspects of life – the breakdown of order in the cities, the drunkenness, brutality and hunger in the country, life as a forced conscript in the Red Army during the Civil War. In a sense, he uses Zhivago’s various women to illustrate or symbolise aspects of Russian society after the Revolution – those who emigrated, those who conformed as best they could to the new regime, those who were destroyed by it. There is an underlying, and largely underdeveloped, theme of individuality and art struggling to survive under first chaos and then growing state control of every corner of existence.

However, for me, the negatives outweigh the positives. The book is poorly structured, has no flow and relies far too heavily on increasingly ridiculous coincidences. There are parts where the author doesn’t bother to fictionalise at all, instead simply dumping factual information on the reader. The characterisation starts out fairly well but seems to fade as Pasternak becomes distracted, first by his vague and unsatisfactory forays into the political/historical aspects, and then by his increasing tendency to use Zhivago as a conduit to allow Pasternak himself to waffle on pretentiously about art and literature and indulge in a good deal of barely disguised self-adulation.

…. Gordon and Dudorov belonged to a good professional circle. They spent their lives among good books, good thinkers, good composers, good, always, yesterday and today, good and only good music, and they did not know that the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness. . . . …. He could see clearly the springs of their pathos, the shakiness of their sympathy, the mechanism of their reasonings. However, he could not very well say to them: ‘Dear friends, oh, how hopelessly ordinary you and the circle you represent, and the brilliance and art of your favourite names and authorities, all are. The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and knew me.’ But how would it be if one could make such declarations to one’s friends! And so as not to distress them, Yuri Andreevich meekly listened to them.

The extracts from Yuri’s journal, where – in the midst of war, with people around him starving to death, with an abandoned pregnant wife and an increasingly neurotic mistress – he takes time out to do a bit of lit-crit of earlier Russian authors, feel like the ultimate self-indulgence. And to top it all off, Pasternak gradually begins to incorporate a kind of religious symbolism into the story, but again without enough depth or direction to make it work.

I admit I always struggle with Russian literature, partly, I think, because even good translations still leave them feeling clunky and partly because the Russian propensity for having a cast of thousands, each with four or five variations of their names, means I always find reading them a tedious slog. In this one, a character mentioned once hundreds of pages earlier will suddenly re-appear with no re-introduction, no reminder of who they are or what role they have played. If that happened in a modern novel, I’d criticise it as poor writing, so I reckon the same standards ought to apply to classics. My truthful feeling about this one is that it may have come to be seen as a classic not so much because of its quality, but because at the time of publication in the midst of the Cold War, its mildly unflattering portrayal of the communist regime, added to the romanticism of its having been smuggled out of Russia and printed in the West, may have fed into the Western intelligentsia’s support for artistic dissidents and led to it being lauded because of its very existence rather than judged on its literary merits.

In conclusion, then, a flawed work in terms of plot, structure and characterisation but with the saving graces of some fine descriptive writing and occasional insights into Russian society before, during and after the Revolution. I’d recommend it more in terms of its historical significance than its literary worth and, on that basis, I’m glad to have read it.

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63 thoughts on “ doctor zhivago by boris pasternak ”.

A wonderfully argued review. I read this too long ago to remember, during my teens and twenties Russian phase. Other authors stayed with me from then. I suspect that film also provided indelible images so that book memory is film memory, in fact. Snow. Tears. Trains. Swelling music. Fur hats. Beautiful people looking soulful. Omar Sharif.Romance with a backdrop of revolution. I particularly like your Sum up on the Western response to it.

Thank you, m’dear! I intended to watch the film, which I’ve never seen(!), after I’d read the book, but I have such an antipathy to Zhivago now I’m almost certain I’d be harrumphing all the way through it. I think I’ll wait a few months. I’m pretty sure I’d have enjoyed this more if I hadn’t read the book about the book, but I’m also sure I’d still have had issues with it…

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I have to say that I completely, utterly disagree with your review! Taking your point that Zhivago is not a nice man, there is so much more to this book than macho posturing. What about the beautiful, beautiful poetic writing? The descriptions of snow and scenery, moments of heartbreak and loss? There are parts of this book that will stay with the reader forever. What about the graphic displays of a society in the throes of chaos where people have to chop up their furniture for warmth or dream about getting a scrap of lettuce because there are no fruit or vegetables anywhere in Moscow? You cannot read this book without looking at life with new eyes: it makes the panic over ‘best before’ dates in our modern world look absurd by comparison. I also can’t agree that the literary criticism in the midst of war is a self-indulgence. It’s a form of escapism, a way to deal with a world gone mad by distracting the mind from other worries. Whatever the flaws of his main character, this is a book for the ages and one of the few that I would say was honestly deserving of the Nobel Prize. To each their own, it seems!

Haha! Well, disagreement is what reading is all about! I did say that some of the descriptive writing is great, but sadly that’s not enough to make a novel. It’s not that I need characters to be likeable, but if the author’s trying to make them likeable – or in this case worthy of adulation – then hating them seems like a bit of a failure… though one could argue whether that failure is mostly the author’s or the reader’s. My bet is it’s the author’s. 😉 As for emotional bits – well, yes, there were some bits that brought a tear to my eye. Like the boy killed by the firing squad. Imagine my surprise, nay, stunned amazement, when Pasternak decided to bring him back to life a couple of hundred pages later…

As for the descriptions of the hardships, yes, some of them are powerful, but having just read A People’s Tragedy, I actually spent a good part of my time, especially when Yuri was in the Red Army, thinking that Pasternak was barely mentioning the lack of food and starvation that was going on at that time. He seemed to come and go with it, happy to forget it whenever it suited the story. I found the factual descriptions in A People’s Tragedy much more harrowing and unforgettable than Pasternak’s, though perhaps I wouldn’t have felt that way had I not read them so close together.

Oh dear! I’m afraid I concluded it was yet another example of the Nobel being given for political reasons rather than literary merit. I felt if he’d wanted to distract himself he could have done it by hopping on a train to Moscow to find out if his wife and children were alive… haha! I fear we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on this one…

Interestingly, I saw a documentary about Dr Z a few years ago where they explained that part of the book’s popularity in the West was due to it providing a rare glimpse behind the iron curtain, and the revolution years in particular. Today, we know so much more and that has to reduce the fascination somewhat.

Yes, I think that’s very true. In fact, even while I was reading it, I wondered if I’d have felt differently if I hadn’t been reading so much factual history of the revolution recently – I might have found some of the scenes more shocking, whereas I actually felt he was underplaying the horrors, if anything.

I have a copy of this that’s been sitting on my bookshelf for two years and that I was considering taking to a charity shop–I think that I might do just that! I find it very difficult to get past a profoundly unlikeable/unsympathetic main character in any novel, so I’ll maybe give this one a pass.

More generally, I agree that sometimes books which have been banned/produced in unusual circumstances sometimes take on a mystique that they don’t really warrant. (I felt like this about Brave New World, although I know that not everyone agrees with me on that).

Well, I’d be being hypocritical if I tried to talk you into reading it, but in fairness I should say I rarely get along with Russian literature, so my bias might be getting in the way!

Yes, I absolutely agree. I re-read Animal Farm a few months ago and really found it quite underwhelming, and I don’t have the courage to re-read Brave New World because I suspect I’d feel the same about it, though I loved them both as a young teenager. I also think classics sometimes take on a bandwagon effect – people assume they must be great because of their status, so maybe assume that if they don’t enjoy one, it must be their ‘fault’ as a reader…

I’m glad you read this, rather than me, and I’m also glad my book got more smiley faces than a Nobel Prize winner 🙂 The macho posturing would have put me right off, but it did remind me of an occasion a few weeks ago where a chap – in all complete seriousness – said to me, ‘If you play your cards right, you could be my third ex-wife’. Zhivago is alive and well and living in Kings Cross!

Hahahaha! The thing is, I think the Nobel, and many other of these prizes, forget that the point of reading is supposed to be primarily to entertain! If they do something else too, then great, but if they make you want to throw the book at the wall, then I can’t see how they merit the full smiley array… 😉 Oh dear! I really hoped that kind of guy would have gone extinct by now – what on earth is evolution playing at!!

Somebody told me that Will Self got very frustrated because, although he won lots of literary awards, his books didn’t actually sell and nobody read them. I’m not a huge fan of Mr Self personally but he is a clever chap and I do feel for him a bit – the best bit about being a writer is when people read and enjoy your work! Although I’m sure there are plenty whose egos are far happier with the awards than the readership… I couldn’t believe it! You will be unsursprised to hear that I turned down this tempting offer…

I tried one of his books once and couldn’t get past the first few pages – too pretentious for words! And kinda smugly clever, if you know what I mean. Whereas Salman Rushdie, in the one book of his I’ve read, is stupendously clever, but managed to make me feel awed rather than patronised. Yeah, I think some of them write specifically for awards rather than readers – JM Coetzee springs to mind, and Ian McEwan in his later books.

Hahaha! Well, thank goodness – we don’t want that type of man to get opportunities to breed… 😉

Rushdie is BRILLIANT! You’re right, so clever but never once patronising. He carries you along with him. I read a review of Self’s latest book and he seems to be attempting some sort of Joyce emulation. Bugger that for a game of soldiers, I’m not going near anything even remotely Joycean for a good while after last summer’s Finnegans Wake!

