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Doctor Zhivago (Vintage International) Paperback – October 4, 2011
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First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara, the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. Pevear and Volokhonsky masterfully restore the spirit of Pasternak's original—his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone—in this beautiful translation of a classic of world literature.
- Print length704 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateOctober 4, 2011
- Dimensions5.16 x 1.15 x 7.97 inches
- ISBN-100307390950
- ISBN-13978-0307390950
- Lexile measure1010L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“One of the very great books of our time.” —The New Yorker
“Pevear and Volokhonsky have done a masterly job translating what ought to be considered the definitive English edition of Doctor Zhivago.” —The New Criterion
“A welcome opportunity for anyone who has already read Dr. Zhivago to revisit it and experience a richly rewarding fresh take on an epic tale. For those coming to it for the first time it is a chance to read one of the greatest novels of all times.” —New York Journal of Books
“As well as a gripping story, Doctor Zhivago is a work of meditation and quiet challenge. Pasternak meant every word of it. I believe he would be pleased with the powerful fidelity of the translation now before us.” —Angela Livingstone, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
About the Author
A poet, translator, and novelist, Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890. In 1958 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but, facing threats from Soviet authorities, refused the prize. He lived in virtual exile in an artists’ community near Moscow until his death in 1960.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part One
The Five O'Clock Express
1
They walked and walked and sang "Memory Eternal," and when they stopped, it seemed that the song went on being repeated by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind.
Passers-by made way for the cortège, counted the wreaths, crossed themselves. The curious joined the procession, asked: "Who's being buried?" "Zhivago," came the answer. "So that's it. Now I see." "Not him. Her." "It's all the same. God rest her soul. A rich funeral."
The last minutes flashed by, numbered, irrevocable. "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world, and those that dwell therein." The priest, tracing a cross, threw a handful of earth onto Marya Nikolaevna. They sang "With the souls of the righteous." A terrible bustle began. The coffin was closed, nailed shut, lowered in. A rain of clods drummed down as four shovels hastily filled the grave. Over it a small mound rose. A ten-year-old boy climbed onto it.
Only in the state of torpor and insensibility that usually comes at the end of a big funeral could it have seemed that the boy wanted to speak over his mother's grave.
He raised his head and looked around from that height at the autumn wastes and the domes of the monastery with an absent gaze. His snub-nosed face became distorted. His neck stretched out. If a wolf cub had raised his head with such a movement, it would have been clear that he was about to howl. Covering his face with his hands, the boy burst into sobs. A cloud flying towards him began to lash his hands and face with the wet whips of a cold downpour. A man in black, with narrow, tight-fitting, gathered sleeves, approached the grave. This was the deceased woman's brother and the weeping boy's uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, a priest defrocked at his own request. He went up to the boy and led him out of the cemetery.
2
They spent the night in one of the monastery guest rooms, allotted to the uncle as an old acquaintance. It was the eve of the Protection. The next day he and his uncle were to go far to the south, to one of the provincial capitals on the Volga, where Father Nikolai worked for a publisher who brought out a local progressive newspaper. The train tickets had been bought, the luggage was tied up and standing in the cell. From the nearby station the wind carried the plaintive whistling of engines maneuvering in the distance.
Towards evening it turned very cold. The two ground-floor windows gave onto the corner of an unsightly kitchen garden surrounded by yellow acacia bushes, onto the frozen puddles of the road going past, and onto the end of the cemetery where Marya Nikolaevna had been buried that afternoon. The kitchen garden was empty, except for a few moiré patches of cabbage, blue from the cold. When the wind gusted, the leafless acacia bushes thrashed about as if possessed and flattened themselves to the road.
During the night Yura was awakened by a tapping at the window. The dark cell was supernaturally lit up by a fluttering white light. In just his nightshirt, Yura ran to the window and pressed his face to the cold glass.
Beyond the window there was no road, no cemetery, no kitchen garden. A blizzard was raging outside, the air was smoky with snow. One might have thought the storm noticed Yura and, knowing how frightening it was, reveled in the impression it made on him. It whistled and howled and tried in every way possible to attract Yura's attention. From the sky endless skeins of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet. The blizzard was alone in the world, nothing rivalled it.
Yura's first impulse, when he got down from the windowsill, was to get dressed and run outside to start doing something. He was afraid now that the monastery cabbage would be buried and never dug out, now that mama would be snowed under and would be helpless to resist going still deeper and further away from him into the ground.
Again it ended in tears. His uncle woke up, spoke to him of Christ and comforted him, then yawned, went to the window, and fell to thinking. They began to dress. It was getting light.
3
While his mother was alive, Yura did not know that his father had abandoned them long ago, had gone around various towns in Siberia and abroad, carousing and debauching, and that he had long ago squandered and thrown to the winds the millions of their fortune. Yura was always told that he was in Petersburg or at some fair, most often the one in Irbit.
