But it's a love story against the backdrop of massive historical change. At its heart, the book is about the history of Russia in the early twentieth century, told through the perspective of a man who refuses to compromise his independent mind for the sake of fitting into a ruthless, heartless political system.Īnd yes, there's a love story, too, for all you fans of the classic 1965 movie. But the book is way too long and epic for this to be the only thing going on in it. What is Doctor Zhivago About and Why Should I Care?įor a lot of people, Doctor Zhivago is a love story about the affair that Yuri Zhivago (a married man) has with Lara Antipova (a married woman). Yeah, the stakes are pretty high in this book, and there ain't a lot of lighthearted comedy in it. And for a great writer like Pasternak, anything that condemns the power of the individual mind is an enemy of all that is good and beautiful in the world. Much like George Orwell's Animal Farm, Pasternak's book admits that the capitalist system that existed before Communism was totally awful and nearly just as bad as Communism turned out to be.īut the thing about Communism that never sits well with Pasternak's main character, Yuri Zhivago, is the way that this mode of thinking completely ignores and condemns the power of the individual human being to think for him- or herself. Now to be fair, there's a lot more to Doctor Zhivago than a critique of Communism. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize the next year, he both humiliated and enraged the rulers of his home country. It was only after Pasternak smuggled a copy out of the country that he was able to publish the book in Italian. He wrote the book in Russian, but since the book criticized Communism, the Soviets banned it from publication. Well, it was only one year earlier, in 1957, that Pasternak published his masterpiece Doctor Zhivago. The thing is that while Sartre turned down the prize for philosophical reasons, Pasternak turned it down because the Soviet government would have given him some serious trouble if he'd dared to accept it.

In 1958, Boris Pasternak became only the second writer (after Jean-Paul Sartre) to ever refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The poems of doctor zhivago