Doctor Zhivago
Doctor Zhivago book cover

Doctor Zhivago

Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 19, 2010

by
Price
$33.02
Format
Hardcover
Pages
544
Publisher
Pantheon
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0307377692
Dimensions
6.5 x 1.6 x 9.55 inches
Weight
1.01 pounds

Description

"The previous English-language translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was made and brought out in England and the U.S. in extreme haste, on the eve of the 1958 Nobel Prize award to its author that triggered one of the fiercest political storms of the Cold War era. This new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is for the first time based on the authentic original text, reflects the present, deeper level of understanding of the great masterpiece of 20th century Russian literature and conveys its whole artistic richness with all its complexities and subtleties that had escaped the attention of the earlier translators and readers. "In faithfulness to the original, attention to stylistic details and nuances, lucidity, and brilliance it matches Pevear and Volokhonsky’s superb translations of such monumental works of the classics of Russian literature as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . The new edition will have an even more profound effect on our understanding of 20th century Russia that the first appearance of the novel had more than half a century ago."—Lazar Fleishman, Professor of Russian Literature, Stanford University“Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have once again provided an outstanding translation of a major Russian novel. They capture Pasternak’s ‘voice’ with great skill. Thanks to their sensitive rendering, those reading Doctor Zhivago in English can now get a far better sense of Pasternak’s style, for they have produced an English text that conveys the nuances (along with the occasional idiosyncrasies) of Pasternak’s writing.xa0Notably as well, their version includes some phrases and sentences that inexplicably were omitted by the original translators.xa0The text is accompanied by useful (but not overwhelming) notes in the back that provide information about many historical and cultural references that would otherwise be obscure for those coming to the novel for the first time.xa0Without a doubt, their version will become the standard translation of the novel for years to come.” —Barry Scherr, Mandel Family Professor of Russian, Dartmouth College 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. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are the award-winning translators of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, among many other works of Russian literature. They are married and live in France. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Part Onexa0The Five O'Clock Expressxa01xa0They walked and walked and sang "Memory Eternal,"1 and when they stopped, it seemed that the song went on being repeated by their feet, the horses, the gusts of wind.xa0Passers-by made way for the cortège, counted the wreaths, crossed themselves.xa0 The curious joined the procession, asked:xa0 "Who's being buried?"xa0 "Zhivago," came the answer.xa0 "So that's it.xa0 Now I see."xa0 "Not him.xa0 Her."xa0 "It's all the same.xa0 God rest her soul.xa0 A rich funeral."xa0The last minutes flashed by, numbered, irrevocable.xa0 "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world, and those that dwell therein."xa0 The priest, tracing a cross, threw a handful of earth onto Marya Nikolaevna.xa0 They sang "With the souls of the righteous."xa0 A terrible bustle began.xa0 The coffin was closed, nailed shut, lowered in.xa0 A rain of clods drummed down as four shovels hastily filled the grave.xa0 Over it a small mound rose.xa0 A ten-year-old boy climbed onto it.xa0 xa0Only 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.xa0He raised his head and looked around from that height at the autumn wastes and the domes of the monastery with an absent gaze.xa0 His snub-nosed face became distorted.xa0 His neck stretched out.xa0 If a wolf cub had raised his head with such a movement, it would have been clear that he was about to howl.xa0 Covering his face with his hands, the boy burst into sobs.xa0 A cloud flying towards him began to lash his hands and face with the wet whips of a cold downpour.xa0 A man in black, with narrow, tight-fitting, gathered sleeves, approached the grave.xa0 This was the deceased woman's brother and the weeping boy's uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, a priest defrocked at his own request.xa0 He went up to the boy and led him out of the cemetery.xa02xa0They spent the night in one of the monastery guest rooms, allotted to the uncle as an old acquaintance.xa0 It was the eve of the Protection. 