Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak smuggled his only novel out of the Soviet Union in 1957, and it was published first in Italy and then internationally to a Nobel Prize that the Soviet state forced him to refuse. Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago is a Moscow doctor and lyric poet whose comfortable life is shattered first by the First World War and then by the October Revolution and its civil war. Across two decades the novel follows him from front-line field hospitals to a partisan camp in the Urals to a quiet death on a tram, hinging on his three-cornered love for his wife Tonya and the vivid, doomed Lara, who comes to embody the country itself. Pasternak's lyric prose turns the Bolshevik upheaval into a vast meditation on art, faith, and love under terror. The 1965 David Lean adaptation made Zhivago and Lara household names.
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From the eve of the 1917 revolution through the Soviet years, doctor and poet Yuri Zhivago is pulled across a transformed Russia, with two women, his wife Tonya and his great love Lara, on either side of him.
Doctor Zhivago is dense, with a large Russian cast, patronymic naming, and lyrical poetic passages. The novel was published in 1957 and reflects a sweeping period of Russian history. Most readers find good translations accessible despite the demands.
Yes. Doctor Zhivago was banned in the Soviet Union from its 1957 publication until 1988. Boris Pasternak was forced to refuse the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature under government pressure. The CIA covertly distributed Russian-language editions during the Cold War.
Doctor Zhivago was written by Boris Pasternak, published in 1957 by Pantheon Books.
Doctor Zhivago is 559 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Doctor Zhivago takes most readers 8 to 12 hours to finish.
Doctor Zhivago is a standalone novel by Boris Pasternak, not part of a series.
Doctor Zhivago is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