But then his mother, who had always been sickly, turned out to have consumption. She began going for treatment to the south of France or to northern Italy, where Yura twice accompanied her. Thus, in disorder and amidst perpetual riddles, Yura spent his childhood, often in the hands of strangers, who changed all the time. He became used to these changes, and in such eternally incoherent circumstances his father's absence did not surprise him.
As a little boy, he had still caught that time when the name he bore was applied to a host of different things. There was the Zhivago factory, the Zhivago bank, the Zhivago buildings, a way of tying and pinning a necktie with a Zhivago tie-pin, and even some sweet, round-shaped cake, a sort of baba au rhum, called a Zhivago, and at one time in Moscow you could shout to a cabby: "To Zhivago!" just like "To the devil's backyard!" and he would carry you off in his sleigh to a fairy-tale kingdom. A quiet park surrounded you. Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost. Their cawing carried, loud as the crack of a tree limb. From the new buildings beyond the clearing, pure-bred dogs came running across the road. Lights were lit there. Evening was falling.
Suddenly it all flew to pieces. They were poor.
4
In the summer of 1903, Yura and his uncle were riding in a tarantass and pair over the fields to Duplyanka, the estate of Kologrivov, the silk manufacturer and great patron of the arts, to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, a pedagogue and popularizer of useful knowledge.
It was the feast of the Kazan Mother of God, the thick of the wheat harvest. Either because it was lunchtime or on account of the feast day, there was not a soul in the fields. The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners. Birds circled over the fields. Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you stared long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes.
"And these," Nikolai Nikolaevich asked Pavel, a handyman and watchman at the publishing house, who was sitting sideways on the box, stooping and crossing his legs, as a sign that he was not a regular coachman and driving was not his calling, "are these the landowner's or the peasants'?"
"Them's the master's," Pavel replied, lighting up, "and them there," having lighted up and inhaled, he jabbed with the butt of the whip handle towards the other side and said after a long pause, "them there's ours. Gone to sleep, eh?" he scolded the horses every so often, glancing at their tails and rumps out of the corner of his eye, like an engineer watching a pressure gauge.
But the horses pulled like all horses in the world; that is, the shaft horse ran with the innate directness of an artless nature, while the outrunner seemed to the uncomprehending to be an arrant idler, who only knew how to arch its neck like a swan and do a squatting dance to the jingling of the harness bells, which its own leaps set going.
Nikolai Nikolaevich was bringing Voskoboinikov the proofs of his little book on the land question, which, in view of increased pressure from the censorship, the publisher had asked him to revise.
"Folk are acting up in the district," said Nikolai Nikolaevich. "In the Pankovo area they cut a merchant's throat and a zemstvo man had his stud burned down. What do you think of that? What are they saying in your village?"
But it turned out that Pavel took an even darker view of things than the censor who was restraining Voskoboinikov's agrarian passions.
"What're they saying? Folk got free and easy. Spoiled, they say. Can you do that with our kind? Give our muzhiks the head, they'll crush each other, it's God's truth. Gone to sleep, eh?"
This was the uncle and nephew's second trip to Duplyanka. Yura thought he remembered the way, and each time the fields spread out wide, with woods embracing them in front and behind in a narrow border, it seemed to Yura that he recognized the place where the road should turn right, and at the turn there would appear and after a moment vanish the seven-mile panorama of Kologrivovo, with the river glistening in the distance and the railroad running beyond it. But he kept being mistaken. Fields were succeeded by fields. Again and again they were embraced by woods. The succession of these open spaces was tuned to a vast scale. You wanted to dream and think about the future.
Not one of the books that were later to make Nikolai Nikolaevich famous had yet been written. But his thoughts were already defined. He did not know how near his hour was.
Soon he was to appear among the representatives of the literature of that time, university professors and philosophers of the revolution – this man who had thought over all their themes and who, apart from terminology, had nothing in common with them. The whole crowd of them held to some sort of dogma and contented themselves with words and appearances, but Father Nikolai was a priest who had gone through Tolstoyismand revolution and kept going further all the time. He thirsted for a wingedly material thought, which would trace a distinct, unhypocritical path in its movement and would change something in the world for the better, and which would be noticeable even to a child or an ignoramus, like a flash of lightning or a roll of thunder. He thirsted for the new.
Yura felt good with his uncle. He resembled his mother. He was a free spirit, as she had been, with no prejudice against anything inhabitual. Like her, he had an aristocratic feeling of equality with all that lived. He understood everything at first glance, just as she had, and was able to express his thoughts in the form in which they came to him at the first moment, while they were alive and had not lost their meaning.