2 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.xa0 The train tickets had been bought, the luggage was tied up and standing in the cell.xa0 From the nearby station the wind carried the plaintive whistling of engines maneuvering in the distance.xa0Towards evening it turned very cold.xa0 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.xa0 The kitchen garden was empty, except for a few moiré patches of cabbage, blue from the cold.xa0 When the wind gusted, the leafless acacia bushes thrashed about as if possessed and flattened themselves to the road.xa0During the night Yura was awakened by a tapping at the window.xa0 The dark cell was supernaturally lit up by a fluttering white light.xa0 In just his nightshirt, Yura ran to the window and pressed his face to the cold glass.xa0Beyond the window there was no road, no cemetery, no kitchen garden.xa0 A blizzard was raging outside, the air was smoky with snow.xa0 One might have thought the storm noticed Yura and, knowing how frightening it was, reveled in the impression it made on him.xa0 It whistled and howled and tried in every way possible to attract Yura's attention.xa0 From the sky endless skeins of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet.xa0xa0 The blizzard was alone in the world, nothing rivalled it.xa0 xa0Yura's first impulse, when he got down from the windowsill, was to get dressed and run outside to start doing something.xa0 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.xa0Again it ended in tears.xa0 His uncle woke up, spoke to him of Christ and comforted him, then yawned, went to the window, and fell to thinking.xa0 They began to dress.xa0 It was getting light.xa03xa0While 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.xa0 Yura was always told that he was in Petersburg or at some fair, most often the one in Irbit.xa0 xa0But then his mother, who had always been sickly, turned out to have consumption.xa0 She began going for treatment to the south of France or to northern Italy, where Yura twice accompanied her.xa0 Thus, in disorder and amidst perpetual riddles, Yura spent his childhood, often in the hands of strangers, who changed all the time.xa0 He became used to these changes, and in such eternally incoherent circumstances his father's absence did not surprise him.xa0As a little boy, he had still caught that time when the name he bore was applied to a host of different things.xa0 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:xa0 "To Zhivago!" just like "To the devil's backyard!" and he would carry you off in his sleigh to a fairy-tale kingdom.xa0 A quiet park surrounded you.xa0 Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost.xa0 Their cawing carried, loud as the crack of a tree limb.xa0 From the new buildings beyond the clearing, pure-bred dogs came running across the road.xa0 Lights were lit there.xa0 Evening was falling.xa0 xa0Suddenly it all flew to pieces.xa0 They were poor.xa04xa0In 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.xa0It was the feast of the Kazan Mother of God, 3 the thick of the wheat harvest.xa0 Either because it was lunchtime or on account of the feast day, there was not a soul in the fields.xa0 The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners.xa0 Birds circled over the fields.xa0 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.xa0"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'?"xa0 xa0"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.xa0 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.xa0 xa0But 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.xa0 xa0Nikolai 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. xa0"Folk are acting up in the district," said Nikolai Nikolaevich.xa0 "In the Pankovo area they cut a merchant's throat and a zemstvo man 4 had his stud burned down.xa0 What do you think of that?xa0 What are they saying in your village?"xa0But it turned out that Pavel took an even darker view of things than the censor who was restraining Voskoboinikov's agrarian passions.xa0"What're they saying?xa0 Folk got free and easy.xa0 Spoiled, they say.xa0 Can you do that with our kind?xa0 Give our muzhiks the head, they'll crush each other, it's God's truth.xa0 Gone to sleep, eh?"xa0This 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.xa0 But he kept being mistaken.xa0 Fields were succeeded by fields.xa0 Again and again they were embraced by woods.xa0 The succession of these open spaces was tuned to a vast scale.xa0 You wanted to dream and think about the future.xa0Not one of the books that were later to make Nikolai Nikolaevich famous had yet been written.xa0 But his thoughts were already defined.xa0 He did not know how near his hour was.xa0 xa0Soon 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.xa0 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 Tolstoyism and revolution5 and kept going further all the time.xa0 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.xa0 He thirsted for the new.xa0Yura felt good with his uncle.xa0 He resembled his mother.xa0 He was a free spirit, as she had been, with no prejudice against anything inhabitual.xa0 Like her, he had an aristocratic feeling of equality with all that lived.xa0 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.xa0Yura was glad that his uncle was taking him to Duplyanka.xa0 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.xa0 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. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • Boris Pasternak’s widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the award-winning translators of
  • War and Peace
  • and
  • Anna Karenina,
  • and to whom,
  • The New York Review of Books
  • declared, “the English-speaking world is indebted.”
  • First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy—the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, and Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize a year later under intense pressure from Soviet authorities—
  • 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: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. Stunningly rendered in the spirit of Pasternak’s original—resurrecting his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone—and including an introduction, textual annotations, and a translators’ note, this edition of
  • Doctor Zhivago
  • is destined to become the definitive English translation of our time.

Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Reviews

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In Praise of Boris Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago

Just a few words, on the outside chance that I might tip a potential reader or two into reading this marvelous oh-so-Russian novel of lives caught up in the Great October Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath. Either you read Big Russian Novels (primarily of the 19th century) or not. If you do, you've probably already read, or tried to read, Zhivago. If you don't, I can offer a few reasons why you might want to read this one, in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation or the earlier, less literal (but reportedly more graceful and poetic) Hayward-Harari version. Pasternak's cast of principal characters are to a person layered, complex, deeply conceived individuals swept up in the massive surge of events, struggling to keep their heads above water while, all around them, friends, family, and nameless millions of others are drowning in the turbulence. The arc of Yuri Zhivago alone - from enthusiastic, humanistic supporter of "regime change" to mordant skeptic of divisive ideas imposed as orthodoxy-driven policy - is typical of the evolutions and surprises Pasternak has written into the novel. His characters ruminate far and wide over imputed glories and horrors of Marxism, Bolshevism, Soviet Communism, the New Economic Policy (NEP), etc., and it was for precisely these candid criticisms of Soviet ideology and practice that Pasternak's novel was condemned (although unpublished) in the USSR - despite the deStalinization still underway at the time of Zhivago's publication, first in Italy then around the world (Soviet readers couldn't legally purchase a USSR/Russian edition until 1988). Needless to say, Pasternak was obliged to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature he won in 1958, mostly for Doctor Zhivago.

For me - I spent most of my adult life as an analyst of foreign political, economic, social, and military affairs - Doctor Zhivago is particularly brilliant in its depiction of the horrors and dislocations war and civil war inflict on populations, and especially those segments with little or no recourse to "safety nets" of  any variety - personal, familial, governmental, church-, religion-, or community-based, or other. Pasternak depicts the range of human ingenuity in such circumstances, as individiuals cobble together the means of extracting brief moments of small pleasure from the tractor-pull of events. But through an accumulation of hundreds of small details, often in asides and parenthetic observations, Pasternak conveys the epochal common misfortunes and hardships of those whose accident of history made them Russians born around and after 1900. The novel compels us to consider that, at some point in the 20th century, such horrors of remorseless privation, despotism, and brutal inhumanity were visited upon the majority of humanity - the Europe of the World  Wars, China for most of the century, and on and on - and how  fortunate those spared such travails (and their descendents) are.

Throughout, Pasternak's characters comment on the flow of events, the political struggles, the conduct of, first, the World War and later the Civil War, the states-of-play at various key junctures, the putative winners and losers, the impositions of what must seem arbitrary policy (and then policy reversals), all in the name of advancing to some  formless Communist Utopia but, to the  cynically incisive observations of Zhivago and other perceptive observers, simply a Soviet variation of high-stakes politics of power-seeking  individuals. THIS is how depotism and deprivation of freedom looks, and it's an experience alien to most American readers and one worthy of serious contemplation. Zhivago is filled with long, philosophical digressions that in general weigh humanism and spirituality against ideological politics; many found these passages tedious and a drag on the narrative. Suffice to say, I did not. Moreover, I found even Pevear-Volokhonsky's more literal translation filled with beautifully poetic moments, as were the translations of "Yuri Zhivago's poetry" that forms an appendix to the novel.

In short, I found Doctor Zhivago a transporting literary experience and a profound reflection on Soviet Communism. And a book I will reread, soon, in the Hayward-Harari translation.
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"That one might read the book of fate

And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness,--melt itself Into the sea! "
King Henry IV, Part 2, Act III. Scene I

Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago takes us back to a time when fate took Russia through a perfect storm of revolution, war, revolution, and civil war. This was a time that did not just level mountains and melt a continent but also melted and cruelly leveled the lives and fates of untold numbers who were caught in these turbulent waters. Josef Stalin is reported to have said that "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic." What Pasternak has done so masterfully in telling this story is to paint a picture on a huge canvas that stretches from Moscow to Siberia while at the same time telling an intimate story that allows the reader to maintain that feeling of tragedy.

I've had a copy of Dr. Zhivago sitting on my shelf for decades, one of the books I inherited from my father's collection. I never bothered to pick it up. I'd seen David Lean's classic film and wrongfully decided that there was no need to invest any time in reading an epic novel about the tragic romance of Yuri Andreevich Zhivago and Larissa Fyodorovna Antipova. When I saw that Pevear and Volokhonsky had done a new translation I decided to give Zhivago a shot. What a revelation. As good as the movie was it didn't begin to plumb the depths of the book. The movie focused, understandably enough, on the relationship between Yuri and Lara and it seemed that the Russian Revolution and Civil War was merely the back-story to the relationship. But in Pasternak's hands I think it was close to being the other way around. The first two-thirds of the book takes two separate lives that contain just a few incidental touch-points where those lives intersected.

The emotional heart of the story for me was elsewhere. It was a story of the dissolution of Russian life in the years between the 1905 Revolution and WWI where the decadence and debauchery of a life lived in fancy clothes and salons played out against the turmoil bubbling beneath the surface. It was a story of the disruption and destitution set in motion by WWI and the October revolution. It was a story of the story of hunger and desperation brought on by a vicious Civil War in which the phrase "man is wolf to man" comes to the fore and the fragile web that keeps a society civilized is swept away in a sea of inhumanity. It is into a world that has already been rent asunder that the relationship of Yuri and Lara comes into bloom. The story of Yuri and Lara almost seemed to me to be the back story, the context that illuminated the age of unreason that Pasternak wrote about.

One passage set this out for me in stark terms: "This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver." The passage concludes that people denounced themselves, "drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped." This struck me immediately as Pasternak's version of Yeats' "Second Coming" where the centre cannot hold and where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It was one of the many touch-points in the book that were immensely moving to me.

The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has said, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that a "translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful." My high-school level Russian does not permit me to speak to this translation's faithfulness but I can certainly attest to its beauty. Pasternak's prose, as rendered by the team of Pevear and Volokhonsky, flows beautifully. As I read through the book I did not feel I was reading a translation. Any time I read a piece in translation and feel compelled to underline or highlight particularly noteworthy passage I think of the translation as one that does justice to the book. Time after time I found myself highlighting passages that I wanted to remember. This strikes me as being my own testimony not just to the beauty of the translation but what also must be its faithfulness.

Dr. Zhivago is not, as I imagined, a eulogy for a pair of tragic Russian lovers but an elegy for an age in a specific time and place. It is a beautiful, moving story that was a pleasure to read.

L. Fleisig
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A new translation brings new life to one of the 20th century's great literary events.

Boris Pasternak's most famous novel, and the source for one of the biggest (both in box office and scope) films in cinematic history, arrives in stores once again, translated for the 21st century. As already noted by the product description, "Doctor Zhivago" was an international sensation on its initial publication in 1957 - smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published first in Italy due to the censorship of the Communist government, it was rapidly translated into English (and other languages). Max Hayward's work was of good quality, particularly given the time constraints under which he laboured - good enough to make the novel a bestseller and probably the most famous work of Russian literature published in the 20th century. It earned its author the Nobel Prize in Literature, though political considerations interfered even then to block his acceptance.

Nevertheless, the theory and practice of translation has evolved considerably in the last half-century (and probably will continue to); works are continually retranslated, sometimes with minor variations in style, sometimes with bigger ones. Now comes the turn of "Doctor Zhivago". And as any fan of Russian literature could tell you, there could be no better team on hand to handle it than Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This husband-and-wife team has become the gold standard in Russian-to-English translation over the last quarter century, having produced a truly astonishing volume of work: the major works of Dostoevsky, Count Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Gogol, and Chekhov (Pevear has also translated Dumas' "The Three Musketeers" from French by himself, I guess for a change of pace). Now they've turned their hand to Pasternak's magnum opus. The resulting translation is up to their usual standards.

One won't get too far into story summary, given how famous this is, but in brief it is a semi-autobiographical account by the author of the tumultuous history of Russia in the early 20th century. Beginning with the fall of the Tsarist despotism, the brief and doomed interlude of attempted democracy under Kerensky, and the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks, with ensuing civil war, we follow Dr. Yuri Zhivago. Something of an idealist, like Pasternak (or Pasternak's self image, anywyay), Zhivago struggles with his love for Lara, and the conflict it creates with his family. That's the part everybody remembers, anyway, almost invariably. David Lean's famous film, as big as it was, could only tell a condensed version of Pasternak's story, which is larger still on the page; but that is true with all the great novels. Pasternak weaves an epic account of one of the greatest political earthquakes in history, which claimed millions of lives, and is comparatively little-remembered in the contemporary West.

Recommended. And one hopes that Pevear and Volokhonsky can make time for Sholokhov.
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Goodbye to the Old World

I hate to say it but the Pevear/Volokhonsky edition rings hollow. They seem much better when sticking with 19th century classics like [[ASIN:0143035002 Anna Karenina ]] and [[ASIN:0374528373 The Brothers Karamazov]]. It may be, as Pevear writes in his forward, that they stuck closer to the original text, but the result is a clunky translation that at times reads like it was done with google. The writing is flat the sentence structure is awkward making any first time reader wonder what is so great about this book. I found myself going back to the original Hawyard/Harari [[ASIN:0679774386 translation]] which has a much nicer flow.

