Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

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Original Title: Doctor Zhivago

ISBN: 0679774386
ISBN13: 9780679774389
Autor: Boris Pasternak/Max Hayward (Translator)/ Manya Harari (Translator)/ John Bayley
(Introduction)
Rating: 3.6 of 5 stars (947) counts
Original Format: Paperback, 592 pages
Download Format: PDF, FB2, MOBI, MP3.
Published: March 18th 1997 / by Pantheon / (first published 1957)
Language: English
Genre(s):
Historical Fiction- 629 users
Cultural >Russia- 508 users
Literature >Russian Literature- 334 users
Classics- 314 users
Romance- 220 users
Literature- 218 users

Description:

This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution 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. The poems he writes constitute
some of the most beautiful writing in the novel.

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Other Editions:
- Doctor Zhivago (Hardcover)

- Doctor Zhivago (Hardcover)

- Doctor Zhivago (Paperback)

- Doctor Zhivago (Paperback)

- (Paperback)

Books By Author:

- Selected Poems
 - The Poems of Doctor Zhivago

- Letters, Summer 1926

- My Sister - Life

- The Last Summer

Books In The Series:

Related Books On Our Site:

- Life and Fate

- Children of the Arbat (Arbat Tetralogy, #1)

- Cancer Ward

- Red Cavalry
- And Quiet Flows the Don

- Oblomov

- Envy

- Sofia Petrovna
- Generations of Winter

- The Golovlyov Family

- The White Guard

- The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin

- The Collected Stories

- Selected Poems

- A Hero of Our Time

- Spring Torrents
 - The Double and The Gambler

- Nervous People and Other Satires

Rewiews:

