| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780679407591 | | Publisher: A. A. Knopf | | Publish Date: 11/1/1991 | | Buy.com Sku: 30116343 | | Item#: R3RNH3 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.25L x 1.25T |
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| | | | "On they went, singing "Rest Eternal," and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing..." (from the first line) (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
In the grand tradition of the epic novel, Boris Pasternak's masterpiece brings to life the drama and immensity of the Russian Revolution through the story of the gifted physician-poet, Zhivago; the revolutionary, Strelnikov; and Lara, the passionate woman they both love. Caught up in the great events of politics and war that eventually destroy him and millions of others, Zhivago clings to the private world of family life and love, embodied especially in the magical Lara.
First published in Italy in 1957, "Doctor Zhivago "was not allowed to appear in the Soviet Union until 1987, twenty-seven years after the author's death.
Translated by Manya Harari and Max Hayward
Annotation:
The publication of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO was surrounded by great controversy. Pasternak's manuscript received a cool reception from Soviet publishers in Moscow, and the author, despairing of ever seeing the book in print, had a copy of the manuscript submitted to an Italian publisher. As a result, the first publication of the book was in Italy in 1956. Pasternak was subsequently awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, which was perceived by the authorities in Moscow as an attack on their suppression of Pasternak's work, and by extension on the Soviet system itself. Pasternak was vilified in the Soviet press, and refused the Nobel Prize in the hope of ending the persecution of himself and his family. Had he accepted the prize, he would have been forced into exile from his homeland, a fate which he did not wish to suffer. Pasternak was left to live out his remaining two years in relative peace. The book was not published in the Soviet Union until the glasnost era of the 1980s. In the novel, Zhivago, a young poet and physician, finds himself trapped by competing loyalties after the fall of the Czar and the emergence of the Communists during the political turmoils that followed the First World War. Torn between his duties to his wife and family and his love for the young nurse Lara, Zhivago suffers an internal struggle that mirrors the strife of the civil war around him
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"'Doctor Zhivago' will come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of a genius. This book is a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit." - Edmund Wilsonrecounted in Berlin's "Personal Impressions"
"...now I am writing something entirely different: something new, quite new, luminous, elegant, harmonious, well-proportioned, classically pure and simple--what Winckelmann wanted, yes, and Goethe; and this will be my last word, and most important word, to the world. It is, yes, it is what I wish to be remembered by; I shall devote the rest of my life to it." - Boris Pasternak 1945 "Personal Impressions"
"I began to read 'Doctor Zhivago' immediately on leaving [Pasternak], and finished it on the following day. Unlike some of its readers in both the Soviet Union and the west, I thought it a work of genius. It seemed--and seems to me to convey an entire range of human experience, to create a world, even if it contains only one genuine inhabitant, in language of unexampled imaginative power." - Sir Isaiah Berlin |
| Author Bio| Boris Leonidovich Pasternak | | Boris Leonidovich Pasternak's father was a painter and his mother a pianist, and he was raised in an artistic, intellectual home. As an adolescent, Pasternak intended to become a composer, but he gave up music at age 19 and began to write verse. He published his first collection of poetry in 1914. During the First World War, Pasternak managed a draft board in the Urals. After the revolution, he worked briefly in the new education ministry. He continued to write poetry and prose, and his fame grew in the 1920s with each volume of poetry he published. When the Great Terror began in mid-1930s, he stopped publishing new poetry and made his living by translating works into Russian, especially the works of Shakespeare and Goethe. He defended his fellow poets (e.g., Mandelshtam) during the purges; his fame, and the regard Stalin had for his work, protected him during that time. Pasternak worked as a war correspondent during the Second World War. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s he worked on his novel, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. The novel ran into trouble with Soviet censors when Pasternak presented it for publication in 1956. He arranged for it to be published in Italy, and the last four years of his life were spent attending to the fallout from that decision. He refused the award of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1958 in a successful effort to stem the persecution campaign against him in the Soviet Union. |
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