The story itself is odd in the way it is laid out by Pasternak. It seemed he was aiming at something far greater than a romance, or that his love was with Russia itself. The actual story of Yury and Lara comprises less than 4 chapters. The bulk of the narrative is about Yury trying to make sense of the tumultuous revolution taking place in his homeland, from the early years of the 1905 strikes to the eventual victory by the Red Army in the civil war that stretched to 1922. These chapters are the most visceral, as Pasternak places Yury on the battle front, tending to the wounded, growing more and more cynical with the great many casualties he has to attend to. He finishes the story off with an epilogue as told by his long-time friend Misha, and a strange epitaph in the poems Zhivago had penned during the course of the narrative.

While Pasternak pretty much keeps to an historic timeline, his thoughts are more impressionistic, especially in the way he relates the battles in the provinces as the country becomes split by the White and Red Armies. Yury can't bring himself to choose between the opposing forces, and this very much underscores his relationships with Tonya, his wife, and Lara, his lover. The first seeming to represent tradition, albeit not without its allusions to the modern writers of the day, and the second a democratic love in which he idealizes Lara as the perfect modern woman, above all the petty conceits of the bourgeoisie, yet not deluded by the false promises of the Bolsheviks.

I suppose some readers will have difficulties with all the tangents this story takes, especially if you were thinking that the great love story between Yury and Lara would dominate the narrative. Actually, it is a very awkward love story as Pasternak never really allows his two characters to grow together. They come together because of circumstances and their love is never fully realized. I had to wonder if Pasternak was uncomfortable with the romance he created, as he seemed much more at home describing Yury's and Tonya's plight first in Moscow and then at Varykino. His best writing was that of the military camps Zhivago found himself in.

Overall, I give the book 4 stars and this translation 3 stars. The book was made into a fantastic [[ASIN:B0012BWC5M mini-series]] by Aleksandr Proshkin in 2006 that takes in the full scope of the novel, whereas [[ASIN:B002WC88A8 Sir David Lean]] focused primarily on Yury and Lara. Don't even bother with the 2002 British mini-series.
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Fantastic translation of a challenging novel

This epic love story between Dr. Yuri Zhivago and nurse Lara, set against the backdrop of Russian revolution and civil war, earned Pasternak the Nobel Prize. This semi-autobiographical work chronicles the deplorable conditions during the struggle for control of the country that culminated in the arrival of Soviet power. The novel seeks to explore the ultimate questions of human existence--the nature of man, the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of life, and the riddle of death.

Yuri struggles between his devotion to Tonya, his wife and childhood friend, and Lara, the nurse he met in a war-time hospital and the woman with which his passions lie. Yuri is constantly torn between what his heart wants and what he knows is right for those he loves. He seeks to turn the tragedy in his life to poetry. As Yuri says of art, "it constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life."

Having read and loved Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations of [[ASIN:1400079985 War and Peace (Vintage Classics)]] and [[ASIN:0375702245 The Idiot]], I knew I wanted their translation of this Russian masterpiece. This one was more of a challenge. At first, all the imagery provided by masterful descriptions of landscapes brought the book to life. After a while, however, the descriptions of trees, hills, rivers, fog, snow, rain, birds, etc became rather redundant and began to really slow the story. The sentence structure also forced me to re-read many sentences to fully grasp their intent. But this should not discourage potential readers from this version. Pevear and Volokhonsky take extreme effort to capture the original author's style and give English readers a chance to truly experience the work in its originality as much as possible.

It is a beautiful story of love, loss, and one's devotion to principles at all costs. Among the many memorable scenes is Yuri Zhivago's consoling words to the dying Anna Ivanovna, something that one cannot soon forget. This book is absolutely worth the effort.
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Poetic and terrifying

There are better reviews out there but here's my two cents. This book contains passages of overwhelming beauty (Pasternak was a successful poet long before he wrote this novel). Its bird's eye view of the Russian Revolution is mind-blowing, and its exposure of Soviet communism--especially the nauseating moralizing state propaganda the Soviets were forced to swallow--is terrifying simply because it sounds so familiar. This should be required reading for anyone who still believes that time and place was any sort of Utopia. Yes, Pasternak was Russian, so there is the weird constant shifting of character names, but I wouldn't let that stop you from reading this beautiful and insightful work.
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A cryptic, moving, masterpiece -- beautifully restored

It would be difficult for anyone to claim that his love of this formidable book had no relationship to Lean's film, an abbreviation of an often bewildering but heroic text. Pasternak told a masterful story, stymied at times by his drive to polemics, jolted by his awkward time-shifts, forced to speed because of the realities of his personal history.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO inspires us because of its characterizations, its emphasis on the awesome power of coincidence in human affairs, and the constricted agony of its narrator. It moves us because it portrays a decent, balanced human being, sailing square, from whom history demands a position, a side, an allegiance. This -- Yuri Zhivago is ever reluctant to give, and so he speaks to us of the freedom, joy and resistance that is his love for Lara.