I have Rushdie’s new one (which reminds me – I have Horowitz’s new one too!!) so I’m hoping I’ll love it too – haven’t yet gone back to tackle some of his controversial ones though. Ugh! Joyce was bad enough without people emulating him!!

*swoons at the mention of Horowitz* I am so jealous! Of the Rushdie one, too, but mainly our dear darling Anthony! I just know it’s going to be the best book of the year. You do realise I’m going to be asking you pretty much every day – have you read it yet? What’s happening? Is it wonderful? Tell me everything!!! I totally understand if you stop talking to me 🙂 🙂

Haha – the big read is scheduled for mid-August since the book’s due out on the 24th. But if I keep abandoning books at the rate I’m doing right now, it could be sooner… 😀

I hope there will be reviews of the abandoned books… you know how much I like it when a book doesn’t meet your high standards 😀 Throw all those books to one side! You know the Horowitz is the only one that matters!!

Sadly, only one of them inspired me to write a mean comment on Goodreads which may make it into the blog some day. The other two were just blah… 😉

I am sorely tempted!

I fell asleep during a stage show of Doctor Zhivago, and have no intention of ever reading the book. I do love Lara’s Theme though.

Haha – well, I certainly won’t be trying to talk you into it! Yes, the music is great – don’t know if I could cope with the film though, given how much I dislike Yuri… maybe in a few months…

Oh, let it out and tell us what you really think of the book (!!) Thanks for a refreshing review on that old chestnut . . .

Haha – yes, I’ve never really mastered that art of writing neutral reviews, have I? 😉 It’s like therapy though – gotta get it out of my system…

Thanks for your thoughts on this, FictionFan. I confess I don’t care for Zhivago’s character, either. At all. But I do think you’re right about Pasternak’s descriptions. And it is interesting to see how he portrayed those times. It was very hard for me to warm to this one (I mean the book), though. But I did notice you managed to fit Omar in there very nicely… 😉

I don’t mind an unlikeable charcater if he’s supposed to be unlikeable, but the problem is that we’re supposed to think Zhivago is wonderful, just as all his women do… ugh! Still a worthwhile read though, for the descriptions and insights, but sometimes that’s not enough to make a wholly successful novel, for me, at least. Haha! I was looking forward to watching Omar, but I have such an antipathy to Zhivago now I’ll have to wait for a few months/years… 😉

Nicely reviewed. I read this book many years ago and remember feeling confused about the characters. There were too many of them. I had to go back and forth to refresh my memory about the cast as well as the period/setting. However, I thought the book was well-written (translated). It grabbed my attention.

Thank you! I always find myself confused with all the charcaters and names in Russian literature – it’s a lot of the reason why I rarely enjoy them. This edition doesn’t have a list of characters, either, which I felt was a serious omission. I ended up having to resort to Google from time to time to remind myself of who someone was. But yes, some of the descriptive writing is great.

This book has been sitting on my shelf for years and years gathering dust. Maybe time to dust it off and sell it to the used book store.

Well, I’d be being hypocritical if I tried to persuade you to read it, but in fairness I have to say I rarely enjoy Russian literature – the style just doesn’t seem to work for me somehow. Maybe you should read some of the more glowing reviews before you banish it from your home… 😉

I love reading about these classics because then I don’t have to actually read them myself. Thanks for saving me the time!

Haha! But I think that must be classed as cheating. For punishment, you have to read this one AND Moby Dick… 😉

Yikes! I don’t have an extra few weeks on my hands unfortunately

OK, no chocolate for a month then…

NOOOOOOOOOOOO blasphemy

Interesting review. I read this in my teens when the whole “smuggled out of Russia/samizdat” furore was at its height, and as you know I was never big on romances, with the result that my abiding memory of the book was the politics, not the people, which is almost the definitive “fail” for a supposedly character-driven book. I never thought it was a patch on the real Russian greats – Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, etc., and I always preferred to get my history straight, rather than fictionalised.

I think it suffered for me for a variety of reasons – my dislike for Pasternak the man, but also the fact that I’ve been reading so much great factual history that that aspect didn’t work so well for me as it might otherwise have done. I haven’t read much Russian literature because I rarely enjoy it, but certainly this wasn’t anywhere close to the Tolstoys I’ve read. One day I may try Dostoevsky… but not today!

I’ve long meant to read this, but your review gives me pause. It definitely sounds a bit self-indulgent. I just put a book down by H.G. Wells for that very same flaw – using the character to articulate the author’s pet theories. And the idea that everyone loves him despite constantly abandoning them sounds hard to stomach.

Thanks for the warning and great review! 🙂

Thank you! Ha! I feel kinda guilty about putting everyone off the book though – inexplicably, loads of people seem to love it! But I really couldn’t get excited about the love affair because I disliked Zhivago so much and wasn’t much keener on Lara. Maybe the film is better… 😉

The film wasn’t too bad, though everyone still seemed awfully understanding of Zhivago. But Omar Sharif gave him a non-narcissistic, somewhat absent-minded, dreamy gentleness that made him slightly more appealing. Though I’ve read that the movie is not that close to the book…which might be a good thing. 🙂

Ha! Yes, for once it sounds like the film might be better than the book. It certainly looks beautiful, both Omar and the scenery. Maybe in a few months, when I’ve recovered from the book…

Wow. I saw the movie, but never read the book. And your review inspires me to continue ignoring the book. Ugh! Don’t blame yourself though. Pasternak’s attitude is the culprit.

Haha! I won’t try to talk you into it, that’s for sure! Thank you – I do feel he’d have been vastly improved by attending some self-awareness classes… 😉

Excellent review, well thought out and argued. Haven’t read this one, but agree some Russian lit is a bit tedious, specially always having to check the names on the character list! Anna Karenina was like that. Spoiler: Anna doesn’t feature as much as you would expect, and editing is something Russians don’t seem to believe in. I remember doing a review saying in part that it didn’t do much for me. I think I was in a minority of one on Instagram over that! I do like Dostoyevsky and Chekhov though.

Thank you! 😀 Yes, I find I spend way too much time trying to remember who people are – it definitely seems to be a feature of a lot of Russian literature. Ha! It’s so long since I read Anna Karenina I don’t remember much about it, but a couple of years ago I listened to a dramatised version that had been done for BBC Radio. It was about three and a half hours long, and I swear Anna spent at least three of them sobbing, wailing and shrieking – I have never been so glad to hear a train arrive in my life! 😉 Someday I will try Dostoevsky – he sounds the most appealing of the Russian writers to me…

A brilliant review as always FF – The line about Pasternak not being your favourite person made me smile.

I read this many moons ago and it’s one of those books I remember where and what was going on in my life at the time – probably because it took so long and to work out which character was which – but to be honest the book itself is now fairly shadowy but having worked out it was more than a quarter of a century ago when I was younger and more easily impressed, maybe that’s not surprising.

Ha! It’s horrifying when you suddenly realise how long it is since you read a book! I do think I’d have enjoyed this much more when I was younger, and also if I hadn’t known anything about Pasternak – disliking him so much as a man definitely coloured how I felt about Zhivago. Still, it’s another one ticked off the list… 😉

Awesome review! Haha, I can totally see from your words why Pasternak is not your favorite human being! While not being my kind of books, I loved reading your impressions about it and I must say that I recall from my Russian classes that all the names in the books were so confusing for me!

Thank you! Haha! Yes, I really took a dislike to Pasternak, so poor old Zhivago didn’t stand much chance of winning me over… 😉 I do find the Russian habit of using zillions of different names for the same character deeply confusing – I wonder if Russians do too, or if somehow they’re able to keep track of them all better.

I read it after I read it.

I love reading an intelligent person’s criticisms of a novel deemed a classic. My own occasional lack of self-confidence leads me down the yellow brick road of doubt into You’re Just An Idiot city. I was surprised you liked Moby Dick, for example, as I cannot stand Melville’s writing (though I’ve tried it several times), but your reasons were well-thought out, and the same applies here.

Well, thank you very much! 😀 I was always opinionated but I think it’s an age thing that makes me confident enough to be so forthright about classics these days – it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking we must be missing something. But it’s just like current books – they won’t all appeal to everyone and it’s kinda pointless pretending to be wowed by them when we’re not. But no, no, no! I hated Moby Dick! You must be thinking of somebody else’s review – I had a lot of fun slating it… 😉

I know I read your review… Maybe I remembered wrong because you actually read the whole thing, but didn’t light it on fire and toast weiners instead. 🌭🌭 I feel extra better!

Haha! United in hatred – that’s what the bookosphere is all about! 😉

An interesting review. I have thought about reading this book at various points in the past, but something fairly intangible has always held me back. Given your comments about the parallels between Pasternak and Pastrenak, I think it might be best if I give this one a miss! It’s frustrating, isn’t it? We always expect the classics to be such stellar reads, sure fire hits we can rely on.

*between Pasternak and Zhivago.

