doctor zhivago book review

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.

Giving “Doctor Zhivago” Another Chance

By christine jacobson march 5, 2020.

He saw her almost from behind, her back half turned. She was wearing a light-colored checkered blouse tied with a belt, and was reading eagerly, with self-abandon, as children do, her head slightly inclined towards her right shoulder. Now and then she lapsed into thought, raising her eyes to the ceiling or narrowing them and peering somewhere far ahead of her, and then again, propped on her elbow, her head resting on her hand, in a quick sweeping movement she penciled some notes in her notebook.

He could see her profile, half turned away from him. She was wearing a light-coloured check blouse with a belt, and was immersed in what she was reading, oblivious of everything else, like a child. Her head was bent a little to one side, towards her right shoulder. From time to time she looked up at the ceiling, lost in thought, or screwed up her eyes and stared straight ahead; then she would lean her elbows back on the table, prop her head on one hand and copy something down into her notebook with a brisk, sweeping flourish of her pencil.

What is it that terrifies us — thunder and lightning? No, it’s sidelong glances and whispers. Life is full of treachery and ambiguity. A single thread is as fragile as gossamer, pull it and it snaps; but try to get out of the web and you only tangle yourself up worse. And the mean and weak rule over the strong.

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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 .

Buy Doctor Zhivago at

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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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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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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, 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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Doctor Zhivago Paperback – Oct. 4 2011

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First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, 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, the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. Pevear and Volokhonsky masterfully restore the spirit of Pasternak's original—his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone—in this beautiful translation of a classic of world literature.

• ISBN-10 0307390950
• ISBN-13 978-0307390950
• Edition Reprint
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date Oct. 4 2011
• Language English
• Dimensions 13.18 x 2.87 x 20.35 cm
• Print length 704 pages
• See all details

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About the author.

A poet, translator, and novelist, Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890. In 1958 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but, facing threats from Soviet authorities, refused the prize. He lived in virtual exile in an artists’ community near Moscow until his death in 1960.

