The story
Doctor Zhivago, published in Italian by the Milan publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in November 1957, is a novel by the Russian poet Boris Pasternak. It follows Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, from the early 1900s through the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the civil war, along with his love for Lara Antipova and his wife Tonya. The book is less political tract than an account of a private life crushed by public events, with a closing section of Zhivago's poems.
Pasternak, known as a poet, spent ten years on the novel. The Soviet journal Novy Mir rejected it in 1956 because it did not accept the revolution as the Soviet state did, and the Soviet authorities would not allow it to be printed, so Pasternak let Feltrinelli publish it abroad. In 1958 a Russian-language edition was printed in the Netherlands, a project declassified documents show was supported by the American CIA. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1958 and, under heavy pressure from the Soviet Writers' Union, which expelled him, declined it. He died in 1960. The book was published in the Soviet Union in 1988, and his son accepted the medal in 1989. David Lean's 1965 film made it known to a wide new audience.
Why it mattered
- The affair showed the Cold War fight over literature, as both governments used the book for their own ends.
- It encouraged Soviet dissident writing and the practice of publishing banned works abroad, called tamizdat.
- The Nobel Prize crisis made Pasternak a symbol of conscience for later dissidents.
- The 1965 film and its theme music made the story popular far beyond readers of Russian.
Sources
- When the CIA Used Dr. Zhivago as a Cold War Weapon History.com
- Doctor Zhivago Britannica
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