Doctor Zhivago (Paperback)

by Boris Pasternak (Author) "On they went, singing "Rest Eternal," and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing..." (more)
Key Phrases: labor conscripts, rowan tree, Yurii Andreievich, Antonina Alexandrovna, Nikolai Nikolaievich (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
“The best way to understand Pasternak’s achievement in Doctor Zhivago is to see it in terms of this great Russian literary tradition, as a fairy tale, not so much of good and evil as of opposing forces and needs in human destiny and history that can never be reconciled . . . [Zhivago is] a figure who embodies the principle of life itself, the principle that contradicts every abstraction of revolutionary politics.”
—from the Introduction by John Bayley


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Description
n celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is the only paperback edition now available of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (March 18, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679774386
• ISBN-13: 978-0679774389
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (81 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23,214 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The flaws are much of what makes it so great., January 5, 2007

By	C. Gilbert "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I read Zhivago for the first time in high school. I loved it, but didn't pick it up again for 20 years. I was surprised to find it rough going at the beginning. When I had first read the book, it had been precisely the first 100 or so pages that had enchanted me and pulled me into the novel. This time around, it was the complex and often frustrating last half of the book that really moved me. I guess this is a measure of how the book grows with the reader.

Doctor Zhivago is a complicated book that seems to me largely about how people get involved with circumstances (politics, love affairs) that do not interest them, simply because life leaves them vulnerable. That makes for a strange reading experience, because it is not a message that wraps itself up neatly. The texture of the novel is in part about ends-- loose ends, dead ends, character cul-de-sacs. A more experienced author wouldn't have tried to work this theme out in prose using the same methods that Pasternak employed. The book rolls from melodrama to nearly documentary realism. He uses diary form, letters, even poetry to complete the work. I guess it was his lack of experience that allowed him to (very nearly) achieve the impossible. The feeling of the book is an awful lot like life.

There are certainly more polished and perfect novels and novelists out there. Doctor Zhivago would not have profited from their example. As the title of this review says, Zhivago is great precisely because it isn't perfect. It is a great sprawling messy wonderful world of a book.

Recommended for readers of all ages.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A historic and poetic love epic, April 1, 2006

By	Vivek Sharma "Vivek" (Cambridge / Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is quite remarkably a poet's novel: the writer was a poet, and hence each page is full of beautiful imagery, metaphors and word play. The protagonist is a poet, the novel revolves around his love and life in the first half of twentieth century Russia. The reader, by association, has to be a poet to really relish the saga.

It is one of those novels from last century that everyone must read. The ghosts of socialism and Marxism, the excesses that occured in name of revolution, the transformation of the largest country of the world from ceturies old system into a failed ideal: the novel has enough historical significance. Last century was guided, molded, scarred, decorated and defined by the events and ideas that crop up as part of Doctor Zhivago's life. The literary underpinnings are gigantic: a love story with the Russian Revolution as background score: a Nobel was the least he could have got.

Besides the historical perspective, the story itself is a delightful one. The homely Tonya, Dr Zhivago's wife and first love and mother of his children, the sensuous Lara who weaves into and out of Yuri (Dr Zhivago's) life, her husband Pasha Antipov, who at every junction of his life must fight against ghosts and demons of his wife's past and present and in attempt outclass himself, the Uncle Koyla, the intellectual: the list is unending. Characters are crafted from all sections of society, making this novel a representation of whole society at that time. Like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the novel provides four or five chief characters, who are immense in their own potrayal, parting with their thoughts, ideas, ideals and philosophies, and possessing unique well-defined characteristics, the novel has another string of about twenty characters who are unforgettable for whatever roles they are assigned.

The harshness of winter, the beauty of forests and fields, the man divided in his love for wife Tonya and lover Lara, the poet in exile, the idealists seeking to change the world, Russian history and customs: such ideas find Pasternak displaying hs poetic prowess. Many passages in the book are sheer poetry, and I am amazed at seeing how powerful they are in translated language: I wish I knew Russian to find out how delightful the original must have been.

It is a long novel, with graphic pleasant and unpleasant sequences and a writing style where its apparent that either because it is a translation or ther writer was a poet attempting prose, the writing is not a easy read. Requires lot of time and effort and most people prefer the movie that was made in 1965 or so. I think reading Doctor Zhivago is an experience in itself, and in this post cold war era, it contains the perspective and historical lessons that we all must know and understand.

An excerpt that presents a preview of all the things this novel incorporates into the love saga of Yuri, where his heart is in strife in his love for two women as is it in strife witnesses changes that challenge every aspect of his being and thinking:

"Even more than what they had in common, they were united by what separated them from the rest of the world. They were both repelled by what was tragically typical of the modern man, his shrill textbook admirations, his forced enthusiam, and the deadly stillness coldly preached and practiced by the countless workers in the field of art and science in order that the genius must remain extremely rare.

They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing there is anything remarkable about it.

To them- and this made them unusual- the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessnesses were moments of revelation, of ever greater understanding of life and of themselves."

Loved it. Highly recommended.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The epic of independent thought in censorship hell, February 14, 2001

By	Guillermo Maynez (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is the epic of Zhivago (and later, Pasternak himself)over the background of Russia's transition from Czarist rule to Bolshevism, passing through the First World War and the Civil War. The novel tells the intercrossing stories of Dr. Yuri Zhivago and Lara, whose lives meet several times during their childhood and adolescence, without getting to know each other. Zhivago grows up in Moscow, with the Gromeko family, whose child Tonya becomes his wife. Lara gets married to Pavel Antipov, who goes to war. When he is missing in action, Lara becomes a military nurse, in order to look for him. Zhivago also has to go to war, and there he meets Lara. After the war, he and his family move to a rural estate near the city of Yuriatin. There he meets Lara again. She lives alone with her daughter, since her husband has become the terrible revolutionary known as Strelnikov. They fall in love immediately and absolutely, and they start an affair which torments Zhivago, since he feels bad about being unfaithful to his wife. One day, he is kidnapped by the Partisans (revolutionaries), who keep him in prison during the Civil War. Eventually he escapes, to proceed his life. Many things more happen, but let's not spoil the plot.

This book is a vast landscape of Russia, but it's not a political or social novel. It is basically a story of love and Fate, but it is also possible to interpret it as a symbol of what war, politics and especially totalitarianism can do to the individual. But I don't agree with the reviewer who says that every character is a specific symbol or prototype, since I found them to be full personalities, tragic figures with a whole life depicted in the book. This book is to be suffered, for it is very emotional and sad. "Rich" is perhaps the best word to describe it.