Pasternak sent Doctor Zhivago into the world

Person: Boris Pasternak
Lived: 1890–1960
Field: Poetry and fiction
From: Russian

The story

Boris Pasternak worked on Doctor Zhivago for years, completing it in 1955, though some passages dated back to the 1910s and 1920s. The novel follows a physician and poet, Yuri Zhivago, swept through revolution and civil war between 1905 and the Second World War while holding on to love, nature and the freedom of his inner life. In 1956 the Soviet journal Novy Mir rejected it because it ignored socialist realism and criticised the revolution, collectivisation and the terror.

That year Sergio D'Angelo, an Italian Communist journalist in Moscow who was also scouting new Soviet books for the Milan publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, came to Pasternak's home at Peredelkino and offered to send the novel abroad. Pasternak handed him the manuscript, joking that D'Angelo was now invited to watch him face a firing squad. No Soviet author had dealt with a Western publisher since the 1920s, and both women closest to him were horrified, but Pasternak said he was ready for any sacrifice to see the book published.

Soviet emissaries pressed Feltrinelli repeatedly to withdraw it, and the authorities forced Pasternak to send telegrams asking for the manuscript back, but he sent secret letters telling the publisher to ignore them. Feltrinelli refused to delay, believing he had no right to keep a masterpiece from the world, and published the novel in Italian in November 1957. It became an instant sensation across the non-Communist world, helped by the Soviet campaign against it and by the American CIA's secret purchase of copies.

The first English translation, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, appeared in August 1958 and spent 26 weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list in 1958 and 1959. Inside the Soviet Union typed copies passed from hand to hand in samizdat, while the press condemned a book few critics had read. In 1958 Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1965 David Lean's film adaptation, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, became a worldwide blockbuster and carried the story to an even larger audience. Translated into many languages, the novel has remained in print ever since, and it is now read in Russian schools.

Why it matters

By sending Doctor Zhivago abroad, Pasternak ensured that a great novel of individual freedom reached readers whom censorship could not stop.

About Boris Pasternak

Russian poet and author of Doctor Zhivago, smuggled to the West in 1957, who was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature and forced by the Soviet state to decline it.

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Boris Pasternak

1890–1960 · Poetry and fiction

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