Thanks, Jacqui! Well, I wouldn’t try to talk you into reading it, for sure, but loads of people love it – my feelings about Pasternak the man definitely affected how I felt about Zhivago. Yes, sometimes it can be hard to see why a classic is a classic, but then it’s just like current books – no book ever appeals to everyone, I suppose. At least there’s always Dickens… 😉

Your opening paragraph did make me laugh, FF! I’ve never been tempted to read this as I found the film beautiful but tedious and uninvolving. Your excellent review makes me think I may well have the same problem with the novel…

Somehow the sarcasm just escaped onto the screen despite my best efforts to restrain it! 😉 I was going to watch the film after I read the book, but honestly I’ve developed such a dislike of Zhivago now I can’t imagine how even Omar could make it watchable. Maybe one day, when the scars have healed…

Perfect review! I just finished the book and you stated my thoughts on it exactly. The book suffers a lot from “telling” the reader things rather than “showing” them. I never really felt the romance between Lara and Yurii because the book tells us they’re madly in love but never really demonstrates it except through flowery dialogue.

The character problem bugged me as well, and ending on Gordon and Dudorov was a strange choice, considering they were barely in the book at all! The pacing is flawed too – don’t get me started on the dreary 100 page digression when Zhivago is kidnapped by partisans.

It’s a frustrating book because I feel it could be great with some real editing and reworking – cutting out many pointless characters and focusing on the ones that matter. But as it stands the plot meandered and the characters were unsympathetic. I only enjoyed parts because I’m fascinated by the time period.

Thank you, and thanks for popping in and commenting! 🙂 Yes, I wonder what it would have turned out like if he’d been in a position to have it properly edited and produced by a major publisher. I felt it was very self-indulgent and so full of self-adulation – I’d like to think a strong editor would have made him tone that down. When I read it, I was doing a reading challenge to learn about the Revolution through history and fiction, and I read so many better books as part of that. I suspect this one became famous as much because of the romantic idea of it having been smuggled out as for the book’s intrinsic qualities…

“I felt it was very self-indulgent and so full of self-adulation ”

Completely agree. I also found many of his digressions on art or religion to be tedious and boring.

“I suspect this one became famous as much because of the romantic idea of it having been smuggled out as for the book’s intrinsic qualities…”

In addition to the book’s publication history, the concept of the book is certainly better than its execution. A sweeping drama of lives and families before and after the Revolution is certainly compelling, and is the reason why I read the book in the first place.

Oh, yes, those digressions were so annoying, especially when everyone around him was dying of starvation and his poor wife and lover were both quietly forgotten while he maundered on about literature! There’s a time and a place… 😉

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Doctor Zhivago, By Boris Pasternak, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

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In his introduction to this new translation of Doctor Zhivago, Richard Pevear quotes from a letter written by Boris Pasternak in English: "living, moving reality in such a rendering must have a touch of spontaneous subjectivity, even of arbitrariness , wavering, tarrying, doubting, joining and disjoining elements". Pevear uses this quote to stress his point that Doctor Zhivago is "a highly unusual book". He argues that "to embody the 'living moving reality'", it "had necessarily to be an experimental novel".

For some reason, Pevear refuses to call it modernist, although both Pasternak's words and Pevear's own description of "a feeling of chaos, random movement, chance encounters, sudden disruptions" could very well apply to a modernist author – Virginia Woolf, for example. In the end, it's not what one calls it that matters. What is important is an acknowledgement of the unique features of the novel's structure and style, which combine to create the poet's vision of the Russian Revolution and its consequences.

Pasternak sees this great upheaval as a clash between the inhuman abstractions of a ruthless political order and the indomitable might of life-force. The surname "Zhivago" has the same root as the Russian adjective "zhivoy" –"live", "alive". This sums up the tragedy of the novel's hero, who welcomes the revolution in the hope that it will put an end to injustice, but dies in 1929, unable to live beyond "the year of the great turning-point", as Soviet textbooks would later label it.

Even in 1956, in the atmosphere of Khrushchev's "thaw", the novel was rejected by Soviet publications. However, the manuscript got out and appeared in Italian in 1957. Pasternak's Nobel Prize, in October 1958, led to his expulsion from the Writers' Union, a smear campaign in the Soviet press, and his forced refusal of the prize. This persecution precipitated his death in May 1960, and delayed the novel's publication in Russia for 30 years.

To have an English version ready in time for the award of the Nobel, the translators, Max Hayward and Manya Harari, had to work extremely fast, which led to omissions and simplifications. Moreover, the need to make the book readable often made them replace the rhythm and style of Pasternak's prose with plain, lively English which at times verged on banality.

Their version, published in August 1958, remained the only English Zhivago for 52 years. The blurb of this new translation claims that Pevear and Volokhonsky "have restored the rhythms, tone, precision and poetry of Pasternak's original". They try to follow Pasternak in everything.

Sometimes, especially where the effect depends on the rhythm of the sentence, it works well. Here is the opening: "They walked and walked and sang 'Memory Eternal', and whenever they stopped, the singing seemed to be carried on by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind". The tone, impersonal and rhythmical, heightening everyday detail, is recognisably Pasternak's. The first sentence of the old translation could be anyone's: "On they went, singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing."

However, sticking too closely to the Russian original often takes the translators to the other extreme. The new translation teems with artificial, un-English constructions. The simplest Russian phrases, translated literally, sound awkward, and their meaning is unclear: "What's with me?"; "I am deeply guilty before him". These are the ordinary idiom of everyday Russian. One has to admit that this is a deliberate strategy: faithfulness to the Russian at all costs, even when it implies faithlessness to the English.

What happens, then, when it comes to something more characteristic of this particular novel, like Pasternak's poetry lurking in his prose? Here is a description of the sounds heard by Yuri Zhivago as he leans out of a window, overwhelmed by the beauty of a summer night. Hayward and Harari write: "Somewhere in the vegetable patch they were watering cucumber beds, clanking the chain of the well as they drew the water and poured it from pail to pail". The original word order is slightly changed, but the simple picture remains as evocative and poetic in English as it is in Russian.

Here are Pevear and Volokhonsky: "Somewhere, where the kitchen garden began, beds of cucumbers were being watered, water being poured from one bucket into another, with a clink of the chain drawing it from the well." The passive verbs make the sentence clumsy; the participle near the end renders it nearly incomprehensible. The words and their order painstakingly follow the Russian, but what is the point if the impression the poet was trying to convey is lost?

To get a Doctor Zhivago that would convey Pasternak's genius without sounding foreign, English readers might have to wait for a new translation. We should hope that it comes before another 50 years pass.

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Book Reviews

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak: Book Review

Oh, I had a hard time with this one. It was sheer stubbornness that got me through. I didn’t particularly like Doctor Zhivago, I thought Lara was crazy, and I couldn’t keep up with the politics. I kept thinking that I should look up the Russian Revolution (or whatever it’s called) and try to make some sense out of what was going on, but I didn’t care enough to even do that.

There were philosophical discussions planted smack in the middle of conversations. Of course I didn’t believe anyone has ever actually talked that way. I couldn’t follow the philosophy and then I lost the thread of the conversation by the time the characters got back to talking about something I was interested in.

The doctor was the epitome of “not to decide is a decision.” He just went with whatever situation he found himself in. He had some ideals when he was young that he fought for, but then he became jaded and seemed not to really believe in anything. But I could be wrong about that. As his family life changed, he never fought for anyone. He just took the easiest path before him.

Lara was at least passionate but I felt she was inconsistent. Who did she really want to be with? I’m not entirely sure. She said one thing but did another.

What I did take away from the book is how confusing it must have been to live through a time like this. I have a feeling the confusion about who was fighting whom and why was done deliberately. I can’t imagine living through a war and never being sure who was on what side and which side I should be on to get through safely. You can see how tightly I would hold to my ideals–I just want to make it through!

And Russian novelists and their character names! Holy cow! I can’t keep up with everyone and their nicknames. I just can’t. That adds to my confusion as well.

Because I never fully caught the thread of the book, this is really all I can say. It was not the book for me, but if you’re curious, don’t let me discourage you.

Read an excerpt .

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Well, I'm glad to know I wasn't alone, but I might be done with Russian Lit. I liked the actual story of Anna Karenina but I was bored to tears in all the essays about–let's just call it Communism–randomly shoved in. Does it get better?

I'm a huge fan of Russian lit. My favorite novel ever is Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. But Dr. Z. was a struggle. Took me months to get through it, and I was just as confused as you were — and I majored in Russian history, so it's not like I was lacking in background. Good for you for making the effort, but talk to me next time you get a yen for a Russian classic.

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California Literary Review

Book review: doctor zhivago by boris pasternak.

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Fiction Reviews

Found In Translation

The noted British film director, David Lean, returned to Europe from the 1963 Academy Award ceremony on board an Italian luxury liner. Lean’s latest film, Lawrence of Arabia , had received Best Picture and he was mulling over new projects. Packed in his luggage was a novel sent to him by MGM for his consideration. It was a big book, a Russian novel. According to his biographer, Kevin Brownlow, Lean was not pleased at its “five hundred and something pages.”

