English language

Published Nov. 7, 1958 by Collins and Harvill Press.

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (9 reviews)

This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.

Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel.**

--------- Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's only novel, is set between the early 1900s and World War II and contains complex plot lines and …

52 editions

Review of 'Doctor Zhivago' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

To think of this book as another in the line of big Russian books set during wartime is probably to miss a lot of what the author was after. While the centerpiece of the story is the First World War and the Russian Revolution, which cannot be separated from the main themes of the novel, the reaction of the main character to what is happening around him and inside of him is not primarily about war, or politics, or even love. We spend most of the book looking through Yuri Zhivago's eyes, but we only rarely get the sense that he is able to put together a coherent picture of what is happening and why, or what it all might mean. Things happen according to their own logic, not because they make practical sense in a realistic manner, but to express some deep intention of the author's. It feels authentically …