Synopsis
The publication of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO was surrounded by great controversy. Pasternak's manuscript received a cool reception from Soviet publishers in Moscow, and the author, despairing of ever seeing the book in print, had a copy of the manuscript submitted to an Italian publisher. As a result, the first publication of the book was in Italy in 1956. Pasternak was subsequently awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, which was perceived by the authorities in Moscow as an attack on their suppression of Pasternak's work, and by extension on the Soviet system itself. Pasternak was vilified in the Soviet press, and refused the Nobel Prize in the hope of ending the persecution of himself and his family. Had he accepted the prize, he would have been forced into exile from his homeland, a fate which he did not wish to suffer. Pasternak was left to live out his remaining two years in relative peace. The book was not published in the Soviet Union until the glasnost era of the 1980s. In the novel, Zhivago, a young poet and physician, finds himself trapped by competing loyalties after the fall of the Czar and the emergence of the Communists during the political turmoils that followed the First World War. Torn between his duties to his wife and family and his love for the young nurse Lara, Zhivago suffers an internal struggle that mirrors the strife of the civil war around him
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1974-07-01 |
Industry Reviews
"...now I am writing something entirely different: something new, quite new, luminous, elegant, harmonious, well-proportioned, classically pure and simple--what Winckelmann wanted, yes, and Goethe; and this will be my last word, and most important word, to the world. It is, yes, it is what I wish to be remembered by; I shall devote the rest of my life to it."
recounted in Berlin's "Personal Impressions" - Boris Pasternak (01/01/1945)
"I began to read 'Doctor Zhivago' immediately on leaving [Pasternak], and finished it on the following day. Unlike some of its readers in both the Soviet Union and the west, I thought it a work of genius. It seemed--and seems to me to convey an entire range of human experience, to create a world, even if it contains only one genuine inhabitant, in language of unexampled imaginative power."
"Personal Impressions" - Isaiah Berlin
"'Doctor Zhivago' will come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of a genius. This book is a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit."
other - Edmund Wilson
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