After two solid days of reading and “a box of Kleenex,” an emotionally moved Lean cabled his agent, “Yes, I’ll do Doctor Zhivago .”

Thus began the epic process of translating a great novel into film. This is especially worthy of note because the art of translation is a vital strand in the ongoing life story of Doctor Zhivago . A brilliant new English version has just been published. The translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, aim to help lovers of literature “read the novel in a new way, to see more clearly the universality of the image that Pasternak held up against the deadly fiction of his time.”

This new version of Doctor Zhivago is more than a reworking of Russian prose and poetry into English. It is a translation of a great novel from the Cold War era to the remarkably changed circumstances of the 21st century.

At every stage of its life, Doctor Zhivago has emerged in shape-changing transformations. Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago , toiled as a translator of Western books into Russian, when his literary works were banned by Soviet authorities. Pasternak’s leading character, Yuri Zhivago, is a poet who struggles to translate his feelings and reflections on life and love into verse. In an earlier version of the novel, written during 1930’s, Pasternak charted the story of his protagonist through the pivotal years of 1905 to 1917. Then in 1946, Pasternak commenced a new, longer version that was to be published first in an Italian translation in 1957. A limited Russian version was produced in the West, just in time to be considered for the 1958 Noble Prize in Literature.

Doctor Zhivago received the Nobel Prize on October 23, 1958. The next day, a storm of denunciation descended upon Pasternak. Even though the general tone of Doctor Zhivago is not anti-Communist, Pasternak had failed to write his novel in the prevailing style expected of Russia’s writers, “Socialist Realism.” This made him a marked man in the eyes of Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo. Doctor Zhivago was banned in the Soviet Union and Pasternak was forced to decline the Nobel Prize.

Around the rest of the world, translated editions of Doctor Zhivago met with scholarly praise and huge, popular success. The English-language version, the one that David Lean read, did not receive unqualified approval by literary critics.

Pasternak was sympathetic to the difficult situation of his English-language translators. Manya Harari and Max Hayward needed to produce a version of the novel that readers, unfamiliar with the nuances of Russia’s language and culture, could appreciate.

“It’s not their fault,” Pasternak declared. “They are used, like translators everywhere, to reproducing the literal sense rather than the tone of what is said – and of course it is the tone that matters.”

The “tone” that Pasternak wanted to convey is to be found in the thoughts and struggles and, most of all, in the capacity for love of his protagonist, Yuri Zhivago.

On a surface level, Pasternak’s novel is set during the era of the Russian Revolution, beginning with the abortive uprising of 1905 and extending through the Civil War of 1918-1923 and the foundation of the Soviet Union. In a similar way, Zhivago can be interpreted as a representative figure of the Silver Age of Russia . This amazing blaze of cultural glory immediately preceded the outbreak of World War I. There are autobiographical elements in Doctor Zhivago , as well. The young Pasternak published his first poems in 1913, the same time period as his hero’s literary coming of age. And just as Zhivago was to be consumed by love for Lara in the novel, so too would a passionate relationship leave its mark on Pasternak’s emotional life. In 1946, just as he began work on the novel, Pasternak met and fell in love with Olga Ivanskaia, who served as the model for his heroine, Lara.

Doctor Zhivago , however, is not a novel about the Russian Revolution. Nor is it primarily an autobiographical work. Doctor Zhivago is a book about life and living, about loving and being loved.

In the Russian language, the root for Zhivago’s name is the word zhiv , meaning “life” or “living.” Taking a diametrically different approach to that of Marxist ideology, Zhivago rejects abstract theories about the Russian Revolution. In a moving scene, Zhivago explains his views to Lara:

“The revolution broke out involuntarily, like breath held for too long. Everyone revived, was reborn, in everyone there are transformations, upheavals. You might say that everyone went through two revolutions, one his own, personal, the other general. It seems to me that socialism is a sea into which all these personal, separate revolutions should flow, the sea of life, the sea of originality. The sea of life, I said, the life that can be seen in paintings, life touched by genius, life creatively enriched. But now people have decided to test it, not in books, but in themselves, not in abstraction, but in practice.” (p.129)

Pasternak ranges the individualism of Zhivago against the heartless society that is being erected by the Bolsheviks on the grave of Tsarist Russia. Where Zhivago questions his every deed from the standpoint of conscience, left-wing leaders like Lara’s husband, Pasha Antipov, who styles himself as Strelnikov or “Shooter,” kill without blinking or thinking.

The Bolsheviks promise a classless utopia for all, justifying their purges and mass executions by what they will achieve in the future. Zhivago revels in physical toil and sharing of the earth’s bounty, but he is not interested in the imminent triumph of Communism. He seeks a “new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God,” where “there are no peoples, there are persons.”

Pasternak looked to Russia’s rich literary heritage for a means to convey Zhivago’s thoughts and ideals. He found it in Symbolism, the literary movement which emerged as the dominant mode of cultural expression in the last years before World War I. The individual was supreme in Russian Symbolism, both as a unique, creative being and as a representative of human emotions, dreams and values.

So important did Symbolism loom in Russian culture that it took on a quasi-mystical form. Doctor Zhivago is replete with symbolism. This is true of “The Poems of Yuri Zhivago” that conclude the book and seemingly at every turn of the novel. In a 1995 study of Doctor Zhivago , British scholar, Angela Livingstone, analyzed a seemingly minor scene depicting the coming of spring. Here the branches of budding apple trees “miraculously” reaching “over the fences into the streets” are symbolical of the “bridging and linking” of places and communities in society.

If grasping such literary allusions is difficult now, trying to convey them to English-speaking readers in the Cold-War 1950’s was next to impossible. Manya Harari and Max Hayward, both fine scholars, chose to emphasize the drama of Pasternak’s story over the novel’s Symbolist foundations. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, by contrast, base their translation on the whole cloth of Pasternak’s original.

A revealing example of the differing approaches of the two translating teams can be appreciated in the following passage of the novel.

Lara, having served with Zhivago treating wounded soldiers during World War I, departs for home. She leaves Zhivago and an elderly woman caretaker, Mademoiselle, in the country estate that had been turned into a field hospital. Suddenly a storm of hurricane magnitude descends and they think they hear a returning Lara banging on doors and windows, trying to escape the wind and the rain. Instead, it is the wind rattling a broken shutter. Both Zhivago and Mademoiselle, eager to see Lara again, regret “that it had been a false alarm.”

Here are the respective versions of the conclusion to this episode.

“They had been so sure of it that when they locked the door the imprint of their certainty remained in the street, round the corner, like the watery wraith of this woman, or of her image which continued to haunt them.” Harari and Hayward Translation p.161

“They were so certain of it that, when they locked the door, the traces of their certainty remained by the corner of the house outside, in the form of the woman’s watermark or image, which continued to appear to them from around the turning.” Pevear and Volokhonsky Translation, p. 132

Manya Harari and Max Hayward produced a translation for English-speaking readers whose literary perspective had been shaped by the dramatic fiction of the West from the 19th and 20th centuries. Their version evokes a resonance of Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories. Zhivago and Mademoiselle sense that Lara remains “in the street, round the corner.” In fact, the “watery wraith” of Lara haunts them from within.

In the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the imaginary Lara has a more fixed presence. In keeping with pre-1914 Symbolism, Lara stands for an ideal of womanhood in Zhivago’s mind. But the spiritual manifestation of Lara, less a ghostly visitation here, remains rooted “by the corner of the house outside.” The use of the word “watermark” is particularly effective, evoking a tangible, if hard to discern, presence, as with embossed brand marks on high-quality stationary.

It was almost inevitable that the 1958 translation by Harari and Hayward responded to post-World War II conditions in the West. Indeed, the controversy attending the publication of Doctor Zhivago turned it into a Cold War cause célèbre. In the West, the persecution of Pasternak was portrayed as a further demonstration of Soviet repression. From the standpoint of the Soviet Writers Union, Pasternak was a “bourgeois reactionary” and a “malevolent Philistine.”

A more effective Soviet response to Doctor Zhivago would have been to print it in the literary magazine, Novy Mir . This had been the original plan in 1954, but was then rejected. Two years later, the brief “thaw” following Stalin’s death was over. Pasternak knew he was running great risks by publishing Doctor Zhivago in the West. He remarked to the Italian Communist journalist, Sergio d’Angelo, to whom he entrusted the manuscript, “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.”

Recent research into the Cold War origins of the Doctor Zhivago controversy has made a convincing case that the book’s publication involved an act of espionage more in keeping with a novel by John le Carré than one by Boris Pasternak.

In January 2007, the Sunday Times of London broke a story with the lurid title “How the CIA won Zhivago a Nobel.” Based on research by Ivan Tolstoy, the article contended that the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago was briefly seized from a plane bringing it to the Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The CIA, with the complicity of British Intelligence, mounted the operation to embarrass the Soviet government. The manuscript was photographed, from which a Russian version was published in a limited-run by the Dutch firm, Mouton. This was done to insure that any restrictions on translated works would not impede the Nobel committee’s consideration of Doctor Zhivago .