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Part One   The Five O'Clock Express   1   They walked and walked and sang "Memory Eternal," and when they stopped, it seemed that the song went on being repeated by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind.   Passers-by made way for the cortège, counted the wreaths, crossed themselves.  The curious joined the procession, asked:  "Who's being buried?"  "Zhivago," came the answer.  "So that's it.  Now I see."  "Not him.  Her."  "It's all the same.  God rest her soul.  A rich funeral."   The last minutes flashed by, numbered, irrevocable.  "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world, and those that dwell therein."  The priest, tracing a cross, threw a handful of earth onto Marya Nikolaevna.  They sang "With the souls of the righteous."  A terrible bustle began.  The coffin was closed, nailed shut, lowered in.  A rain of clods drummed down as four shovels hastily filled the grave.  Over it a small mound rose.  A ten-year-old boy climbed onto it.    Only in the state of torpor and insensibility that usually comes at the end of a big funeral could it have seemed that the boy wanted to speak over his mother's grave.   He raised his head and looked around from that height at the autumn wastes and the domes of the monastery with an absent gaze.  His snub-nosed face became distorted.  His neck stretched out.  If a wolf cub had raised his head with such a movement, it would have been clear that he was about to howl.  Covering his face with his hands, the boy burst into sobs.  A cloud flying towards him began to lash his hands and face with the wet whips of a cold downpour.  A man in black, with narrow, tight-fitting, gathered sleeves, approached the grave.  This was the deceased woman's brother and the weeping boy's uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, a priest defrocked at his own request.  He went up to the boy and led him out of the cemetery.   2   They spent the night in one of the monastery guest rooms, allotted to the uncle as an old acquaintance.  It was the eve of the Protection.  The next day he and his uncle were to go far to the south, to one of the provincial capitals on the Volga, where Father Nikolai worked for a publisher who brought out a local progressive newspaper.  The train tickets had been bought, the luggage was tied up and standing in the cell.  From the nearby station the wind carried the plaintive whistling of engines maneuvering in the distance.   Towards evening it turned very cold.  The two ground-floor windows gave onto the corner of an unsightly kitchen garden surrounded by yellow acacia bushes, onto the frozen puddles of the road going past, and onto the end of the cemetery where Marya Nikolaevna had been buried that afternoon.  The kitchen garden was empty, except for a few moiré patches of cabbage, blue from the cold.  When the wind gusted, the leafless acacia bushes thrashed about as if possessed and flattened themselves to the road.   During the night Yura was awakened by a tapping at the window.  The dark cell was supernaturally lit up by a fluttering white light.  In just his nightshirt, Yura ran to the window and pressed his face to the cold glass.   Beyond the window there was no road, no cemetery, no kitchen garden.  A blizzard was raging outside, the air was smoky with snow.  One might have thought the storm noticed Yura and, knowing how frightening it was, reveled in the impression it made on him.  It whistled and howled and tried in every way possible to attract Yura's attention.  From the sky endless skeins of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet.   The blizzard was alone in the world, nothing rivalled it.    Yura's first impulse, when he got down from the windowsill, was to get dressed and run outside to start doing something.  He was afraid now that the monastery cabbage would be buried and never dug out, now that mama would be snowed under and would be helpless to resist going still deeper and further away from him into the ground.   Again it ended in tears.  His uncle woke up, spoke to him of Christ and comforted him, then yawned, went to the window, and fell to thinking.  They began to dress.  It was getting light.   3   While his mother was alive, Yura did not know that his father had abandoned them long ago, had gone around various towns in Siberia and abroad, carousing and debauching, and that he had long ago squandered and thrown to the winds the millions of their fortune.  Yura was always told that he was in Petersburg or at some fair, most often the one in Irbit.    But then his mother, who had always been sickly, turned out to have consumption.  She began going for treatment to the south of France or to northern Italy, where Yura twice accompanied her.  Thus, in disorder and amidst perpetual riddles, Yura spent his childhood, often in the hands of strangers, who changed all the time.  He became used to these changes, and in such eternally incoherent circumstances his father's absence did not surprise him.   As a little boy, he had still caught that time when the name he bore was applied to a host of different things.  There was the Zhivago factory, the Zhivago bank, the Zhivago buildings, a way of tying and pinning a necktie with a Zhivago tie-pin, and even some sweet, round-shaped cake, a sort of baba au rhum, called a Zhivago, and at one time in Moscow you could shout to a cabby:  "To Zhivago!" just like "To the devil's backyard!" and he would carry you off in his sleigh to a fairy-tale kingdom.  A quiet park surrounded you.  Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost.  Their cawing carried, loud as the crack of a tree limb.  From the new buildings beyond the clearing, pure-bred dogs came running across the road.  Lights were lit there.  Evening was falling.    Suddenly it all flew to pieces.  They were poor.   4   In the summer of 1903, Yura and his uncle were riding in a tarantass and pair over the fields to Duplyanka, the estate of Kologrivov, the silk manufacturer and great patron of the arts, to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, a pedagogue and popularizer of useful knowledge.   It was the feast of the Kazan Mother of God, the thick of the wheat harvest.  Either because it was lunchtime or on account of the feast day, there was not a soul in the fields.  The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners.  Birds circled over the fields.  Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you stared long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes.   "And these," Nikolai Nikolaevich asked Pavel, a handyman and watchman at the publishing house, who was sitting sideways on the box, stooping and crossing his legs, as a sign that he was not a regular coachman and driving was not his calling, "are these the landowner's or the peasants'?"    "Them's the master's," Pavel replied, lighting up, "and them there," having lighted up and inhaled, he jabbed with the butt of the whip handle towards the other side and said after a long pause, "them there's ours.  Gone to sleep, eh?" he scolded the horses every so often, glancing at their tails and rumps out of the corner of his eye, like an engineer watching a pressure gauge.    But the horses pulled like all horses in the world; that is, the shaft horse ran with the innate directness of an artless nature, while the outrunner seemed to the uncomprehending to be an arrant idler, who only knew how to arch its neck like a swan and do a squatting dance to the jingling of the harness bells, which its own leaps set going.    Nikolai Nikolaevich was bringing Voskoboinikov the proofs of his little book on the land question, which, in view of increased pressure from the censorship, the publisher had asked him to revise.   "Folk are acting up in the district," said Nikolai Nikolaevich.  "In the Pankovo area they cut a merchant's throat and a zemstvo man had his stud burned down.  What do you think of that?  What are they saying in your village?"   But it turned out that Pavel took an even darker view of things than the censor who was restraining Voskoboinikov's agrarian passions.   "What're they saying?  Folk got free and easy.  Spoiled, they say.  Can you do that with our kind?  Give our muzhiks the head, they'll crush each other, it's God's truth.  Gone to sleep, eh?"   This was the uncle and nephew's second trip to Duplyanka. Yura thought he remembered the way, and each time the fields spread out wide, with woods embracing them in front and behind in a narrow border, it seemed to Yura that he recognized the place where the road should turn right, and at the turn there would appear and after a moment vanish the seven-mile panorama of Kologrivovo, with the river glistening in the distance and the railroad running beyond it.  But he kept being mistaken.  Fields were succeeded by fields.  Again and again they were embraced by woods.  The succession of these open spaces was tuned to a vast scale.  You wanted to dream and think about the future.   Not one of the books that were later to make Nikolai Nikolaevich famous had yet been written.  But his thoughts were already defined.  He did not know how near his hour was.    Soon he was to appear among the representatives of the literature of that time, university professors and philosophers of the revolution – this man who had thought over all their themes and who, apart from terminology, had nothing in common with them.  The whole crowd of them held to some sort of dogma and contented themselves with words and appearances, but Father Nikolai was a priest who had gone through Tolstoyism and revolution and kept going further all the time.  He thirsted for a wingedly material thought, which would trace a distinct, unhypocritical path in its movement and would change something in the world for the better, and which would be noticeable even to a child or an ignoramus, like a flash of lightning or a roll of thunder.  He thirsted for the new.   Yura felt good with his uncle.  He resembled his mother.  He was a free spirit, as she had been, with no prejudice against anything inhabitual.  Like her, he had an aristocratic feeling of equality with all that lived.  He understood everything at first glance, just as she had, and was able to express his thoughts in the form in which they came to him at the first moment, while they were alive and had not lost their meaning.   Yura was glad that his uncle was taking him to Duplyanka.  It was very beautiful there, and the picturesqueness of the place also reminded him of his mother, who had loved nature and had often taken him on walks with her.  Besides that, Yura was pleased that he would again meet Nika Dudorov, a high-school boy who lived at Voskoboinikov's and probably despised him for being two years younger, and who, when greeting him, pulled his hand down hard and bowed his head so low that the hair fell over his forehead, covering half his face.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (Oct. 4 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 704 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307390950
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307390950
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 488 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.18 x 2.87 x 20.35 cm
• #580 in Military Historical Fiction
• #1,499 in War Fiction (Books)
• #1,679 in War & Military Action & Adventure

