Doctor Zhivago
닥터 지바고
A novel written by Boris Pasternak in 1945-1955. The doctor and poet Yuri Zhivago drifts between his family and his beloved Lara through revolution and civil war and dies forgotten. Rejected by Soviet journals, it was first published in Italy in 1957, and the campaign over the 1958 Nobel Prize forced the author to decline it. Soviet publication came in 1988.
In depth
What is the story?
The novel opens at a funeral, with young Yuri Zhivago burying his mother. His family was wealthy, but his father had abandoned them before his mother died, and the orphan grows up with the Gromekos, a Moscow professor's family. A gifted poet, he chooses medicine and marries their daughter Tonya.
Another thread follows Lara, kept by the lawyer Komarovsky and struggling to get free. She marries her childhood friend Pavel Antipov but finds no happiness. Pavel volunteers for the First World War and returns as the fearsome revolutionary commander Strelnikov. Yuri and Lara cross paths at the front as army doctor and nurse, and meet again in the Urals town of Yuryatin, where he has taken his family to escape the revolution. They fall in love.
The Civil War tears them apart. Red partisans seize Yuri and he spends eighteen months as their army doctor in Siberia. He escapes and walks back; his wife, in Moscow with the children, writes that they are about to be deported abroad. Komarovsky comes and invites them to the Far East. The two take refuge on the abandoned estate of Varykino, but when Komarovsky returns and warns of danger Yuri lets Lara go with him and stays alone, losing his mind. There the hunted Strelnikov appears, talks of revolution and Lenin, learns that Lara has always loved him, and kills himself.
Back in Moscow Yuri lives with Marina, daughter of a former yard-keeper, and slowly goes to pieces. One morning he has a heart attack on a tram and dies in central Moscow. His half-brother Yevgraf and Lara, who happens by, come to his coffin; she soon disappears. During the Great Patriotic War a laundress, Tanya, turns out to be the daughter of Yuri and Lara. The novel ends with friends reading Yuri's poems, and 25 of them follow.
Why was it banned?
Soviet literary officials saw the problem in its attitude to the revolution. The writer Emmanuil Kazakevich, reading the manuscript, said that by this novel the October Revolution was a misunderstanding and better not done. In September 1956 Novy Mir's editors sent a rejection "as people standing in a position directly opposed to yours". Konstantin Simonov was then the editor, and the letter was made public in October 1958 under Alexander Tvardovsky.
That summer Pasternak had already passed a copy, through a Communist journalist, to the Communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Pressed by officials to sign a telegram halting the Italian edition, he secretly told him to ignore any such requests. The Italian edition came out in Milan in November 1957, and Feltrinelli was later expelled from the Italian Communist Party.
What was the Nobel affair?
On 23 October 1958 the Swedish Academy awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature. Moscow was enraged. Vladimir Semichastny repeated Khrushchev's pig comparison in a Komsomol anniversary speech, the Writers' Union expelled him, and calls followed to strip his citizenship and deport him. Meetings condemned him at factories, collective farms and institutes, though people could not read the book, giving the campaign its name: "I haven't read it, but I condemn it." He declined the prize and died in 1960. His son received the medal only in December 1989.
There is another layer. A pirate Russian edition in the Netherlands in 1958, and copies handed to Soviet tourists at the Brussels World's Fair, were organised by the CIA, whose internal note said the book had "great propaganda value". That the novel served as a Cold War weapon and that the Soviet state persecuted its author are both true.
How is it judged as literature?
Dmitry Likhachev called it a spiritual autobiography with no external facts matching the author's life. Vladimir Nabokov scorned it as "a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic". Over its view of Jewish assimilation, David Ben-Gurion called it one of the most contemptible books about Jews by a person of Jewish origin. In the USSR it circulated in samizdat for thirty years and appeared in Novy Mir in January-April 1988; Pasternak was posthumously restored to the Writers' Union.
On screen?
David Lean's 1965 film is the best known, and a Russian television series followed in 2006.