Ivan Tolstoy presented a more detailed treatment of his thesis in 2008, with a book published in Russia entitled The Laundered Novel . As the book has yet to be published in the West, it is impossible to prove – or disprove – his allegations. What Tolstoy’s book does validate is the vital importance of literary translation to the whole “back story” of Doctor Zhivago .

Of infinitely greater importance is the fact that Doctor Zhivago has stood the test of time far better than the Iron Curtain or tales of Cold War intrigue. Pasternak’s novel is the story of a man of conscience who asserts human dignity in the face of the all-powerful state. That issue certainly has not faded with the passage of time.

By enabling us to see Doctor Zhivago as a living book, not merely as a dated text from a bygone era, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, have performed an enormous service to all who value great literature. Now, perhaps for the first time, we can realize the deep, inner truths that Pasternak sought to convey. When Zhivago opens his heart to Lara with these immortal words, he is speaking to us as well.

“Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. And life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so thrillingly serious!”

Ed Voves is a freelance writer, based in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, the artist Anne Lloyd, and a swarm of cats who love curling up with good books.

Mr. Voves graduated with a B.A. in History from LaSalle University in 1976 and a Masters in Information Science from Drexel University in 1989. After teaching for several years with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, he worked in the news research department for “The Philadelphia Inquirer” and the “Philadelphia Daily News,” 1985 to 2003. It was with the “Daily News,” that he began his freelance writing, doing book reviews and author interviews with such notable figures as Umberto Eco, Maurice Sendak, and Peter O’Toole. For the “Inquirer,” he specialized in reviews of major historical works. Following his time with the newspapers, he worked as an independent researcher for Knowledge@Wharton, the online journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the staff of the Free Library of Philadelphia in 2005 and is currently the branch manager of the Kingsessing Branch in southwest Philadelphia. In 2006, he began writing for the “California Literary Review.” History of Yoga

Ed Voves is a freelance writer, based in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, the artist Anne Lloyd, and a swarm of cats who love curling up with good books. Mr. Voves graduated with a B.A. in History from LaSalle University in 1976 and a Masters in Information Science from Drexel University in 1989. After teaching for several years with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, he worked in the news research department for "The Philadelphia Inquirer" and the "Philadelphia Daily News," 1985 to 2003. It was with the "Daily News," that he began his freelance writing, doing book reviews and author interviews with such notable figures as Umberto Eco, Maurice Sendak, and Peter O'Toole. For the "Inquirer," he specialized in reviews of major historical works. Following his time with the newspapers, he worked as an independent researcher for Knowledge@Wharton, the online journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the staff of the Free Library of Philadelphia in 2005 and is currently the branch manager of the Kingsessing Branch in southwest Philadelphia. In 2006, he began writing for the "California Literary Review." History of Yoga

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Doctor Zhivago, a modern novel in the great Russian tradition, was barred from publication in the author's own country --...

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DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

by Boris Pasternak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 1958

Doctor Zhivago, a modern novel in the great Russian tradition, was barred from publication in the author's own country -- the Soviet Union. It is in Italy and, now, in the United States that this fine work must seek its audience. Embracing the first half of the century, the opening chapters portray the pre-revolutionary atmosphere of unrest in which Zhivago's intellectual and moral ideals take root. After his service in the army he takes his family to the Urals and there is kidnapped by partisan forces to Siberia where he leads an inhuman existence. After a successful escape he has a brief reunion with his true love and companion and travels to Moscow only to find his family in exile. Rather than capitulate to the obligatory Weltanschaung he waives the academic life for manual labour and finally dies in a tram, suffering. The critical picture of Soviet society -- the price of Revolution- is framed by the philosophical considerations of the problems of good and evil, historical necessity vs. individual freedom, spiritual values as imminent rather than transcendant. Absolutely a must for the litterati.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1958

ISBN: 0679774386

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1958

Categories: FICTION

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Just finished reading Dr. Zhivago and would love to discuss it.

Needless to say, this post contains spoilers.

I just finished reading Dr. Zhivago . I'm very interested in the Russian Revolution and the early 20th century in general, and I enjoy large, sprawling epics, so I thought that Dr. Zhivago would be right up my alley! I expected something like a bleaker, Russian East of Eden .

Unfortunately, I was fairly disappointed in this book. In general, I found it to be a tedious and slow read. The plot feels disjointed and more like a series of episodic narratives loosely connected by coincidence. It also jumps around in time which can feel somewhat disorienting - especially early on, when time can jump forward 4 years in the span of a single paragraph break, with no indication.

Worse still, in a story with approximately one thousand characters, the characterization is pretty weak, even for the main characters. I never really 'felt' the love between Yurii and Lara, since Pasternak really just tells us they're in love, but never really bothers to show it. This is exacerbated by the fact that the initial meeting between Yurii and Lara, at the hospital during the war, has little to no interaction between the characters - Pasternak tells us that they've been getting along well but only bothers to write one awkward interaction between the two. The effect of this is that Yurii comes across utterly unsympathetic in the latter half of the novel, when he essentially abandons his family for Lara. I can buy this sort of story if I really feel the love between the two, but that was not the case here. No other character in the book feels fully realized, and their motivations remain sketchy for most of the story. I found myself confused about Yurii's real opinions on the Revolution for much of the book - a central theme of the novel!

Other narrative choices are equally bewildering. I started getting interested in the story when Antipov reappeared as Strelnikov - finally an exciting conflict, I thought. I was curious how all of these characters and conflicting ideologies and relationships would intersect. Unfortunately he disappears as quickly as he appears, and plays little to no role in the story. The anticipated collision between Yurii, Lara, Tonia, and Strelnikov never occurred.

The final flaw is that long chunks of the book are devoted to Pasternak's own musings on art, philosophy, and history, expressed through the writing of Zhivago. I didn't find these engaging at all . The most egregious was when Pasternak has three separate characters express their thoughts that "Jewish people really should just assimilate!", and even has the gall to write in a Jewish character to express these same thoughts. I wonder what Pasternak really thought about Jewish people...

The saving graces of the book are some fantastic descriptions of the natural world and the effects of the Revolution and Civil War on peoples and places. Pasternak has a gift for vividly describing landscapes and scenery, and these provided some relief from the other, more tedious parts of the book.

Still, I'd find it hard to recommend to anyone unless they're very passionate about Russian literature or history. Has anyone else read it? If so, what were your thoughts?

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The CIA’s ‘Zhivago’

July 10, 2014 issue

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The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book

Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece

Mondadori/Getty Images

Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya at his dacha in Peredelkino, late 1950s

In its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the CIA has a museum that’s not generally open to the public. The museum’s function, according to its website, is to “inform, instruct and inspire” members of the CIA as they practice the craft of intelligence. 1 Among its prize exhibits, alongside the Enigma encryption machine, a semi-submersible submarine, and Osama bin Laden’s AK-47, is an unassuming paperback book measuring five-and-a-half inches high, three-and-a-half inches wide, and three quarters of an inch thick. It’s a pocket edition of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago , six hundred pages printed on bible paper for smuggling purposes. The caption reads: “Copy of the original Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago , covertly published by the CIA . The front cover and the binding identify the book in Russian; the back of the book states that it was printed in France.”

So far as I know, it’s the only literary exhibit in the museum and its presence in such incongruous surroundings indicates the importance the CIA once placed on “soft” warfare and propaganda, though when exactly the book was put there and information about it released online is not clear. For over half a century the CIA kept totally quiet about its involvement with Doctor Zhivago and only very recently admitted to it. Perhaps it was in 2009, when the Russian journalist and broadcaster Ivan Tolstoy published The Laundered Novel : Doctor Zhivago between the KGB and the CIA, the first serious investigation of the subject for many years. The museum’s caption refers to Tolstoy’s book as “alleging that the CIA had secretly arranged for the publication of a limited-run, Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago ,” but coyly adds (as if the museum had no connection with its bosses), “the CIA officially declined to comment on Tolstoy’s conclusions.”

Perhaps that will change now, with the publication of two new books, Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece by Paolo Mancosu, and especially The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée. The authors of both books describe in great detail the way the CIA successfully covered its tracks and the mechanisms it used to get a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago published in Europe with great speed, but Finn and Couvée have a trump card in the form of a collection of “approximately 135” declassified CIA documents that reveal the thinking behind the operation and the many missteps in carrying out what was till then a completely unfamiliar enterprise. There is a vast literature about Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago , and much of it has referred to the CIA ’s involvement in the novel’s publication either in passing or at length, but no one has previously had access to firsthand material of this nature. 2 Fortunately, Finn and Couvée’s book is about far more than the CIA . They cover every aspect of the Zhivago affair in detail, from Pasternak’s early life and the origins of his novel to the bombshell of its first publication in 1957, the nature of the CIA ’s intervention, and the aftermath for Pasternak and his associates.

It took Pasternak half a lifetime to write Doctor Zhivago . A poet of genius in his youth, he had less facility with prose, yet decided early in his career that he wanted to write a “big,” nineteenth-century style novel “with a love intrigue and a heroine in it—like Balzac.” His subject would be the February and October revolutions and the civil war between Reds and Whites, all of which he had lived through and experienced personally. He made a start on the novel in 1932, when he was still sanguine about the revolution’s outcome, but destroyed most of what he had written when Stalin’s Great Terror and the purges put an end to his optimism and made it too dangerous to write down his true thoughts at all.

