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Monday, July 13, 2009 - 7:09 PM
lthough it contains passages written in the 1910s and 1920s, Doctor Zhivago was not completed until 1956. After submission for publication to the journal Novy mir,
it was rejected because of Pasternak's political viewpoint (incorrect
in the eyes of the Soviet authorities): the author, like Dr Zhivago,
was more concerned with the welfare of individuals than with the
welfare of society, and Soviet censors construed passages as anti-Marxist. There are implied critiques of Stalinism and references to prison camps. In 1957, the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli smuggled the book manuscript from the Soviet Union and simultaneously published editions in both Russian and Italian in Milan, Italy. The next year, it was published in English, (translated from the Russian by Manya Harari and Max Hayward)
and was eventually published in a total of eighteen different
languages. The publication of this novel was partly responsible for
Pasternak's being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1958. The Soviet government asked the committee not to award him the
prize, leading him to reject it in order to prevent a scandal back at
home; Boris Pasternak died on 30 May 1960, of natural causes.
Doctor Zhivago was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988, in the pages of Novy mir, although earlier samizdat editions existed.
Plot summary
Yuri Zhivago is sensitive and poetic nearly to the point of mysticism. In medical school, one of his professors reminds him that bacteria may be beautiful under the microscope, but they do ugly things to people.
Zhivago's idealism and principles stand in contrast to the brutality and horror of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent Russian Civil War. A major theme of the novel is how mysticism and idealism are destroyed by both the Bolsheviks and the White Army
alike, as both sides commit horrible atrocities. Yuri witnesses
dismemberment and other horrors suffered by the innocent civilian
population during the turmoil. Even the love of his life, Lara, is
taken from him.
He ponders on how war can turn the whole world senseless, and make
an otherwise reasonable group of people destroy each other with no
regard for life. His journey through Russia has an epic, dreamlike,
almost surreal feeling because of his traveling through a world which
is in such striking contrast to himself, relatively uncorrupted by the
violence, and to his desire to find a place away from it all, which
drives him across the Arctic Siberia of Russia, and eventually back to Moscow. Pasternak gives subtle criticism of Soviet ideology: he disagrees with the idea of "building a new man," which is against nature.
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