Doctor Zhivago

Academician D. Likachev called «Doctor Zhivago» the spiritual autobiography of Pasternak. Perhaps this is the most accurate and the briefest — therefore it is not excluded that it is the most valuable — description of the book. Only the author... can add or clarify: «I am currently writing a large novel in prose about a man who represents some kind of vector sum between Blok and me, and Mayakovsky and Yesenin, perhaps.» As a result, a book emerged with a broad canvas of Russian life from the beginning of the 20th century to the Great Patriotic War. A saying appeared in the country: «Haven't read, but condemn!» — and the tragic persecution of the author as a traitor and slanderer of the Soviet regime. And in the history of world literature, a new Nobel laureate appeared — Boris Leonidovich Pasternak.