Pasternak had two brushes with Stalin during the next few years, the first in 1934, when Stalin phoned him out of the blue to ask his opinion of Osip Mandelstam, newly arrested for composing a biting epigram about the dictator. Pasternak knew the epigram, but waffled so much in his reply that Stalin apparently accused him of not sufficiently sticking up for a friend. As news of their conversation raced around the grapevine, some accused him of cowardice, though Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, didn’t agree. Later, when Pasternak’s name appeared on a list of people to be executed, Stalin apparently said contemptuously, “Leave the ‘holy fool’ [a sobriquet that has also been translated as ‘cloud-dweller’] alone.”

Pasternak deliberately cultivated an image of modesty and otherworldliness (“what century is it outside?” was an oft-quoted line from one of his poems) and played possum throughout the purges, surviving while preserving his integrity, a rare feat in those times. It seemed unlikely that the cloud-dweller would toss a bomb as explosive as Doctor Zhivago into the stagnant Soviet pool a couple of decades later, but his experiences with Stalin, especially the Mandelstam affair, and other compromises he made during the Terror left a residue of guilt and remorse that certainly figured among his motives.

Pasternak returned to his novel in 1946, encouraged by the brief easing of Soviet repression during World War II and a deep patriotism that impelled him to speak out. Another powerful stimulus that year was his encounter in the offices of the literary magazine Novy Mir with a young editor and translator named Olga Ivinskaya. Pasternak, fifty-six and married to his second wife, Zinaida, with two sons at home, was completely dazzled by Olga’s movie star looks and smoldering sensuality. She was ardent, talented, energetic, and—unlike his wife—passionate about literature. “My life, my angel, I love you truly,” he wrote soon after meeting her, showering her with books and letters and extravagant compliments. Olga, twenty-two years his junior and a single mother, with two young children of her own, was awed and flattered by the famous poet’s attentions. Encountering Pasternak, she wrote in her memoir, was like meeting a god.

Soon they were taking long walks together, then they were lovers, and before long, Olga became Pasternak’s unofficial secretary and personal assistant as well, for which she was to pay dearly. In 1949 she was arrested for “anti-Soviet political activities” (Pasternak himself was too famous to be touched) and sentenced to five years in the Gulag—reduced to four as the result of the Stalin amnesty in 1953. Many thought she and Pasternak would split up after that, but Olga had apparently miscarried Pasternak’s child in prison, and in addition to feeling guilty about her incarceration, he felt she had saved his life by refusing to betray him during lengthy interrogations by the KGB . He wrote their relationship into Doctor Zhivago , and included many of the poems he dedicated to her in the twenty-six he appended to the novel.

By 1954 the novel was finished. Its plot, too convoluted to summarize in any detail, follows the life and wanderings of Yuri Zhivago, a dreamy young doctor swept up in World War I, then the revolution, then the civil war, while moving back and forth between European Russia and western Siberia. Through a series of coincidences he has repeated encounters with a young nurse, Larissa (Lara) Guichard, and though both are married, they embark on a passionate affair. They are separated when Zhivago is kidnapped by Red partisans during the civil war and forced to serve as their medical officer. Released at the end of the war, Yuri spends some idyllic months with Lara, before persuading her to travel to eastern Siberia, while he returns to Moscow and has two children with another woman before dying of a heart attack. Lara manages to attend the funeral and is then arrested and flung into the Gulag. The novel ends with two family friends meeting an orphaned laundry girl during World War II and concluding that she is the daughter of Yuri and Lara.

Pasternak submitted Doctor Zhivago to Novy Mir and the journal Znamya in early 1956, and it was months before a reply came back, partly because the KGB had to be given time to investigate Pasternak’s counterrevolutionary views and partly because discussions of the novel had gone all the way up to the Presidium of the Party’s Central Committee, where it was characterized as “a malicious libel.” In September 1956 Pasternak received a formal letter signed by five members of Novy Mir’s editorial board offering a detailed analysis of the plot and explaining what was wrong with it. Pasternak was judged to be alienated from the society he lived in and anti-Soviet in his views, and there could be no question of publishing his novel.

Meanwhile, rumors of the novel’s existence had spread far and wide among literary circles, and soon a young Italian journalist, Sergio d’Angelo, came calling at Pasternak’s dacha to ask if he would consider having it published in Italy. The proposed publisher was a Communist, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, which would make it more palatable, in d’Angelo’s view. Pasternak wasn’t convinced by the argument, but eventually handed the young man a typescript, adding with a grim laugh, “You are hereby invited to my execution” (translated by d’Angelo as “face the firing squad”).

D’Angelo carried off the prized text, setting off a months-long correspondence between Pasternak and Feltrinelli, carried on clandestinely through a variety of intermediaries, with the active participation of Ivinskaya. Much, but not all of it, was intercepted and copied by the KGB . The Soviet authorities, through the Writers’ Union, brought immense pressure on Pasternak to get the novel back, and the Italian Communist Party put pressure on Feltrinelli. There were even promises of a suitably toned-down version being published in the Soviet Union, but it was too late. Pasternak told Isaiah Berlin, who was appalled by his action and tried to dissuade him, that he was ready to sacrifice his life if necessary. He was so determined that he gave Berlin a copy to take back to England with him, secretly smuggled another copy to Jacqueline de Proyart, a Russian-speaking friend in France, and gave a fourth to George Katkov (a prominent émigré historian also based in England). By now Pasternak almost didn’t care who published his novel, as long as it appeared in print somewhere.

The nature of Pasternak’s anguish, frustration, and joy over the complex negotiations needed to realize his dream can be seen in Paolo Mancosu’s Inside the Zhivago Storm , which gives us the complete correspondence between Pasternak and Feltrinelli for the first time. Pasternak’s torments are paralleled by the young Feltrinelli’s less mortal but still stormy combat with the Italian Communist Party, and their emotional letters add up to a nonfictional epistolary novel that is a treasure house for Pasternak scholars. Feltrinelli rushed the Italian translation of Doctor Zhivago to market in November 1957, and translations into English, French, German, and other languages followed in the spring of 1958.

Anna Akhmatova with Boris Pasternak just after he began writing Doctor Zhivago , 1946

While the Soviet authorities maintained a tightlipped silence on the subject, Doctor Zhivago spent the next six months on the New York Times best-seller list and was an international sensation. It seemed to have everything: peace, war, revolution, civil war, a wide variety of settings, and a huge cast of characters, just like the books of Pasternak’s literary hero, Lev Tolstoy. With an illicit love affair at its center, the novel appeared to roll War and Peace and Anna Karenina into one, but it presented critics with a quandary. Even before it was published, Kornei Chukovsky called it “alien, confusing and removed from my life,” and Akhmatova echoed his verdict. “It is my time, my society, but I don’t recognize it,” she said, “It is a failure of genius.”

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the few critics in the West to agree with them, notoriously derided Doctor Zhivago as “a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences,” 3 and from the literary point of view he was right. 4 But that wasn’t really the point of the novel’s fame or success. Nabokov’s old friend and literary sparring partner, Edmund Wilson, put his finger on the matter (and had the pleasure of contradicting Nabokov once again) when he emphasized Doctor Zhivago ’s political and historical importance, and the symbolic significance of Pasternak writing such a book inside the Soviet Union, publishing it abroad, and surviving. “ Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history,” wrote Wilson. “Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius.”

Content, rather than art, is the key to Doctor Zhivago ’s importance. “Revolutionaries who take the law into their own hands are horrifying, not as criminals, but as machines that have gotten out of control, like a runaway train,” says the autobiographically rooted Zhivago to Lara at one point, and when Lara remarks, “You’ve changed, you know. You used to speak more calmly about the revolution,” he rejoins, “Those who inspired the revolution aren’t at home in anything except change and turmoil…because they haven’t any real capacities, they are ungifted.” Still later he comments:

Revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point of genius. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days…but for decades thereafter, for centuries, the spirit of narrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped as holy.

The novel’s main action ends in 1929, suggesting that the decades of narrowness started then, and it reads like a requiem for Russian politics and Russian culture. Nothing like it had been seen in the Soviet Union since the early 1920s and it’s no wonder the authorities regarded Pasternak and his novel as anti-Soviet.

The CIA quickly came to a similar conclusion. Less than a month after Doctor Zhivago ’s appearance in Italy in November 1957, a CIA memo cited an expert’s view that it was “more important than any other literature which has yet come out of the Soviet Bloc,” and that care should be taken not to harm Pasternak in taking advantage of its publication. In early January the agency received two rolls of microfilm from British intelligence, a photographic replica of Feltrinelli’s original manuscript, and began to ponder how to use them. 5

The timing was propitious, for as Finn and Couvée point out, the CIA had a large number of officials who had strong literary credentials and loved books. They believed in the power of ideas, and agreed with the CIA ’s chief of covert action that “books differ from all other propaganda media primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium.” Crass and reductive as the sentiment may be, it acknowledges an important aspect of literature that cannot be denied. Ironically, the idea seems to have been borrowed from the Soviets themselves, who were guided by Maxim Gorky’s 1934 dictum (itself reflecting centuries of Russian attitudes) that books are weapons, “the most important and most powerful weapons in socialist culture.” The Soviets were already masters of propaganda and the manipulation of culture in the 1930s, as George Kennan, author of containment and the intellectual father of the cold war, well knew.

