Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Max Hayward, Manya Harari, John Bayley (Introduction)

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Synopsis

This famous novel of the Russian revolution and Civil War became a cause celebre when its publication was cancelled by Soviet authorities and Pasternak had the manuscript smuggled out of the country for publication. Doctor Zhivago was cited by the Swedish Academy when it awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 (an award that Pasternak refused, under pressure from the Soviet government).

The controversy surrounding the novel's publication and the notoriety of the David Lean's popular film adaptation of the novel have obscured the quality of the work itself. Simply stated, Doctor Zhivago is one of the most powerful books published in the 20th century and will be read long after the memory of its publication history has faded; it not only brings the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet era to life, it tells the stories of some of the most memorable characters to be found in all of literature.

The New Yorker, November 15, 1958 - Edmund Wilson

...one of the very great books of our time.... The incidents succeed one another with so much invention and vivacity, with such range of characterization and description, each submerges us so completely in the atmosphere of its moment of Russian life... Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, 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 genius.... His book is a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit.

Biography

BORIS Leonidovich PASTERNAK won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958 "for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.” — the Nobel Prize committee. Pasternak had to decline the honor because of the protests in his home country. Doctor Zhivago became an international bestseller and was translated into 18 languages but circulated only in secrecy and translation in Russia. In 1987 the Union of Soviet Writers posthumously reinstated Pasternak, a move that gave his works a legitimacy they had lacked in the Soviet Union since his expulsion from the writers' union in 1958 and that finally made possible the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union. Pasternak's son accepted his father's Nobel Prize medal at a ceremony in Stockholm in 1989.


From the Hardcover edition.