Doctor Zhivago

What Doctor Zhivago is about

Yuri Zhivago is a Moscow doctor and poet whose life is overturned by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed. Married to Tonya, the daughter of the family that raised him, he falls in love with Lara, a nurse whose own life has been shaped by the predatory lawyer Komarovsky and by her husband Pasha, who becomes the ruthless Red commander Strelnikov. Zhivago's family flees Moscow's hunger to an estate called Varykino in the Urals; he is conscripted by partisans, escapes, and is reunited with Lara for a brief time before history separates them again. The novel ends with the poems Zhivago wrote, presented as his legacy.

Pasternak meant it as a portrait of how the Revolution looked to a private man who valued individual life, love and art above politics. That point of view, rather than any direct attack on the Soviet state, is what made it unpublishable.

The ban, in full

In 1956 the literary magazine Novy Mir rejected the manuscript with a long letter explaining that it rejected the spirit of the Revolution. Pasternak had already given a copy to Sergio D'Angelo, a scout for the Italian Communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, reportedly saying the visitor was invited to watch him face the firing squad. Soviet officials pressed Feltrinelli to return the manuscript; he refused, and published the novel in Italian in Milan in November 1957. Translations followed around the world. The CIA, as documents released in 2014 confirmed, secretly printed a Russian-language edition and handed copies to Soviet visitors at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.

In October 1958 Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Soviet press attacked him, the Writers' Union expelled him, and there were calls to deport him. Within days he sent a telegram declining the prize. He died at his dacha in Peredelkino in May 1960. His companion Olga Ivinskaya, often called a model for Lara, was then sent to a labour camp. The novel was published in the Soviet Union only in 1988, in Novy Mir, and in 1989 Pasternak's son collected the Nobel medal in Stockholm.

About Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) was the son of a painter and a concert pianist and was known first as a poet. During Stalin's purges he survived while many friends did not, partly by working as a translator; his translations of Shakespeare and Goethe are still read in Russia. Doctor Zhivago, which he worked on for about ten years, was his only novel.

Which edition to read

The 1958 English translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari was the standard for decades. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky published a newer translation in 2010. Both include Zhivago's poems.

Reception and legacy

The novel became an international bestseller. David Lean's 1965 film, with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, was one of the most successful films of the decade. The "Pasternak affair" remains one of the best-known cases of Soviet literary censorship.

Questions

Why was Doctor Zhivago banned in the Soviet Union?

Because it questioned the Revolution's value from the point of view of an individual, and was seen as anti-Soviet.

Did Pasternak accept the Nobel Prize?

He accepted at first, then declined under official pressure. More: books banned in the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago.