Doctor Zhivago

The novel «Doctor Zhivago» had a dramatic fate. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak began writing this epoch-making work almost immediately after the victory over Nazi Germany. By that time, he had finished translating Shakespeare's «Hamlet». The poet was 55 years old and had been writing remarkable poems for over three decades. After graduating with a gold medal from the 5th Moscow gymnasium, Pasternak wanted to enroll in the composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory. His own doubts about having perfect musical ear got in the way. His parents had instilled in Boris the habit of striving for perfection in whatever he undertook. He achieved mastery in the field of poetry. By the early 1930s, Boris Leonidovich was already the author of several collections of brilliant poems. At the first congress of the Writers' Union of the USSR, there were calls to officially name him the best poet of the Soviet Union. However, the poet himself recalled that he had always sought to move from poetry to prose. Pasternak wrote that poetry for him was — «unprocessed, unrealized prose…». He turned to it both before «Doctor Zhivago» and yet this novel became the most significant, monumental, and in many ways fateful prose work of Pasternak. He wrote it for ten years, raising the most important themes of existence and describing the life of the Russian intelligentsia from the early 20th century to the Great Patriotic War.

The Soviet authorities considered the novel insufficiently patriotic, and the poet was denied publication. As a result, «Doctor Zhivago» was first published in Milan in 1957 in Italian. Two years later, the Russian text of the novel was published there as well. Since 1946, Pasternak had been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he only received it after the publication of «Doctor Zhivago» abroad. This event greatly intensified the authorities' biased attitude towards the novel. Pasternak was subjected to unprecedented harassment. He was expelled from the Union of Writers of the USSR. There were even proposals to strip the writer of his citizenship. Later, Yevgeny Yevtushenko expressed the idea that Pasternak with his novel had inadvertently become a hostage of the internal political struggle in the USSR and became one of the prominent figures in the ideological confrontation with the West. The attitude of the Soviet authorities towards the novel changed only after the writer's death. Pasternak died at his dacha in the Moscow region of Peredelkino at the end of May 1960 at the age of 71. The decision to expel Pasternak from the Union of Writers of the USSR was canceled in 1987, and a year later «Doctor Zhivago» was published in the writer's homeland for the first time. In this edition, the novel is illustrated with drawings by contemporary artist Tatiana Kosach.