Reading Order
Doctor Zhivago Reading Order
Doctor Zhivago (1957) by Boris Pasternak is the great Russian novel of the twentieth century and one of the most significant novels of the Cold War — the story of Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, across the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and early Soviet period, and his love for Lara Antipova against the background of historical catastrophe. Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago between 1945 and 1955, knowing it could not be published in the Soviet Union; he smuggled the manuscript to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who published it in Italian translation in 1957. The Soviet authorities forced Pasternak to decline the Nobel Prize in Literature that the novel won in 1958, and the novel was not published in Russia until 1988. The Zhivago poems, attributed to Yuri Zhivago in the novel's final appendix, are considered among the finest in the Russian language.
Where to start
Doctor Zhivago (1957) — the complete novel; no prequel required. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (2010) is the standard modern English version
Complete Doctor Zhivago Book List
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Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak·1957
Doctor Zhivago — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Doctor Zhivago about?
Doctor Zhivago follows Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago, a physician and poet from Moscow, across the upheavals of twentieth-century Russian history: the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War between the Red and White armies, and the early years of Soviet consolidation. Against this vast historical backdrop runs Zhivago's love story with Larissa (Lara) Antipova, the woman he meets on the Eastern Front during the First World War and loses and finds again across the decades of chaos. The novel is also deeply concerned with Zhivago's poetry — the poems he writes, which appear in an appendix to the novel and which Pasternak presents as genuine lyric poetry rather than fictional quotation. Doctor Zhivago is a meditation on the relationship between individual life, lyric consciousness, and historical catastrophe.
Why was Doctor Zhivago banned in the Soviet Union?
Doctor Zhivago was banned because it presented the Russian Revolution and the Soviet system from the perspective of someone who valued individual spiritual and artistic life above the collective political project. Zhivago is not a counter-revolutionary — he does not actively oppose Soviet power — but he is also not a convinced communist, and his perspective (shaped by Christian imagery, lyric poetry, and a sense of the irreducible value of individual consciousness) was irreconcilable with the official Soviet view of what the Revolution meant. The novel's view of the Revolution and Civil War is sympathetic to the human suffering on all sides rather than partisan; the Bolsheviks are not villains, but neither are they heroes. This moral evenhandedness was ideologically unacceptable in 1957.
Is Doctor Zhivago a love story or a historical novel?
It is both, and the relationship between the two is the novel's central formal achievement. The love story between Zhivago and Lara gives the novel its emotional core — their meetings and separations and reunions across the years of war and revolution are the moments the reader cares about most. But the historical novel surrounding that love story gives the love its meaning: Zhivago and Lara's relationship is made extraordinary partly by the extraordinary circumstances in which it exists, partly by the constant threat of its destruction by forces larger than themselves, and partly because both characters understand their love as something that belongs to a different order of reality than the political convulsions around them — the order of lyric consciousness and individual feeling that the Soviet system was attempting to abolish.
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