Yura was glad that his uncle was taking him to Duplyanka. It was very beautiful there, and the picturesqueness of the place also reminded him of his mother, who had loved nature and had often taken him on walks with her. Besides that, Yura was pleased that he would again meet Nika Dudorov, a high-school boy who lived at Voskoboinikov's and probably despised him for being two years younger, and who, when greeting him, pulled his hand down hard and bowed his head so low that the hair fell over his forehead, covering half his face.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (October 4, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 704 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307390950
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307390950
- Lexile measure : 1010L
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.16 x 1.15 x 7.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #40,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #489 in War Fiction (Books)
- #1,277 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #3,060 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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Yuri Zhivago is the sensitive poet at the heart of the novel. After losing both of his parents at a very early age, he is taken in by the Gromyko’s (the wife was a friend to Yuri’s mother) and raised as one of their own, alongside their daughter Tonya. Although Yuri and Tonya could be considered as siblings, both Gromyko parents encourage a marital union. This has always struck me as somewhat incestuous, never mind that the parents are in its favor. Yuri and Tonya seem happy with each other though so who am I to judge? Yuri started writing poetry from an early age but, needing an actual vocation, trained to be a medical doctor. He seems to be dedicated to his profession and so, when World War I breaks out, he joins the army to tend to wounded soldiers.
We cut to a focus on Larissa (Lara) Guichard, who works for her mother at a Moscow dress shop. She is in love with an ardent young man named Pavel (Pasha) Antipov, who is swept along in the revolutionary fervor of the anti-Tsarist protest movement. At the same time, a wealthy businessman, Victor Komarovsky, is helping Lara’s mother with her business affairs after the death of her husband. Komarovsky has coincidentally played a significant role in Yuri’s early life—he helped drive Yuri’s father to suicide. He has become Lara’s mother’s lover and, with her mother’s encouragement for him to introduce Lara to more of influential society, he takes the opportunity to seduce Lara as well. Previously a virgin, Lara now feels tainted and dirty with a moral stain she can never remove. All of her efforts at resistance to him are rendered futile as he imposes his forceful persuasion. This lends impetus to Lara’s desire to marry Pasha as soon as possible, not because she doesn’t love Pasha but partly because a union with him can deliver her from Komarovsky’s insidious hold. When she tells Pasha of her sexual alliance with Komarovsky, he cools in his feeling for her. Although not an outright rejection (he stays married to her), this scenario was perhaps inspired by Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’, in which Tess has been seduced by an affluent gentleman and confesses to her infidelity to her newlywed husband Angel Clare, who leaves after she suggests a separation.
At two points Lara and Yuri see each other incidentally, after he and his supervisory doctor are summoned when her mother attempts suicide and next after Lara tries to kill Komarovsky but misses. Meanwhile, each of them marries their respective mates and each of them has a child. During the war, when Yuri is tending to soldiers wounded on the battlefield, Lara is a volunteer nurse. They work alongside each other and get to know each other. It soon becomes apparent that they are soul mates. Their respective marital obligations are unfortunate inconveniences.
Yuri is divided in his romantic obligations. He loves Tonya but he also loves Lara and is reluctant to sacrifice one for the other. Circumstances intervene, however, and a succession of separations and reunions ensue. When the revolution does come, Russia is still embroiled in the war, doing battle both within and without. Initially, Yuri is very enthused at the arrival of revolution. He is idealistic and sees the original intention of restoring justice to the underrepresented population to be a good thing. However, when factions begin solidifying and extreme measures began to be taken against fellow citizens based on political sentiments or sometimes simply based on suspicion and rumor, he feels threatened. He is conscripted into helping the partisan army and witnesses firsthand how they deal with anyone that wants to challenge their authority or leave. After almost two years he finally escapes.
I always became more absorbed once Yuri or Lara were on the page. However, Yuri, despite being a sensitive poet, compassionate with his family and even most strangers, is supremely selfish, abandoning his first wife and child. Then, after Tonya and their child and her father are deported to Paris, rather than setting out for Paris, he stays with Lara until Komarovsky comes back into their lives, offering both of them a chance to move to a safer location. Lara is in danger after her husband, who has now become the infamous radical Strelnikov, is reported dead and his enemies want to persecute his next of kin. Yuri resists going although concedes that Lara can leave if she chooses. Although he could conceivably still be with Lara if he goes with them, he can’t accept help from the man that destroyed his father and has been the symbolic bane of his existence for his entire life. Was his resistance driven by his hatred for Komarovsky or could it have partly been due to a hope that he could sometime be reunited with Tonya and their children (Tonya has given birth to a daughter while he was enlisted to aid the partisans)? After he loses Lara as well as his hope of being able to find his wife and children, he becomes dissipated and depressed. He marries again, a legal bigamist, and has two more children. He is unable to settle down with them either. He is not quite the noble hero he has been depicted as being in the two film versions. He stops practicing medicine and even writing much poetry although he has reached a certain level of success with a few published collections. The heart ailment he had diagnosed in himself years earlier progresses and he dies relatively young in his fifties. Lara hears of his death and attends his funeral and is later arrested and sent to the Gulag, presumably dying there, one of the nameless millions.
