— Nobel Prize in Literature (1958)
Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago follows physician and poet Yuri Zhivago through the Russian Revolution, civil war, and its aftermath. Torn between his wife Tonya and his great love Lara, he searches for meaning, beauty, and moral integrity amid historical upheaval. The novel weaves personal passion with sweeping social change, examining fate, art, and the cost of surviving a world that tries to erase the individual. It remains a powerful meditation on love, loss, and the endurance of the human spirit.
Date: 1957 (Russia)
Length: ~592 pages (varies by edition)
Cultural impact: ~12.640.000 copies (estimates)
Genre: Romance, Classics
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"Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history. His book is a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit" — Edmund Wilson, American literary critic, The New Yorker
"Doctor Zhivago is not a political novel... After years of silence... Pasternak has written a Soviet novel which at last revives the noble tradition of the Russian past that literature is the conscience of the nation" — Ernest J. Simmons, scholar of Russian literature, The Atlantic
"The story of the relationships which can exist between an intellectual and the Revolution, or between a human being, in the best and highest sense of the word, and the public events which carry him along with them and bow him down" — Alberto Moravia, Italian novelist
"Doctor Zhivago triumphs as a hymn to man in his creative capacity... Pasternak’s championship of family life, of love, nature, God and art... is balanced by his destructive criticism of political manipulation" — Ronald Hingley, biographer and translator of Pasternak
"A miserable thing, clumsy, banal and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences" — Vladimir Nabokov, novelist
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