Kennan’s ideas had led to the foundation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, and in 1956, just before the appearance of Doctor Zhivago , the device of mailing American books and magazines across the iron curtain was beginning to be tried. The next step was a small program to translate Western books into Russian, which functioned alongside a multimillion-dollar enterprise to publish and or distribute thousands of titles in Soviet-controlled countries. Finn and Couvée estimate that up to ten million books and magazines were clandestinely smuggled into the Soviet bloc in this way. It was an effort much less known to the public and much less controversial than cold war cultural activities in the West, although some argue that the problem was the CIA and secrecy itself the offense. The authors respond that in 1950s America no other agency could have done it, for it would have been impossible to get Congress to openly appropriate money for the support of art and culture, especially when most of the money went to institutions and publications with a liberal profile.

The appearance of Doctor Zhivago presented the CIA with a new kind of challenge. It was certain of the book’s “great propaganda value,” but mailing an English translation of the novel into the Soviet Union didn’t seem to promise many dividends, and since it had not yet appeared in Russian, it couldn’t simply be reprinted. It decided to publish its own “black” edition, but that presented problems too. The British asked the CIA not to print the book in America in order not to harm Pasternak, and Pasternak had sent word that no Russian émigrés should be involved either.

The chosen solution was to farm out the job to a New York publisher named Felix Morrow, a former Trotskyite, journalist, and author, passionately anti-Communist, who also had a security clearance. On June 23, 1958, a contract was signed with Morrow requiring him to prepare the Russian manuscript of Doctor Zhivago for typesetting and to produce two sets of photo-offset proofs by July 31. The goal was to have copies of the book printed in Europe in time to distribute them to Soviet visitors to the Brussels International World Fair in September, and also to give copies to sailors on ships bound for the Soviet Union. 6

It was a harebrained scheme and it ran into numerous problems. Morrow welcomed the assignment as “an astonishing and attractive task,” but drove an extremely hard bargain over his fee, blabbed about what he was up to, and couldn’t find a European printer. Failing to blackmail the CIA into buying a large number of printed copies at inflated prices, he sent a copy of the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to an old friend at the University of Michigan Press with a suggestion that they publish it instead. He was convinced, he later wrote, that “the Russian desk at the CIA was, at the least, not much interested in the success of this task” and was dragging its feet. 7 Before long, Michigan was offering copies of a planned edition to members of the US government and to the CIA itself, and officials had to scramble to get the university to hold off.

The reason for the delays was problems in finding a European publisher, where another comedy of errors unfolded. The CIA turned for help to the Dutch intelligence service, BVD . Feltrinelli was rumored to be bringing out a Russian edition with the Dutch academic publishing company Mouton, and when it turned out that Feltrinelli was in no hurry to act, the CIA and BVD decided to go ahead without him. The director of the local branch of Paix et Liberté, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Communist, was asked to bring the proofs to Mouton, and a deal was struck to print a rush edition of Doctor Zhivago of just over a thousand copies (1,160, to be precise). At the last moment a Mouton employee, under the impression that this was the Feltrinelli project, pasted on a slip identifying Feltrinelli as the publisher.

The books were ready by early September, just in time for the Brussels Universal and International Exposition, and about a third were distributed through the Vatican pavilion:

Soon the book’s blue linen covers were found littering the fairgrounds. Some who got the novel were ripping off the cover, dividing the pages, and stuffing them in their pockets to make the book easier to hide.

A CIA memo concluded that “this phase can be considered completed successfully,” though its success was qualified. Feltrinelli was furious that his name had been used and suspected outright fraud, unable to imagine the cause as an innocent misunderstanding. The CIA kept mum, Mouton issued an abject apology and agreed to print an additional five thousand copies for Feltrinelli, and the University of Michigan Press went ahead with its own edition in early 1959.

Pasternak won the Nobel Prize at the end of 1958 and was denounced by the head of the Komsomol, Vladimir Semichastny, as “a pig fouling its own sty” who should be kicked out of the Soviet Union to “breathe capitalist air.” An ailing Pasternak, fearing deportation, rejected the prize, and a year later he died of lung cancer. Ivinskaya was arrested and sentenced for a second time (with her daughter, Irina) to eight years in the Gulag for “foreign currency manipulations,” but released after four. In 1965 David Lean released his blockbuster movie of Doctor Zhivago , starring Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara, which far more people remember than the novel (on Google the movie comes before the book), and in 1978 Ivinskaya published a best-selling memoir of her years with Pasternak.

Since then there has been an avalanche of books on one or another aspect of the Zhivago affair. Mancosu lists over 150 titles in his bibliography; Finn and Couvée list 184. It was Tolstoy’s flawed 2009 book, The Laundered Novel , that set off the subgenre devoted to the machinations of the CIA . The best and most accurate of those accounts before Finn and Couvée is to be found in Mancosu’s chapter two, a tour de force of literary detection worthy of a scholarly Sherlock Holmes. I feel sorry for him over his timing, but the detail he offers, together with the Pasternak–Feltrinelli correspondence, offers a different angle on the episode.

Meanwhile Finn and Couvée have written a fascinating book that is thoroughly researched, extraordinarily accurate in its factual details, judicious in its judgments, and destined to remain the definitive work on the subject for a very long time to come. Though it will be advertised and sold on the basis of the declassified material from the CIA , only two of its sixteen chapters are devoted to that subject; the rest cover every aspect of the creation of Doctor Zhivago and its consequences in rich and convincing detail. I was particularly impressed by their fair treatment of Olga Ivinskaya, who after Pasternak’s death was viciously attacked not only by the government but also by some members of Pasternak’s family and friends. My only wish is that they had delved a little more deeply into the love affair between Pasternak and Ivinskaya and the details of Pasternak’s strange ménage-à-trois, but perhaps that calls for a novelist rather than a journalist.

Also largely missing is an assessment of Pasternak’s historic achievement. Finn and Couvée refer briefly to literary successors such as Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, and Joseph Brodsky, but Pasternak’s feat had epoch-making repercussions in ways that deserve more notice. In sending his book for publication abroad, for example, he deliberately broke Soviet law and acted in a way unthinkable since the punishment of Boris Pilnyak, the last person to do the same, in 1929. Pasternak thus punched a huge hole in the iron curtain and Soviet censorship. By surviving legally unscathed he also set a precedent for behavior that had not been seen since the late 1920s, and Doctor Zhivago became in essence the first serious example of samizdat. Solzhenitsyn once criticized Pasternak for rejecting the Nobel Prize, but it’s likely that without Pasternak, he would have had a far harder time getting One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich published, let alone surviving to win the Nobel Prize himself. Pasternak was the true father of the Soviet dissident movement and singlehandedly influenced the course of the cold war.

As for the CIA , the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russian and the smuggling of copies into the Soviet Union contributed to the novel as a samizdat phenomenon, but it had nothing to do with Pasternak’s fame or him winning the Nobel Prize. The KGB and the Soviet government’s noisy campaign of repression did much more to help than the CIA . It was the CIA ’s future books program that gained most from the experiment. Meanwhile the CIA ’s error-prone approach to its publications hasn’t entirely changed. The book on display in the CIA Museum is not a copy of “the original Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago ,” but a later edition, in paper rather than hard cover, and brought out by an entirely different publisher.

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Michael Scammell is the author of biographies of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler, and has translated many books from Russian. He is now working on a memoir. (April 2016)

The CIA does admit escorted groups of visitors to the museum from time to time, but not the public at large. ↩

Disclosure: I have a copy of the declassified CIA documents as well and was planning to write a book about “the Zhivago affair” myself until Finn and Couvée came along. I occasionally refer to these documents directly rather than via Finn and Couvée’s text. ↩

Nabokov, nine years Pasternak’s junior, has been accused of envying the older writer, and there is probably something to that charge, for as early as 1927 he had criticized the older man’s verse style as clumsy and convoluted. Ironically, when Doctor Zhivago was being translated into English, Nabokov was suggested as a possible translator of the poems, but Pasternak himself turned the notion down, referring to Nabokov’s jealousy as the reason. Finn and Couvée suggest that Nabokov feared Doctor Zhivago would knock Lolita off its perch at the top of the best-seller list, but there could be more to it than that. Lolita is about a pubescent heroine molested and seduced by a much older man, Humbert Humbert, who has married her mother to get access to the daughter. In the opening chapters of Doctor Zhivago , we find a pubescent Lara being molested and then seduced (at the age of fifteen) by a middle-aged lawyer, Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky, who has access to her as her mother’s lover. Another parallel is to be found between the poet, Yuri Zhivago, and another poet, Fyodor Cherdyntsev, in Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift . Is it too fanciful to suggest that Pasternak’s “invitation” to d’Angelo to watch him face “the firing squad,” may have been a subconscious reference to another of Nabokov’s Russian novels, Invitation to a Beheading ? The Russian word for “firing squad” and “beheading” is the same: kazn’ , which means “execution” in its literal sense. ↩

