“A miracle of non-conformity,” the Russian scholar Victor Frank has called Pasternak’s novel, “full of supreme indifference to all the offi cial taboos.” Refused publication in the Soviet Union, the novel was surreptitiously sent to an Italian publisher who brought it out in 1957, with an English translation appearing in 1958. Depicting pre-revolutionary Russian culture, the revolution, and the ensuing civil war from a decidedly subjective viewpoint, Doctor Zhivago broke with the enforced literary dictates of socialist realism and party doctrine at a time when such a challenge demanded enormous courage and conviction. Doctor Zhivago shares with War and Peace an epic tonality both attempt to encapsulate a national history, culture, and philosophy of human nature and experience in the stories of individuals caught up in the maelstrom of history. Analysis of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor ZhivagoĬonsidered by many the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, Boris Pasternak’s (1890-1960) Doctor Zhivago is certainly the most famous fictional treatment of the defining moments of modern Russian history at the outset of the 20th century, inviting a comparison with Tolstoy’s similar effort in War and Peace to dramatize the crucial events of the Napoleonic era.
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