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Doctor Zhivago

Author	Boris Pasternak
Original title	Доктор Живаго (in Russian)
Country	U.S.S.R.
Language	Russian
Genre(s)	Historical, Romantic novel
Publisher	Feltrinelli (first edition), Pantheon Books
Publication date	1957
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	592 (Pantheon)
ISBN	NA (Feltrinelli) & ISBN 0-679-77438-6 (Pantheon)

Doctor Zhivago (Russian: Доктор Живаго) is a 20th century novel by Boris Pasternak. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a medical doctor and poet. The word zhivago shares a root with the Russian word for life (жизнь), one of the major themes of the novel. It tells the story of a man torn between two women, set primarily against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution of 1917. More deeply, the novel discusses the plight of a man as his life is slowly destroyed by the violence of the revolution. The book was made into a film by David Lean in 1965 and has also been adapted numerous times for television, most recently as a miniseries for Russian TV in 2005.

Contents 1 Foreground 2 Plot summary 3 Names and places 4 Film, TV or theatrical adaptations 5 In popular culture 6 Wikipedia links 7 External links

Although it contains passages written in the 1910s and 1920s, Doctor Zhivago was not completed until 1956. After submission for publication to the journal Noviy mir, it was rejected because of Pasternak's political viewpoint (incorrect in the eyes of the Soviet Union): the author, like Dr Zhivago, was more concerned with the welfare of the individual person than with the welfare of the State. In 1957, the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli smuggled the book manuscript from the Soviet Union and published a Russian-language edition in Milan, Italy. The next year, it was published in Italian and English translations, and these publications were partly responsible for Pasternak's being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. The Soviet government asked the committee to not award him the prize, leading him to reject it; Boris Pasternak died a few years later, of natural causes.

Doctor Zhivago finally was published in the Soviet Union in 1988, in the pages of Noviy mir, although earlier samizdat editions existed.

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 brutal contrast to the horrors of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent Russian Civil War. A large theme of the book is how the mysticism of things and idealism is destroyed by both the Bolsheviks, Rebels and the White Army. Yuri must witness cannibalism, dismemberment, and other horrors suffered by the innocent civilian population during the turmoil. Even the love of his life, Lara (whose full name is Larissa Feodorovna), is taken from him.

He ponders on how the war can turn the whole world senseless, and make a previously reasonable group of people destroy each other with no regard for life. His journey through Russia has an epic feeling because of his travelling 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. This fits in the story's theme of life.

Pasternak's description of the singer Kubarikha in the chapter "Iced Rowanberries" is almost identical to Sofia Satina's (sister-in-law / cousin of Sergei Rachmaninov) description of gypsy singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya (1884-1940). Since Rachmaninov was a friend of the Pasternak family, and Plevitskaya a friend of Rachmaninov, Plevitskaya was probably Pasternak's "mind image" when he wrote the chapter; something which also shows how Pasternak had roots in music.

• Zhivago: the Russian root zhiv is similar to 'life'
• Larissa: a Greek name suggesting 'bright, cheerful'
• Komarovsky: komar is the Russian for 'mosquito'
• Pasha: the diminutive form of 'Pavel', from the Latin word parvus, meaning 'small'
• Strelnikov: strelok means 'the shooter'
• Yuriatin: the fictional town was based on the real Perm, where Pasternak had lived for part of the Second World War
• The original of the public reading room at Yuriatin was the Pushkin Library, Perm

Doctor Zhivago has been adapted for film and stage several times:

• The most famous version is a 1965 film adaptation, by David Lean, featuring the Egyptian actor Omar Sharif and English actress Julie Christie as the eponymous character and as Lara. The film was very commercially successful and won several Oscars, but was a critical failure; currently, it is widely considered to be a classic popular film. The music, by Maurice Jarre, features "Lara's Theme", a romance that is most of the film's appeal. Though faithful to the novel's plot, depictions of several characters and events are noticeably different.

• Doctor Zhivago is also a mini-series with Hans Matheson, Keira Knightley, and Sam Neill, first appearing on the British ITV network in November 2002, and Masterpiece Theatre in the United States in November 2003.

• An eleven-part Russian mini-series was released in 2006.

• A made-for-cable film remake had been announced in 2002, which would have had Joseph Fiennes as Zhivago and Jeremy Irons as Komarovsky, but was cancelled. It is unclear whether or not it was a Masterpiece Theatre production or a different version. [1]

• The first film version of Doctor Zhivago was a 1959 Brazilian television fim that is currently unavailable. [2]

• Zhivago, a musical adaptation of the story, features music by Lucy Simon ("The Secret Garden"), a book by Michael Weller ("Hair," "Ragtime" screenplays), and lyrics by Michael Korie ("Doll" and the "Harvey Milk" opera libretto) and Amy Powers ("Lizzie Borden" and songs for "Sunset Boulevard"). It was a direct adaptation of Pasternak's novel rather than Lean's film. It made its debut at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2005 as a Page-To-Stage workshop, and then in a main-stage production which opened in May 2006. A Broadway debut is planned sometime in 2007.

• A new musical called "Doktor Zhivago" is to be premiered in the Urals city of Perm' on March 22 2007, and to remain in the repertoire of Perm' Musical Theatre throughout the 50th Anniversary year. Perm' claims many links with the novel since Pasternak was evacuated there during WW2. Perm' features in the novel under the name "Yuriatin" (which is a fictional city invented by Pasternak for the book) and many locations for events in the book can be accurately traced in Perm', since Pasternak left the street-names mostly unchanged. For example, the Public Reading-Room in which Yuri and Larissa have their chance meeting in "Yuriatin" is exactly where the book places it in contemporary Perm'.

• Dr. Zhivago was mentioned in the lyrics of 98 Degrees' hit song "The Hardest Thing".

• Dr. Zhivago was mentioned in the infamous "Unforgivable" online video series.

• Master Shake refers to Meatwad as "Dr. Zhivago" in an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force (The Shaving) because they both allegedly "suck."

• Dr. Zhivago is the name of Leo's dog on That '70s Show.

• Theme to the film - "Somewhere My Love (Lara's Theme)"

In the movie Into the Wild, Emile Hirsch is often caught with a copy of Dr. Zhivago in his hand.

• Homegrown Doctor Zhivago to Debut on Russian Television
• How the CIA won Zhivago a Nobel
• "The 'Doctor Zhivago' caper" (editorial), The Boston Globe, February 20, 2007.
• "The Wisest Book I Ever Read", by Robert Morgan from The Raleigh News & Observer.