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From Russia, With Love

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

January 31, 2024 by jeverett15 1 Comment

I went into Doctor Zhivago with no small amount of trepidation, not just because of its length and complex plot, but because of my history with this edition’s translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In our previous encounters, I have been stymied by their translations, which always seem clunky and impenetrable to me. They ruined my experience reading The Master and Margherita, and several times since I’ve abandoned plans to read one Russian classic or another because the only translation available was theirs. Because Doctor Zhivago had been high on my list for so long, I decided to give Pevear and Volokhonsky another chance. I regret that decision.

I have found myself nodding along with recognition anyway at pieces that are critical of the Pevear and Volokhonsky approach. In short, they prioritize accuracy to the exclusion all else, including shades of meaning and artistic rendering. But perhaps the problem is not just with the translation. In this very long book, titled Doctor Zhivago, I never really got a feel for the character of Yuri Zhivago. Yuri is a physician and a poet whose career and life are thrown into chaos by the political turmoil of early 20th century Russia. As he tries to do good work in his medical practice and come to an understanding about human nature through his poetry, Yuri also tries to be a good family man to his wife Tonya and their children. Besides the Russian Revolution, the other complication in Yuri’s life is his deep attraction to Larissa Antipova, whom he first meets when the two are children and keeps encountering over and over again, all across Russia.

