Doctor Zhivago

Description

On they went singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing...Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles with the new order and confronts the changes cruel experience has made in him and the anguish of being torn between the love of two women.

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 and after briefly training as a composer resolved to be a writer. He published a large number of collections of poetry, written under the burden of Soviet Russia's stringent censorship, before publishing his most famous work, Dr Zhivago, in 1958. This novel won him the Nobel Prize for Literature but the USSR's hostility to the West meant he was forced to turn it down. He died in 1960.

The first work of genius to come out of Russia since the Revolution -- V.S. Pritchett One of the great events in man's literary and moral history -- Edmund Wilson Belongs to that small group of novels by which all others are ultimately judged -- Frank Kermode * Spectator * Not since Shakespeare has love been so fully, vividly, scrupulously and directly communicated -- Isaiah Berlin * Sunday Times *