In his conventional world, one took sides. One immigrated, emigrated because of official orders. One renounced one's beliefs because to refuse would portend certain death. One eschewed love because of its political consequences, and feared death more often than humans ever imagined.

This is, in other words, one of the saddest, most poign.ant novels ever written, by an author with profound artistic and narrative potential, who wrote in a staccato rhythm At times, Zhivago -- like Billy Pilgrim -- becomes unstuck in time, and the author is often sidetracked by his political musings and polemics.

Still, the magisterial team of Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky -- found Pasternak's true voice. While my heritage is Russian "on both sides," I've mastered only a handful of Russian paragraphs and phrases. Yet, when I read the first, brave Hayward translation, I always felt one step removed -- not from the narrative - but from the voice of a narrator so entrenched in his characters and topics that he couldn't have possibly written in such a nip-and-tuck, Western manner.

So, the present translation team offer us a Pasternak who is perhaps more skilled at poetry than prose, and yet -- warts and all -- manages to pull off a narrative of epic proportions. It has, and it will, inspire generations of readers who aspire to free will and the primacy of the individual. In the original translation, Pasternak's characters were more silhouettes than flesh-and-blood humans. In the present translation -- as much as the original text allows -- the characters come alive with an immediacy I'd never imagined.

In this light, one notes the rendering of Pasha - later Strelnikov here - in a series of vignettes which Robert Bolt dropped from the his script. These few pages are a revelation of character and only one of many reasons to read this version. Like Julie Rose's masterful translation of Les Misérables, issued four years ago, the translators literally recreate a version of Pasternak's novel that was meant to be.

Does it contain odd, or even meaningless phrases? Yes. Does the author consistently drift about on tangents? Without question. Do his portrayals of Zhivago, Tonya, Gordon, Strelnikov, Lara and Komarovsky result in more questions than answers? Absolutely.

But maybe that's exactly what was meant to be. Five stars for the book and its translators; another and five stars for the book's design. For what it's worth, the dust jacket is irresistible and conveys some of what awaits the reader within.

Buy it.
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Excellent translation..but...

I loved this translation, but, some friends of mine who are Russian literature experts, and have studied extensively in Russia, indicate to me that the "tone" is too trendy.
Perhaps. I don't know. I do not have their expertise and background, but for me, this was a wonderful translation and I enjoyed it as much as the first time I read it.

Regardless of how you fall on this particular translation...this is a wonderful story, beautifully written...and I really don't care how "accurate" it is to the original "spoken" language.
I love the story and if this version brings it to a whole new class of readers...then so be it.

Beautiful.
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Excellent translation

So much better than the movie, and the translation picked up the nuances of the language. Always an excellent book.
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Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The West has had a disservice done to it regarding Doctor Zhivago. The first exposure to it the majority of us have had is the easy-to-digest film version, which is exotic and romantic in equal measure, but altogether simple to comprehend. For fans who want to experience the book, however, they find a story not nearly accessible, but a fractured, tortured, clandestine story that goes far beyond the paltry romance between Lara and Yuri. This version, which I can only judge on it's own due to not having read the previous English translation, is tough, dense, and distant. I've always been a major fan of Pevear and Volokhonsky, and have eaten up their previous translations of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol. Here, though, they attacked a truly enigmatic voice, leaving the translation disjointed and almost unpalatable. Pasternak seemed to truly be an auteur in his time, with a poetically esoteric worldview. Perhaps his own language is tour than others to adapt to English in a readable way, perhaps this translation was a misstep, or perhaps the story itself is simply too interior and complex for my comprehension. It is filled with interesting moments, but the story itself, where it goes and how it subtly alludes to the horrors of Stalinism, is oftentimes quite difficult to pick out of the text. Maybe I'll come back in twenty years to find I'm totally wrong, but for now I would suggest the older and apparently higher-regarded translation.
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