I have always heard Pasternak’s novel described as a great love story, but I have to say I found that aspect severely lacking. Putting aside questions of infidelity and its impact on the character’s likeability, the novel’s relatively few scenes between Yuri and Larissa are marred by dreadful dialogue. Here again the translation issue may be rearing its ugly head. It’s hard to imagine any two people on Earth talking to each other in the manner Yuri and Larissa do, let alone two characters supposedly hopelessly in love.

It’s definitely possible that I failed this book as a reader. I don’t really know much about Russian history, and Pasternak doesn’t exactly hold your hand. It was difficult for me to keep track of which side of the conflict characters were on, and what was going on in at the time of the novel’s events. There are precious few explicit references to dates or political opinions, and though there are copious notes describing the various factions and important events, these did not much help me. I also, as ever when it comes to Russian novels, found it difficult to keep track of the minor characters to the confusing proliferation of names, between the characters full names, patronyms and nicknames being used interchangeably.

I so badly wanted to like Doctor Zhivago. I find the story of it being smuggled out of the Soviet Union and Pasternak being unable to accept his Nobel Prize in person so fascinating. But whether it’s appeal was lost in translation or simply wasted on a dunderhead like me, I have to admit that Doctor Zhivago just didn’t work for me.

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The Kenyon Review

Winter 1959 • Vol. XXI No. 1 • Book Reviews | Toggle Table of Contents

Doctor Zhivago as a Novel

By Richard D. Stern , translated by Max Hayward , Manya Harari , and Bernard Guilbert Guerney

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Doctor Zhivago

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• Swarthmore College - Sibelan Forrester - 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.

California Literary Review

Book review: doctor zhivago by boris pasternak.

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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 Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 19, 2010

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.

• Print length 544 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pantheon
• Publication date October 19, 2010
• Dimensions 6.5 x 1.6 x 9.55 inches
• ISBN-10 0307377695
• ISBN-13 978-0307377692
• See all details

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About the author.

