Editions

Doctor Zhivago (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

Doctor Zhivago (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, a stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece, the first since the 1958 original.

Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic 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, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have restored the rhythms, tone, precision, and poetry of Pasternak's original, bringing this classic of world literature gloriously to life for a new generation of readers.

(P) Penguin Audio 2020

Reviews

  • The first work of genius to come out of Russia since the Revolution

    V.S. Pritchett

  • The English-speaking world is indebted to these two magnificent translators

    New York Review of Books

  • One of the great events in man's literary and moral history

    Edmund Wilson

  • Belongs to that small group of novels by which all others are ultimately judged

    Frank Kermode, Spectator

  • Not since Shakespeare has love been so fully, vividly, scrupulously and directly communicated

    Isaiah Berlin, Sunday Times

More in this Series

About the Author

Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 and after briefly training as a composer resolved to be a writer. He published a large number of collections of poetry, written under the burden of Soviet Russia's stringent censorship, before publishing his most famous work, Doctor Zhivago, in 1958. This novel won him the Nobel Prize for Literature but the USSR's hostility to the West meant he was forced to turn it down. He died in 1960.

Boris Pasternak

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