Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak (1957)
“A poet-doctor's struggle to remain human in a century that demanded he become a cog — written by a man the Soviet state tried to destroy for writing it.”
At a Glance
Yuri Zhivago, an orphaned poet-physician, comes of age in pre-revolutionary Moscow, marries the devoted Tonya Gromeko, and is swept into the cataclysms of World War I and the Russian Revolution. He falls into an all-consuming love affair with Lara Antipova, a woman marked by her own traumatic past with the predatory Komarovsky. Torn between duty and passion, between art and survival, Zhivago is conscripted by Red partisans, separated from both women, and watches his world disintegrate. He returns to Moscow a broken man, dies of a heart attack on a streetcar, and leaves behind a cycle of poems that outlast everything the revolution tried to build. Years later, his friends discover the poems — and through them, Zhivago's life achieves the permanence that history denied him.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Doctor Zhivago could not be published in the Soviet Union and was smuggled to Italy in 1956, where it appeared in 1957. It became an international sensation — the most widely read Russian novel since Tolstoy. The CIA covertly helped distribute Russian-language editions as Cold War propaganda. Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature but was forced to decline under Soviet pressure. He was expelled from the Writers' Union and publicly denounced. The novel was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988 — 28 years after Pasternak's death. It is now recognized as one of the supreme achievements of twentieth-century literature.
Diction Profile
High literary register — philosophical meditation interwoven with sensory naturalism, rendered through multiple English translations that attempt to capture Pasternak's poetic prose
Extremely high