A poet, translator, and novelist, Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890. In 1958 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but, facing threats from Soviet authorities, refused the prize. He lived in virtual exile in an artists’ community near Moscow until his death in 1960.   Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are the award-winning translators of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, among many other works of Russian literature. They are married and live in France.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One   The Five O'Clock Express   1   They walked and walked and sang "Memory Eternal,"1 and when they stopped, it seemed that the song went on being repeated by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind.   Passers-by made way for the cortège, counted the wreaths, crossed themselves.  The curious joined the procession, asked:  "Who's being buried?"  "Zhivago," came the answer.  "So that's it.  Now I see."  "Not him.  Her."  "It's all the same.  God rest her soul.  A rich funeral."   The last minutes flashed by, numbered, irrevocable.  "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world, and those that dwell therein."  The priest, tracing a cross, threw a handful of earth onto Marya Nikolaevna.  They sang "With the souls of the righteous."  A terrible bustle began.  The coffin was closed, nailed shut, lowered in.  A rain of clods drummed down as four shovels hastily filled the grave.  Over it a small mound rose.  A ten-year-old boy climbed onto it.    Only in the state of torpor and insensibility that usually comes at the end of a big funeral could it have seemed that the boy wanted to speak over his mother's grave.   He raised his head and looked around from that height at the autumn wastes and the domes of the monastery with an absent gaze.  His snub-nosed face became distorted.  His neck stretched out.  If a wolf cub had raised his head with such a movement, it would have been clear that he was about to howl.  Covering his face with his hands, the boy burst into sobs.  A cloud flying towards him began to lash his hands and face with the wet whips of a cold downpour.  A man in black, with narrow, tight-fitting, gathered sleeves, approached the grave.  This was the deceased woman's brother and the weeping boy's uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, a priest defrocked at his own request.  He went up to the boy and led him out of the cemetery.   2   They spent the night in one of the monastery guest rooms, allotted to the uncle as an old acquaintance.  It was the eve of the Protection. 2   The next day he and his uncle were to go far to the south, to one of the provincial capitals on the Volga, where Father Nikolai worked for a publisher who brought out a local progressive newspaper.  The train tickets had been bought, the luggage was tied up and standing in the cell.  From the nearby station the wind carried the plaintive whistling of engines maneuvering in the distance.   Towards evening it turned very cold.  The two ground-floor windows gave onto the corner of an unsightly kitchen garden surrounded by yellow acacia bushes, onto the frozen puddles of the road going past, and onto the end of the cemetery where Marya Nikolaevna had been buried that afternoon.  The kitchen garden was empty, except for a few moiré patches of cabbage, blue from the cold.  When the wind gusted, the leafless acacia bushes thrashed about as if possessed and flattened themselves to the road.   During the night Yura was awakened by a tapping at the window.  The dark cell was supernaturally lit up by a fluttering white light.  In just his nightshirt, Yura ran to the window and pressed his face to the cold glass.   Beyond the window there was no road, no cemetery, no kitchen garden.  A blizzard was raging outside, the air was smoky with snow.  One might have thought the storm noticed Yura and, knowing how frightening it was, reveled in the impression it made on him.  It whistled and howled and tried in every way possible to attract Yura's attention.  From the sky endless skeins of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet.   The blizzard was alone in the world, nothing rivalled it.    Yura's first impulse, when he got down from the windowsill, was to get dressed and run outside to start doing something.  He was afraid now that the monastery cabbage would be buried and never dug out, now that mama would be snowed under and would be helpless to resist going still deeper and further away from him into the ground.   Again it ended in tears.  His uncle woke up, spoke to him of Christ and comforted him, then yawned, went to the window, and fell to thinking.  They began to dress.  It was getting light.   3   While his mother was alive, Yura did not know that his father had abandoned them long ago, had gone around various towns in Siberia and abroad, carousing and debauching, and that he had long ago squandered and thrown to the winds the millions of their fortune.  Yura was always told that he was in Petersburg or at some fair, most often the one in Irbit.    But then his mother, who had always been sickly, turned out to have consumption.  She began going for treatment to the south of France or to northern Italy, where Yura twice accompanied her.  Thus, in disorder and amidst perpetual riddles, Yura spent his childhood, often in the hands of strangers, who changed all the time.  He became used to these changes, and in such eternally incoherent circumstances his father's absence did not surprise him.   As a little boy, he had still caught that time when the name he bore was applied to a host of different things.  There was the Zhivago factory, the Zhivago bank, the Zhivago buildings, a way of tying and pinning a necktie with a Zhivago tie-pin, and even some sweet, round-shaped cake, a sort of baba au rhum, called a Zhivago, and at one time in Moscow you could shout to a cabby:  "To Zhivago!" just like "To the devil's backyard!" and he would carry you off in his sleigh to a fairy-tale kingdom.  