Novel
Doctor Zhivago
Доктор Живаго
Boris Pasternak · 1957
Synopsis
In 1902, the young Yuri Zhivago loses his mother; an orphan, he is taken in by his uncle, then brought up in Moscow with the Gromekos, whose daughter, Tonya, becomes his friend. In the same city, the young Lara falls under the sway of Komarovsky, an older man, while Pasha Antipov, the son of a railwayman, grows attached to her. Having become a doctor and a poet, Yuri sees his life overturned by the First World War, the revolution and the civil war, and his paths cross those of Lara, married to a revolutionary.
Context
Completed in 1955, the novel was rejected the following year by the journal Novy mir. The Russian manuscript reached Milan, where the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli brought out an Italian translation in November 1957; the book appeared in the Soviet Union only three decades later, in 1988. The first English translators were Max Hayward and Manya Harari, in 1958; Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky produced a new version in 2010.
Who it is for
A long novel that follows its characters over several decades; to be read in Hélène Henry's translation.
Prizes and reception
According to Britannica, an immediate international success on its publication in the West, the year before the Nobel Prize.