Doctor Zhivago

Description

A new translation of one of the greatest love stories ever told, in a beautiful gift edition. From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, a stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece, the first since the 1958 original. Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have restored the rhythms, tone, precision, and poetry of Pasternak's original, bringing this classic of world literature gloriously to life for a new generation of readers.

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 The English-speaking world is indebted to these two magnificent translators * New York Review of Books * 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 *