A quiet park surrounded you.  Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost.  Their cawing carried, loud as the crack of a tree limb.  From the new buildings beyond the clearing, pure-bred dogs came running across the road.  Lights were lit there.  Evening was falling.    Suddenly it all flew to pieces.  They were poor.   4   In the summer of 1903, Yura and his uncle were riding in a tarantass and pair over the fields to Duplyanka, the estate of Kologrivov, the silk manufacturer and great patron of the arts, to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, a pedagogue and popularizer of useful knowledge.   It was the feast of the Kazan Mother of God, 3  the thick of the wheat harvest.  Either because it was lunchtime or on account of the feast day, there was not a soul in the fields.  The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners.  Birds circled over the fields.  Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you stared long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes.   "And these," Nikolai Nikolaevich asked Pavel, a handyman and watchman at the publishing house, who was sitting sideways on the box, stooping and crossing his legs, as a sign that he was not a regular coachman and driving was not his calling, "are these the landowner's or the peasants'?"    "Them's the master's," Pavel replied, lighting up, "and them there," having lighted up and inhaled, he jabbed with the butt of the whip handle towards the other side and said after a long pause, "them there's ours.  Gone to sleep, eh?" he scolded the horses every so often, glancing at their tails and rumps out of the corner of his eye, like an engineer watching a pressure gauge.    But the horses pulled like all horses in the world; that is, the shaft horse ran with the innate directness of an artless nature, while the outrunner seemed to the uncomprehending to be an arrant idler, who only knew how to arch its neck like a swan and do a squatting dance to the jingling of the harness bells, which its own leaps set going.    Nikolai Nikolaevich was bringing Voskoboinikov the proofs of his little book on the land question, which, in view of increased pressure from the censorship, the publisher had asked him to revise.   "Folk are acting up in the district," said Nikolai Nikolaevich.  "In the Pankovo area they cut a merchant's throat and a zemstvo man 4  had his stud burned down.  What do you think of that?  What are they saying in your village?"   But it turned out that Pavel took an even darker view of things than the censor who was restraining Voskoboinikov's agrarian passions.   "What're they saying?  Folk got free and easy.  Spoiled, they say.  Can you do that with our kind?  Give our muzhiks the head, they'll crush each other, it's God's truth.  Gone to sleep, eh?"   This was the uncle and nephew's second trip to Duplyanka. Yura thought he remembered the way, and each time the fields spread out wide, with woods embracing them in front and behind in a narrow border, it seemed to Yura that he recognized the place where the road should turn right, and at the turn there would appear and after a moment vanish the seven-mile panorama of Kologrivovo, with the river glistening in the distance and the railroad running beyond it.  But he kept being mistaken.  Fields were succeeded by fields.  Again and again they were embraced by woods.  The succession of these open spaces was tuned to a vast scale.  You wanted to dream and think about the future.   Not one of the books that were later to make Nikolai Nikolaevich famous had yet been written.  But his thoughts were already defined.  He did not know how near his hour was.    Soon he was to appear among the representatives of the literature of that time, university professors and philosophers of the revolution – this man who had thought over all their themes and who, apart from terminology, had nothing in common with them.  The whole crowd of them held to some sort of dogma and contented themselves with words and appearances, but Father Nikolai was a priest who had gone through Tolstoyism and revolution5 and kept going further all the time.  He thirsted for a wingedly material thought, which would trace a distinct, unhypocritical path in its movement and would change something in the world for the better, and which would be noticeable even to a child or an ignoramus, like a flash of lightning or a roll of thunder.  He thirsted for the new.   Yura felt good with his uncle.  He resembled his mother.  He was a free spirit, as she had been, with no prejudice against anything inhabitual.  Like her, he had an aristocratic feeling of equality with all that lived.  He understood everything at first glance, just as she had, and was able to express his thoughts in the form in which they came to him at the first moment, while they were alive and had not lost their meaning.   Yura was glad that his uncle was taking him to Duplyanka.  It was very beautiful there, and the picturesqueness of the place also reminded him of his mother, who had loved nature and had often taken him on walks with her.  Besides that, Yura was pleased that he would again meet Nika Dudorov, a high-school boy who lived at Voskoboinikov's and probably despised him for being two years younger, and who, when greeting him, pulled his hand down hard and bowed his head so low that the hair fell over his forehead, covering half his face.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; First Edition (October 19, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307377695
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307377692
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.95 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.6 x 9.55 inches
• #142 in Russian & Soviet Literature (Books)
• #10,511 in Classic Literature & Fiction
• #21,283 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Customers say