Nov 26, 2014

Nataliya
Rated it: liked it
Shelves: russian-classics, 2014-reads
There was no way I could ever escape reading Doctor Zhivago. After all, I'm a proud daughter of a
literature teacher; this book earned the Nobel Prize for Boris Pasternak; and it has been staring at
me from the top of my to-read pile for years with quiet accusation.
And so, reader, I finally read it.
Doctor Zhivago is an interesting novel. It is very character-centered but is absolutely *not*
character-driven. It is an epochal novel focused on the particularly turbulent, violent and
uncertain but
There was no way I could ever escape reading Doctor Zhivago. After all, I'm a proud daughter of a
literature teacher; this book earned the Nobel Prize for Boris Pasternak; and it has been staring at
me from the top of my to-read pile for years with quiet accusation.
And so, reader, I finally read it.
Doctor Zhivago is an interesting novel. It is very character-centered but is absolutely *not*
character-driven. It is an epochal novel focused on the particularly turbulent, violent and
uncertain but yet future-defining era in Russian history - the time frame around the Russian
Revolution and the following years of brutality and confusion in the Russian Civil War. The driving
forces of the story are the frequently senseless and almost always cruel historical events, a
greater force against which the efforts and intentions and agency itself of the characters are
pathetically, frustratingly helpless and futile. It is really a story of individual fates trampled
under the relentlessly rolling forward bulldozer of history.What may surprise some people
who via the phenomenon of 'cultural osmosis' may know of this story as one of the greatest stories
of forbidden and doomed love ever written (or something of similar sort, a misunderstanding
perhaps perpetuated by the 1960s screen adaptation of this book), the love story is a quite small
part of the overall plot. Don't read it for the pangs of unrequited love or the tension of the love
triangle - the disappointment is sure to come if those are your expectations.Boris Pasternak, with
the bravery not encouraged in the Soviet Union, seemed to be not only acutely aware of the
historical forces relentlessly driving the lives of his compatriots but also - which was definitely
unacceptable and a few years prior to the completion of the novel, under the ever-increasing
paranoia of Josef Stalin's rule, would have been in the best-case scenario punished by quite a few
years in GULAG concentration camps in the depths of Siberia - recognized the absolute
senselessness of so much if what had happened. His courage in expressing such views paid off in
the form Nobel Prize that he was successfully pressured to reject back in 1958; the Nobel Prize
that was given as we know now not just for the merits of the novel itself but for what it represented
- a daring slap in the face of the Soviet system both despised and feared in the Western world.
While I'm at it, I'd like to make sure I get across that while being quite skeptical about the
October Socialist Revolution and its consequences, Pasternak was definitely not even
close to being starry-eyed or wearing rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia when it came to the
old way of living in Russia, the world shattered by the events of the revolution. He never
leaves a doubt that the old world order needed to be changed, that the change was both
necessary and organically expected; but the direction the change took was painfully brutal and,
perhaps, less than ideal, and those who have suffered from such a radical change were perhaps
the best people Russia had at that time - but their value has not made them any less vulnerable to
the unrelenting march of time and dictatorship of proletariat.
"It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each
other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity
to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same
thing?"Yes, Pasternak clearly had strong views on what has happened and continued to happen.
No surprise he used his novel to express them. Therefore you do get pages and pages of
beautifully expressed opinions in the form of passionate speeches. These pages are both
wonderful since they are so insightful and interesting and full of understanding of internal and
external conflicts that go into the formation of these opinions - as well as actually detrimental to the
novel in the way we usually think of novels, since there is little dialog as such, most of it
replaced by passionate oration. These speeches hinder the narrative flow and introduce early
on the feeling of artificialness, never allowing you to forget that this novel is a construction that
serves the author's purpose rather than being an organic story.
"No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing.
Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But
revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to
confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole
upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is
worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries."
The character development also suffers from the focus on the greater external events. I could
never shake off the feeling that the characters were present as merely the vehicles for driving the
story to where the author wanted it to go; they never developed into real people for me, instead
remaining the illustrations of Pasternak's points and the mouthpieces for his ideas. In short, to me
even 600 pages in, they remained little but obedient marionettes. Besides, what I found a bit
distracting and ringing of contrivance was the sheer amount of coincidences and unbelievable run-
ins into each other that all his characters experienced in the vast reaches of the Russian empire
with more frequency that one would expect from neighbors in a tiny village. The web of destiny
with these improbable consequences tends to disintegrate into the strings holding up puppets, and
that's unfortunate in such a monumental book.
And Pasternak's prose - it left me torn. On one hand, his descriptions are apt and beautiful,
making scenes come to life with exceptional vividness. On the other hand, his descriptors and
sentences frequently tend to clash, marring otherwise beautiful picture. The reason these
occurrences stand out so much to me is perhaps the knowledge of Pasternak's absolute
brilliance as a poet, so easily seen in the collection of poems accompanying this novel. It's
amazing to me to see the level of mastery he shows in his verse - the poem 'A Winter Night'
colloquially known as simply "The Candle Burned" after its famous refrain is one of the best poems
I know, honestly, and "Hamlet" is made of pure perfection - and therefore a bit disappointing to see
it not always repeated in his prose.Sadly, despite my way-too-long obsessive internet search I
could not come across a translation of these poems that came even close to doing justice to their
brilliance. It's very unfortunate, but I guess some things need to be experienced only in the
original. A good reason to learn Russian, right?And yet despite the imperfections and the
unevenness there is still something in this novel that reflects the genius talent that created it.
There is still something that did not let me put this book aside even when I realized I did not love it
as much as I had hoped. The greatness is still there, despite the flaws, and it remains something
to be admired.
3/5 stars.
102 likes
16 comments
David Smith
I read this about 50 years ago, just after I saw the movie, and still remember vividly the
conversation between Antipov and Zhivago. Becoming radicali
I read this about 50 years ago, just after I saw the movie, and still remember vividly the
conversation between Antipov and Zhivago. Becoming radicalized in my own time I found
Pasternak's philosophical exposition compelling and certainly helped to create my nuanced view
of revolution. I agree that the film missed the essential love between Pavel and Lara while
focusing on Yuri and Lara.
While I read it in English, I still found the poetry compelling. I would love to see it in Russian.

Jan 31, 2016 08:57PM

Alex
I don't know why you felt the need to add that your dad is a literature teacher... My dad's not a
literature teacher, so does that mean I can't read t
I don't know why you felt the need to add that your dad is a literature teacher... My dad's not a
literature teacher, so does that mean I can't read this book? I started reading your review and had
to stop cause of how dramatic, and over the top you sound & not to mention arrogant...

Nov 28, 2016 04:00PM