Lara and Yuri had a daughter that Lara later abandoned, presumably in the care of Komarovsky. Years later, during World War II, Yuri’s two best friends track down the daughter and confirm to her that her father was the poet Yuri Zhivago. The last portion of the novel is an assortment of Yuri’s poems. Perhaps due to the translation, I found the poems to be largely unremarkable, mostly average. I suppose I would need to read more of Pasternak’s poetry to compare to this collection to really determine how I feel about him as a poet.
I find this novel almost unreviewable, not because the story isn’t worth telling or that it is not well-written but because I’m left with no overall distinct impression or anything that sums it up as a fictional statement. For one thing, Pasternak does not exhibit the skill of narrative flow of Russian greats such as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Those authors weave you into the story as they introduce you to characters with distinct characteristics and circumstances. In all of ‘War and Peace’, for example, I hardly ever recall not being able to get my bearings as far as who was who and what they were doing, even with the variations of naming so common with Russian characters. Pasternak, on the other hand, name drops someone you’ve never been introduced to, with no further introduction except that suddenly they’re in the middle of the action and then they depart without reason. Why were they there to begin with?
Despite its turgid nature, I consider ‘Doctor Zhivago’ to be an important work of humanism. It still boggles my mind that a novel that is no more romantic and humanistic that many Western fictional works could be seen as subversive in Stalin’s Soviet state. Yuri and Lara are simply trying to live through external and civil wars as unscathed as possible. Perhaps the real revolution in the novel is that its primary characters consider the integrity of the individual to be a higher priority than surrendering an individual fate to the collective well-being of a suppressive system.
Most everyone knows the basic story from having seen David Lean's magnificent film. But Lean's "Doctor Zhivago" is not Pasternak's. The film deviates too much from the novel for seeing the movie to be a substitute for reading the book. The biggest discrepancy is in the character of Zhivago, who in the book is less heroic and more feckless than he is in the movie. In turning such a sweeping novel as DOCTOR ZHIVAGO into a film, numerous cuts and simplifications are of course necessary. But, for me, the movie's omission of Zhivago's third wife Marina, the daughter of a house porter, is inexcusable. And hence, in the book, Zhivago abandons not only his "legal" wife Tonya and their children -- for Lara, the natural, irrational love of his life -- but he also abandons his third wife Marina and their children -- because family life becomes too much for him (in other words, he is too selfish).
The centerpiece of the story, of course, tracks the tumultuous times in Russia of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and then the Russian Civil War. There is violence, rebellion, famine, and typhus. Families are splintered and lives are transformed . . . and many end prematurely.
To me, the story sprawls too much. Worse, it relies too much on extraordinary, almost divine, coincidences. I marked seven such coincidences, and in doing so I did not count such things as the improbable multiple roles of Kamorovsky -- as the lawyer who drove the boy Yura Zhivago's father to suicide, who also was the lawyer for Lara's mother who then seduced Lara, and who in later years suddenly showed up to save Lara and her daughter. And then there is the feckless character of Zhivago.
What redeems the novel, for me, is its exploration of "the accursed questions" ("prokliatye voprosy" in Dostoevsky's phrase), namely, the ultimate questions of human existence--the nature of man, the existence of God, the problems of evil, the looming omnipresence of death, and the meaning of life. Some of Pasternak's philosophizing seems fatuous to me, and some of it is inscrutable. But much of it is more or less on the mark, and at least he is writing in the grand tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Another notable aspect of the novel is its meditations on the Russian Revolution. Paternak was ambivalent about it, and sufficiently critical of it and the Communist state it brought about that the novel could not be published in the Soviet Union until thirty years after it first was published in 1957 (in an Italian translation). Moreover, he was not allowed to accept the Nobel Prize when it was awarded him in 1958. What, then, did Pasternak think of the Russian Revolution? In the words of one of his characters, "History will sort it all out."
A few words about this edition, in which the translation is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: The prose is among the most "modern" that I have encountered in my ongoing traversal of Russian literature in translation (a reprise of sorts of that college course decades ago). As much as Pasternak reminds me, alternately, of Dostoevsky and then of Tolstoy, his prose, at least as rendered here, is more straightforward, more modern. Is that because of Pevear and Volokhonsky? Or is it Pasternak? This edition is footnoted, with twenty pages of endnotes collected at the back of the book. They are excellent, not only because they are informative but also because they are judicious, in that P&V do not go overboard annotating everything that might not be known to the average high school graduate. In addition, however, I for one would have appreciated a listing of the numerous characters (a who's who or dramatis personae), including all the variations of each character's Russian name.