Customers find the subject matter interesting and advanced reading. They also delight in the storyline, saying it's disturbing and visual. Opinions are mixed on the author, with some finding him strong in description and characterization, while others say he's not a good author. Readers disagree on the writing and content, with others finding it beautiful and easy to read, while other find the dialogue tough and choppy. They have mixed feelings about the characters, with one finding them engaging and the other confusing.

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Customers find the storyline delightful, epic, ambitious, and one of the big historical novels of the 20th century. They also say the book follows the movie well, but there are some differences. Readers also describe the story as fascinating, heart wrenching, and disturbing.

"...This (petty) issue aside, I was profoundly moved by the beauty of the story and the struggle Zhivago had with himself, torn between his love for..." Read more

"...The book follows the movie well , but there are some differences...." Read more

"...This is a story well worth the reading today.Michael Andrew Marsden – The North Idaho Ghost Writer" Read more

"...and book itself, Doctor Zhivago has a sprawling, epic and expansive feel to the narrative ...." Read more

Customers find the book's subject matter interesting, informative, and thoughtful. They appreciate the biographical notes and appendices, which provide a marvelous retrospective of the narrative arc. Readers also say the book is definitely advanced reading and not for novices.

"...They are excellent, not only because they are informative but also because they are judicious, in that P&V do not go overboard annotating..." Read more

"...at the end of the book was powerful, beautiful and provided a marvelous retrospetive of the narrative arc. For this, I add a star._..." Read more

"...its turgid nature, I consider ‘Doctor Zhivago’ to be an important work of humanism ...." Read more

"...of principal characters are to a person layered, complex, deeply conceived individuals swept up in the massive surge of events, struggling to keep..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the writing and content. Some find the story beautifully written, with clear type and bright pages. They also say the poetic portions are interspersed with violent, realistic episodes that shockingly reveal the truth. However, others say the text is clunky, dull, and disjointed. They find the dialogue hard to follow and choppy.

"...The collection of "his" poetry at the end of the book was powerful, beautiful and provided a marvelous retrospetive of the narrative arc...." Read more

"...and many end prematurely.To me, the story sprawls too much . Worse, it relies too much on extraordinary, almost divine, coincidences...." Read more

"Book was bound well, font is easily readable and book is in good condition." Read more

"...not because the story isn’t worth telling or that it is not well-written but because I’m left with no overall distinct impression or anything that..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the characters in the book. Some find them engaging, while others say they're confusing.

"...One problem I have is keeping track of the characters ...." Read more

"...Luckily, this specific edition is equipped with a list the principal characters along with their ‘secondary’ names...." Read more

"...The characters philosophize about everything . Add to that the confusion of who was who, so common with reading Russian novels...." Read more

"The engaging characters walk the reader through one of the most devastating revolutionary movements in modern history by illuminating its effects on..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the author. Some find him strong not only in description, but in characterization and plot. They also say the book is in good condition. However, others say he may be a great poet, but not a good author.

"Book was bound well, font is easily readable and book is in good condition ." Read more

"...I find this novel almost unreviewable , not because the story isn’t worth telling or that it is not well-written but because I’m left with no overall..." Read more

"...Rest assured ZHIVAGO is strong not only in description , but in characterization and plot as well...." Read more

"...I think the problem is Pasternak. He may be a great poet, but not a good author ." Read more

Customers find the book terminology confusing and the constant transition to nicknames and sir names.

"...As with any piece of Russian literature, there tend to be issues with names and patronymics ...." Read more

"...Unfortunately, it was very dry the rest of the book. The names became very confusing and the constant transition to nicknames, sir names and..." Read more

" Too many different Russian names connected to each character, including cities and places. Good read otherwise." Read more

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Book Review: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

I can’t remember the recent thought processes that caused me to desire to read Doctor Zhivago now, after all this time. The David Lean film was very important to me as a young teen. I saw it multiple times in the theater and more times on TV. I was utterly enthralled by the cinematography, the music, the story, the historical background, and the performances. It meant something different back then during the Cold War era than it does now. It had relevance; it was a hot topic. The novel was rejected in Russia and was first published in 1957 in Italy. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, but Soviet backlash forced him to refuse the honor. In an article published in the Paris Review in December 2017, shortly before her death, Ursula K. Le Guin writes with admiration that a prize for refusing major awards should have been named the Boris Pasternak Prize in honor of this deed.

I had had a copy of the novel Doctor Zhivago when I was young, but the length and style daunted me and I never got around to reading it. I had been thinking about watching the film again, as certain scenes accompanied by the music had been playing in my mind, but decided to wait until my son arrives from the east coast in a month or so to join me. Reading the novel, I suppose, was a prelude to this event.

Once the decision was made, I had to choose which translation to go for. There are two major translations, both of which are applauded and criticized. From my research I found out that the early original translation flowed better but did not follow every nuance of the original Russian so closely. The newer translation was more meticulous but as a result much harder to follow. I decided to go for the older easier translation; I didn’t want to hamstring myself with a text that might not make sense in the literal rendering. Unfortunately, our local library system had many copies of the newer translation but only one 800-page large print edition of the older one. This version turned out to be rife with typographical errors; it was almost as if whoever was responsible didn’t bother to check the text at all. Nevertheless, I was able to ignore these as I read.

