Doctor Zhivago
SynopsisPlot
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.
Story
About this book
Boris Pasternak's only novel follows Yury Zhivago, a physician and poet whose life runs between the early 1900s and the Second World War, through the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He moves his family from Moscow toward the Ural Mountains hoping for shelter, but finds himself caught between the White and Red forces. His artistic nature leaves him exposed to the new political order, and he loves Lara, the wife of a revolutionary.
The novel was submitted to the Soviet journal Novyi Mir in 1956 and initially accepted, but authorities blocked publication. A typescript reached the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who issued an Italian edition in 1957. Inside the Soviet Union the book appeared only in 1987. After its Western release Pasternak was rejected by Soviet authorities, and he was compelled to decline the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In 1958 the CIA obtained a Russian-language typescript and arranged a covert print run through Mouton Publishers in the Hague, with Dutch intelligence help and under Feltrinelli's imprint without a signed contract. Copies were handed out at the Brussels World's Fair through the Vatican pavilion. A second funded run of seven thousand copies carried the name of a nonexistent French publisher. The agency's role was confirmed only in April 2014.
