Doctor Zhivago was published by Feltrinelli in Milan in November 1957 after Pasternak, unable to publish the novel in the Soviet Union, smuggled the manuscript to Italy through an intermediary. The Soviet literary establishment had rejected the book as anti-Soviet, and Pasternak knew that its foreign publication would provoke a catastrophic response. It did. When Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958 — primarily for Doctor Zhivago — the Soviet government orchestrated a campaign of denunciation so savage that Pasternak was forced to decline the prize. He was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, threatened with exile, and lived his remaining years in internal disgrace, dying in 1960.
The novel follows Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago from his childhood in the last years of Tsarist Russia through the Revolution, the Civil War, and the early Soviet period. Zhivago is a doctor and a poet — a man of extraordinary sensitivity who experiences the Revolution not as an ideological event but as a catastrophe that destroys private life, individual conscience, and the possibility of art. His love for Lara Antipova — whom he meets, loses, finds again, and loses again across the novel’s vast canvas — is the emotional center of a story that spans three decades and half a continent.
The Revolution as Catastrophe
Pasternak’s treatment of the Revolution was what made the novel unpublishable in the Soviet Union. Zhivago initially welcomes the Revolution — he sees it as a liberation of creative energy, a moment when the stale forms of Russian life might be shattered and remade. But the reality of the Revolution is not liberation but coercion. The Bolsheviks do not free the individual; they subordinate the individual to the collective with a ruthlessness that makes the Tsarist autocracy seem almost gentle. Zhivago, who refuses to choose sides — who insists on maintaining his private world of poetry, love, and moral judgment in a society that demands absolute public commitment — becomes an enemy of the state not through any act of resistance but simply by continuing to exist as himself.
The novel’s canvas is enormous: Moscow in the 1910s, the Eastern Front in World War I, the chaos of the Civil War in the Urals, the frozen landscapes of Siberia, and the gray, diminished Moscow of the 1920s and 1930s. Pasternak writes landscape with a poet’s intensity — the Russian winter is not a backdrop but a character, and the novel’s most powerful scenes take place in snow, cold, and the absolute silence of the steppe.
Lara
Lara Antipova is one of the great female characters in twentieth-century fiction — not because she is idealized but because she is fully alive. Her early seduction by the corrupt lawyer Komarovsky, her marriage to the revolutionary Pasha Antipov (who becomes the terrifying Strelnikov), and her love affair with Zhivago are rendered with a psychological depth that refuses to reduce her to a symbol. She represents the private sphere that the Revolution seeks to abolish — love, beauty, tenderness, the irreducible reality of individual feeling.
The Zhivago Poems
The novel concludes with a cycle of twenty-five poems attributed to Zhivago — poems that Pasternak wrote over many years and that represent some of his finest lyric work. The poems are not incidental to the novel; they are its culmination. Zhivago the character is dead by the time the poems appear, but the poems survive — proof that art outlasts the systems that seek to destroy it. This is Pasternak’s deepest argument: that poetry is more durable than politics, and that the individual imagination, however fragile, is the thing most worth preserving.
The CIA and Doctor Zhivago
Subsequent research has revealed that the CIA played a role in the novel’s international dissemination, arranging for Russian-language editions to be distributed to Soviet citizens at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. The agency understood that the novel was a more powerful anti-Soviet weapon than any propaganda, precisely because it was not propaganda — it was a work of art that simply told the truth about what the Revolution had done to Russian life.
Collecting Doctor Zhivago
First edition (Feltrinelli, Milan, 1957): Russian-language first edition, paperback wrappers.
Market values:
- Italian first edition (Russian text), fine: $5,000–$15,000
- Italian first edition (Italian translation, 1957): $1,000–$3,000
- English first edition (Collins/Harvill, London, 1958): $300–$800
- US first edition (Pantheon, New York, 1958): $200–$500
- Signed by Pasternak: Extremely rare, $20,000+