The recap
Yuri Zhivago, orphaned as a boy and raised by a cultured Moscow family, grows up to be a physician with the soul of a poet, just as a new century begins to tear his country apart. Married to the gentle Tonya, he keeps crossing paths with Lara, a spirited young woman whose life has been shadowed early by a dangerous older man. The First World War, the revolution and the civil war that follows sweep them all from Moscow to the front lines and on to the remote Urals, and every meeting between Yuri and Lara feels at once like chance and like fate. Pasternak, whose hero is in many ways his own alter ego, writes history as a kind of weather, vast and indifferent, against which a few private loves burn with astonishing brightness. The novel is long and crowded with characters, but its images of candlelit rooms, crowded trains and frozen countryside stay in the memory. It is an epic of loss and devotion that cost its author dearly to publish.
Why read it
For readers who love sweeping historical epics and doomed, luminous romance, and for anyone who knows the film and wants the poetry of the original.
Fun facts
- 01
Unable to publish it at home, Pasternak entrusted the manuscript to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who brought the novel out first in Milan in 1957.
- 02
Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, but after the Soviet Union of Writers denounced him as a traitor he declined the honor so that he could remain in his homeland.
- 03
The novel stayed formally unpublished in the Soviet Union for about three decades.
- 04
David Lean's 1965 film, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, won five Academy Awards, including one for Maurice Jarre's score with its famous Lara's Theme.
