Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
Summary
Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet orphaned young in prerevolutionary Russia, marries Tonya, the daughter of the family that raised him, but his life bends permanently around Lara Antipova, a woman he first glimpses as a teenager and meets again properly as an army doctor during the First World War, where they work together and become lovers despite both being married to others. The Bolshevik Revolution scatters everyone: Lara's husband Pasha reinvents himself as the ruthless Red commander Strelnikov, Yuri is conscripted by force into a partisan unit and cut off from his family for years, and when he finally makes his way back to find Tonya gone, exiled with their children to Paris, he reunites with Lara instead at Varykino, the family's snowbound former estate. Komarovsky, the same predatory lawyer who had preyed on Lara years earlier, arrives claiming that Pasha has fallen from favor and that Lara is now in danger, and Yuri lets Lara go with Komarovsky to save her; only after she has gone does Pasha, broken and hunted by his own side, reach Varykino looking for her, and Yuri finds him dead by his own hand the next morning. Yuri then returns alone to Moscow, takes up with another woman, and years later dies of a heart attack collapsing off a stalled tram. Lara, arriving too late for anything but his funeral, disappears soon after into Stalin's purges and is never heard from again; an epilogue set decades on suggests that a young war orphan named Tanya may be the daughter Yuri never knew he had, a child Lara gave up when she went with Komarovsky.
Pasternak, a poet by training and instinct rather than a novelist, writes scenes that lean on coincidence and sudden convergence more than a conventional plot would allow, and some readers find the novel's construction genuinely loose; Pasternak himself defended it as reflecting how arbitrary and coincidence driven real history actually feels to live through, rather than how fiction usually tidies it.
Pasternak set much of Yuri and Lara's exile at Varykino near a real town, Yuriatin, modeled closely on Perm, where Pasternak himself had briefly lived in 1916, and the novel took him roughly a decade to finish, much of it written in the secret knowledge that Soviet publication was never going to happen.
Historical Context & Significance
Soviet publishers rejected Doctor Zhivago in 1956 as an implicit rejection of Communist ideology, so Pasternak had the manuscript smuggled out to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who brought out the first edition, in Italian, in Milan on November 23, 1957; the CIA, recognizing its propaganda value, secretly printed a Russian language edition in the Netherlands the next year and distributed hundreds of copies to Soviet visitors at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Edmund Wilson called it one of the great events in man's literary and moral history, and the Swedish Academy awarded Pasternak the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature for his overall contribution to Russian lyric poetry and for continuing the great Russian epic tradition, language that named no specific book, though the award clearly followed the novel's furor. Soviet authorities threatened Pasternak with exile and worse, and he sent a telegram renouncing the prize six days after accepting it, forced to refuse an honor he had first agreed to take.
David Lean's 1965 film adaptation, with Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara, won five Academy Awards and introduced the story, and Maurice Jarre's Lara's Theme, to an audience many times the size of the novel's original readership; the book itself was not legally published in the Soviet Union until 1988, serialized in the magazine Novy Mir three decades after Pasternak first tried to publish it there.