To be honest, the book starts slowly. I was about 300 pages or so in before it began to get interesting. The story begins with Zhivago as a boy witnessing his mother’s funeral. It follows his life as a young man as well as the background of Lara, his eventual lover, a corrupt lawyer named Komarovsky who torments and abuses Lara, and Pasha, a revolutionary who becomes Lara’s husband. The plot also unfolds around a number of secondary characters whose stories were trimmed from the film version. Zhivago and Lara meet at the front during World War I but remain chaste with each other. During the course of the war the Marxist revolution grows and spreads. The story really becomes interesting and absorbing as Zhivago and his family are forced to flee Moscow and take a long train ride across Russia to Varykino in the Ural Mountains. Zhivago’s father in law has an estate there where they all hope to find peace, but the peace is short-lived. Zhivago reunites with Lara and has an affair with her, but soon afterwards he is abducted by a faction of armies fighting in the countryside and forced to serve as a medical officer. Eventually he escapes, but only after his family has already fled back to Moscow and then to Paris. He and Lara have a brief, heartfelt affair and then are once again separated.

My summary of the plot is hopelessly brief and inadequate. As I mentioned, there are many nuances and subplots. Parts of the novel, for me, were slow and ponderous; others seemed unnecessary; there were moments, though, when Pasternak’s gift of poetry shines through in all its glory. This happens frequently when he describes the colors and landscapes of the cities, towns, and countryside in all seasons.

The glorious highlight of the book is when Zhivago, Lara, and Lara’s daughter go and live for a short time in an abandoned house in Varykino in the dead of winter. The town is deserted. They are all alone and isolated. They know that they have but a short time, as they are in danger of arrest or execution. In the midst of it all, Zhivago finds a pen, ink, and paper, sits down during the late night hours at a desk, and writes poetry. Pasternak’s description of the creative process, of sheer uninhibited abandonment to the writer’s art, is unparalleled, and I found the joy of discovering and reading these few pages worth the time it took to read the entire 800 pages of the book. He writes of Zhivago first putting to paper and revising poems he had already written, and then, as he starts on a new poem, inspiration takes over. As it does, language becomes the receptacle of beauty and meaning and assumes the power of a piece of music or the flow of a mighty river. When this happens, the writer is but a tool of universal thought and the poetry of the present and future. Ah, I don’t do it justice. I’m sure the translation doesn’t do it justice either. This is probably one of those sublime passages that can never be properly read except in the original language.

In short, I enjoyed reading this novel, but some parts were far more evocative than others. And I also highly recommend the film by David Lean, which remains one of my all-time favorite cinematic experiences.

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A collection of science fiction stories mostly set in India.

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Copyright 2010-2024 by John Walters. Unauthorized use and/or duplication without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited.

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Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

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 ...

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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Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 1 members.

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It was written beautifully!! Good book club discussion!

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A Guide to Ismail Kadare’s Books

Kadare received the inaugural International Booker Prize in 2005. In his books, the prolific Albanian author offered a window into the psychology of oppression. Here’s where to start.

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By Amelia Nierenberg

Reporting from London

Ismail Kadare, the most celebrated Albanian author in a generation, was a prolific writer who often found ways to criticize the country’s totalitarian state, despite the risks involved. Frequently, he veiled his contempt in myth and parable.

As his work was translated, into French and many other languages, Kadare offered the West a glimpse of life in what was for years a very closed society , and the last country in Europe to ditch Communism. He died on Monday in Tirana, Albania’s capital, at 88.

Kadare rose to international fame during one of Albania’s darkest chapters: the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha , the Communist tyrant who died in 1985. For decades, Kadare lived in fear. He walked a careful line, alternately criticizing and placating the regime.

Sometimes, he was celebrated. Sometimes, he was banished. In the mid 1980s, he had to smuggle his manuscripts out of the country.

And still, Albanians celebrated him — at home and abroad. “There is hardly an Albanian household without a Kadare book,” David Binder wrote in The New York Times in 1990 , shortly after Kadare fled to Paris.

Kadare had been regularly floated for the Nobel Prize. Some have compared him to George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera — who also often turned to metaphor, humor and myth to publish stories critical of state power and violent control. In 2005, Kadare received the first Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), which was then awarded for an author’s entire body of work.

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