Pasternak himself acknowledged the novel’s deficiencies. “I have lost my artistic coherence and let myself inwardly sag,” he wrote to a young editor when sending him some chapters. “I have written this novel in an unprofessional way…with a dullness and naiveté for which I gave myself both permission and indulgence.” His disregard for form, he said, sprang from a desire to move away from the sophisticated modernism of his youth to a simpler form of realism, and to place a much greater emphasis on clarity of content than before. ↩

An entire mythology has grown up around these microfilms. Feltrinelli at various times complained about CIA “interference,” and referred to a plane he was on being obliged to make an unscheduled landing. From this grew a story that British intelligence, at the request of the CIA , had forced Feltrinelli’s plane from Moscow to Milan to land in Malta, and that agents had removed the typescript of Doctor Zhivago from Feltrinelli’s suitcase and photographed it while Feltrinelli and his fellow passengers cooled their heels in the lounge for two hours (in another version, Feltrinelli was on his way from Italy to Holland). Repeated at different times and by various individuals, the story received its greatest publicity after Tolstoy featured it in his book. Mancosu and others discount the story on the grounds that Feltrinelli never made the journey from Moscow to Milan, and that there were enough copies circulating in Britain for such derring-do not to be necessary. All agree, however, that the CIA got their copy from the British. ↩

Ivan Tolstoy speculated that the reason for the CIA ’s haste was the need to rush out a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago in order for it to be considered by the Nobel Prize committee, and that the CIA had also pressured the committee to give the award to Pasternak. He was wrong on both counts, but this couldn’t be confirmed until the Nobel Foundation’s fifty-year rule of confidentiality expired soon after Tolstoy wrote. ↩

From a letter to Carl R. Proffer, founding editor of Ardis Publishers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sent by Morrow on October 6, 1980; see Mancosu, pp. 115–116. In a later letter, dated October 20, 1980, Morrow added: “The Russian desk people at CIA were inimical to the project…. They were either Russian agents or incredibly stupid.” ↩

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Doctor Zhivago

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Doctor Zhivago , novel by Boris Pasternak , published in Italy in 1957. This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak’s complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.

Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak’s alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks ; wandering throughout Russia, he is unable to take control of his fate, and dies in utter poverty. The poems he leaves behind constitute some of the most beautiful writing in the novel.

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Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Introduction

Boris Pasternak's widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the award-winning translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and to whom, The New York Review of Books declared, ?the English-speaking world is indebted.? � First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy?the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, and Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize a year later under intense pressure from Soviet authorities? Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. � Stunningly rendered in the spirit of Pasternak's original?resurrecting his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone?and including an introduction, textual annotations, and a translators? note, this edition of Doctor Zhivago is destined to become the definitive English translation of our time.

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Doctor Zhivago (The Greatest Historical Novels series)

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Doctor Zhivago (The Greatest Historical Novels series) Imitation Leather

Language English
Publisher Bantam
ISBN-10 0553064118
ISBN-13 978-0553064117
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Product details

Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553064118
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553064117
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds

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Doctor Zhivago

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It may not be the best of David Lean's epics, but Dr. Zhivago is still brilliantly photographed and sweepingly romantic.

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IMAGES

Pasternak 1957
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Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak [pdf]
Doctor Zhivago

COMMENTS

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. ... This is an extremely difficult book to review. It is unlike anything I have ever ...
Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago reviewed
Doctor Zhivago, the novel which climaxes the career of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak, is a major work of fiction; but it is also—and for the moment, perhaps more important—a historic utterance.
The 'Doctor Zhivago' Nobel Dust-up
The New York Times. "Doctor Zhivago" was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review on Sept. 7, 1958: "It is easy to predict that Boris Pasternak's book, one of the most ...
Analysis of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago
Despite its undisputed importance as a social document chronicling a crucial period in Russian and world history, Doctor Zhivago continues to divide critics at the most basic level of how it works, its affinity to the novel tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries, and even the genre to which it belongs. Described as both one of the greatest political novels and one of literature's great ...
Pasternak's Muse: The Real-Life Inspiration for 'Doctor Zhivago'
The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago. By Anna Pasternak. Illustrated. 310 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99. Stalin supposedly called Boris Pasternak a "cloud dweller ...
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
FictionFan July 19, 2017 May 23, 2018 book review, boris pasternak, classics, doctor zhivago, literary fiction, Reading the Russian Revolution Challenge, RRRchallenge, ussr 63 thoughts on " Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak "
Doctor Zhivago (novel)
Doctor Zhivago (/ ʒ ɪ ˈ v ɑː ɡ oʊ / zhiv-AH-goh; [1] Russian: До́ктор Жива́го, IPA: [ˈdoktər ʐɨˈvaɡə]) is a novel by Russian poet, author and composer Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957 in Italy.The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II.
Doctor Zhivago, By Boris Pasternak, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
In his introduction to this new translation of Doctor Zhivago, Richard Pevear quotes from a letter written by Boris Pasternak in English: "living, moving reality in such a rendering must have a ...
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak: Book Review
The doctor was the epitome of "not to decide is a decision.". He just went with whatever situation he found himself in. He had some ideals when he was young that he fought for, but then he became jaded and seemed not to really believe in anything. But I could be wrong about that.
Book Review: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
This new version of Doctor Zhivago is more than a reworking of Russian prose and poetry into English. It is a translation of a great novel from the Cold War era to the remarkably changed circumstances of the 21st century. At every stage of its life, Doctor Zhivago has emerged in shape-changing transformations.
Book Reviews, Sites, Romance, Fantasy, Fiction
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. by Boris Pasternak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 1958. Doctor Zhivago, a modern novel in the great Russian tradition, was barred from publication in the author's own country -- the Soviet Union. It is in Italy and, now, in the United States that this fine work must seek its audience.
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Doctor Zhivago
The story is of Zhivago, but known throughout the book as Yurii Andreievich. From his youth and throughout his life in the turbulent and changing times of Revolutionary Russia, Zhivago presents a character who endures the worst of life's hardships with a strength and unwillingness to give up. ... Doctor Zhivago is the literary achievement of ...
a book review by Tony Bailie: Doctor Zhivago
Dr. Zhivago is a big book, physically and in terms of its themes, multi-stranded storylines and historical backdrop. It is a character-driven novel whose subjects live intense, interweaving lives set against the great sweep of early 20th century Russian events. At its heart is the eponymous Dr. Yuri Zhivago and his relationship with two women ...
Book Review: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
This entry was posted in Book Reviews and tagged Boris Pasternak, Cold War, David Lean, Doctor Zhivago, Nobel Prize, Russia, Ursula K. Le Guin. Bookmark the permalink . ← Book Review: A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History by Dominick Cavallo
Doctor Zhivago (Vintage International)
A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME "One of the very great books of our time." — The New Yorker "Pevear and Volokhonsky have done a masterly job translating what ought to be considered the definitive English edition of Doctor Zhivago." — The New Criterion "A welcome opportunity for anyone who has already read Dr. Zhivago to revisit it and experience a richly rewarding fresh take on an ...
Just finished reading Dr. Zhivago and would love to discuss it
Needless to say, this post contains spoilers. I just finished reading Dr. Zhivago.I'm very interested in the Russian Revolution and the early 20th century in general, and I enjoy large, sprawling epics, so I thought that Dr. Zhivago would be right up my alley! I expected something like a bleaker, Russian East of Eden.. Unfortunately, I was fairly disappointed in this book.
The CIA's 'Zhivago'
Fortunately, Finn and Couvée's book is about far more than the CIA. They cover every aspect of the Zhivago affair in detail, from Pasternak's early life and the origins of his novel to the bombshell of its first publication in 1957, the nature of the CIA 's intervention, and the aftermath for Pasternak and his associates. Continue reading.
Doctor Zhivago (Everyman's Library)
Doctor Zhivago (Everyman's Library) [Pasternak, Boris, Hayward, Max, Harari, Manya, Bayley, John] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Doctor Zhivago (Everyman's Library) ... (Books) Customer Reviews: 4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 2,178 ratings. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. Full content visible, double tap to ...
Doctor Zhivago
Doctor Zhivago, novel by Boris Pasternak, published in Italy in 1957. ... Our editors will review what you've submitted and determine whether to revise the article. ... The book quickly became an international best-seller. Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and ...
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Reading Guide-Book Club Discussion
Introduction (Boris Pasternak's widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the award-winning translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and to whom, The New York Review of Books declared, ?the English-speaking world is indebted.? First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy?the novel was ...
Doctor Zhivago (The Greatest Historical Novels series)
Doctor Zhivago (The Greatest Historical Novels series) on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Doctor Zhivago (The Greatest Historical Novels series) ... There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Dr. Lee D. Carlson. 5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely superb. Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2011.
Doctor Zhivago
Sep 19, 2023 Full Review Bob Halliday Salt Lake Tribune Doctor Zhivago, in the film version, is a work of art to match the novel and even excel it in some respects.

Boris Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago' Should Inspire Reverence

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