Doctor Zhivago Study Guide

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow to a wealthy Jewish family. Pasternak’s father and mother, a painter and a concert pianist, respectively, were close followers of Leo Tolstoy and his spiritual-revolutionary movement. The young Pasternak was fascinated by both Christianity and modernist literary movements like Futurism. An injury kept Pasternak was kept out of World War I and, like many other intellectuals, he refused to leave Russia during the civil war. Pasternak found success as a poet after the war. Unlike many of his literary peers, he survived the purges of the 1930s and World War II. In 1956 Pasternak, submitted Doctor Zhivago to a Soviet literary magazine, but it was rejected on the grounds that it was anti-Soviet. The novel was published in Italy in 1957, and it won Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Pasternak’s success was bittersweet, as the award kicked off a furious denunciation campaign in the Soviet Union that ultimately led the author to reject the prize to avoid being deported. Pasternak died of lung cancer in 1960.

Doctor Zhivago reflects Pasternak’s experience of the enormous political upheavals of the early 20th century and often draws on the author’s own biography. The late 19th century was for Russia a period of incredible foment, both politically and artistically: the nascent communist movement was matched in the arts by an explosion in new literary methods, fads, and manifestoes. These political and artistic revolutions chafed against the inflexible and repressive Tsarist state, which refused to give any concessions to the working class or liberal democracy. Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War quickly developed into the 1905 Revolution, which the Tsar violently suppressed. The piecemeal reforms the country underwent in the years before World War I were unable to shore up the Tsar’s power, and after three years of defeat on the battlefield, the Tsar was forced to abdicate in 1917. The Bolsheviks soon toppled the Provisional Government that replaced the Tsar, sparking a five-year civil war that ended in Soviet control of most of the old empire. While the Soviet Union radically improved living standards for most people, it also carried out intense political repression, especially under Stalin. By the end of Pasternak’s life, Stalin had died and been replaced by Khrushchev, who significantly dialed back political repression and somewhat opened up society, but far less than disaffected intellectuals like Pasternak would have liked, as the nation’s vicious reaction to the author’s Nobel Prize shows.

Doctor Zhivago is an epic historical novel in the Russian tradition. Pasternak references his predecessors throughout the book, as his characters read the same authors and poets that influenced him: Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, and Nikolay Nekrasov. Doctor Zhivago heavily resembles sweeping Russian classics like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which also follows a disparate group of characters through a chaotic historical period, but Pasternak’s novel also draws heavily on poetry, like Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin for its style and sensibility. In self-consciously working within an older 19th-century tradition, Pasternak wrote a novel quite different from the works of many of his contemporaries and collaborators, most of whom were experimental poets, though Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Konstantin Paustovsky’s Story of a Life are similarly epic in length and scope.