The Adventures of the Doctor Zhivago Manuscript. Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago": analysis of the work History of creation: recognized by the world, rejected by the homeland

January

Pasternak brings into the novel last changes, and the typescript is sent to the editors of the magazines “Znamya” and “ New world».

Spring

Pasternak hands over the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to the Polish writer and translator Zemovit Fedecki (the first copy to end up abroad).

May 20

Pasternak hands over a draft typescript to D’Angelo, the literary agent of the publisher Feltrinelli (the second copy that ended up abroad).

June 13

Feltrinelli sends Pasternak a publishing contract.

August

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who visited Pasternak in Peredelkino, takes with him the typescript of the novel (the third copy that ended up abroad).

September

Pasternak receives a letter from the editorial board of Novy Mir refusing to publish the novel. In the same month, the French translator Hélène Pelletier arrived in Peredelkino and took away a copy of the novel (the fourth copy to end up abroad).

1957

Jan. 7

In order to delay the publication of the Italian translation of the novel, Goslitizdat enters into an agreement with Pasternak to publish Doctor Zhivago.

January

Pasternak hands over the typescript of the novel to the French translator Jacqueline de Prouillard (the fifth copy that ended up abroad).

February 21

Feltrinelli receives a telegram from Pasternak asking him to postpone the release of the novel in Italian until September.

July 30

The Warsaw magazine Opinie publishes two chapters from Doctor Zhivago. After the scandal, the magazine was closed.

November 23

Doctor Zhivago is published in Italian by Feltrinelli.

1958

1st of January

Hélène Peltier tells Pasternak about the possibility of publishing Doctor Zhivago in Russian at the Dutch publishing house Mouton.

Spring

Albert Camus nominates Pasternak for the Nobel Prize.

End of spring

The Central Association of Political Emigrants (COPE), which existed with money from the CIA, under the leadership of the head intelligence agency Allen Dulles is typing up the Russian version of the novel at a printing house in Munich. The layout is taken to Holland.

27th of June

Doctor Zhivago is released on French at the Gallimard publishing house.

End of July

The printing house of the Mouton publishing house is secretly printing the first edition of the Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago.

Early August

Feltrinelli puts his name on title page Mouton edition. This is how the first edition of the novel appears in Russian.

September 7

Russian editions of Doctor Zhivago are being distributed free of charge at Expo 58 in Brussels.

September

English and American translations novel.

October 12

The novel begins to be published in installments in the newspaper “Novoye” Russian word" (NY).

October 23

The Swedish Academy awards Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature.

December

The University of Michigan Press is conducting its second Russian edition novel.

1959

March

Feltrinelli publishes the third Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago.

May

The fourth edition of the novel in Russian is published in Paris.

1961

The University of Michigan Press publishes Pasternak's collected works in three volumes.

1967

The University of Michigan Press is publishing the third edition of Doctor Zhivago, which for the first time takes into account the author's will. Previously, the text was printed based on a draft that Pasternak handed over to Feltrinelli. Now the publication is carried out from the typescript of Jacqueline de Prouillard. Following this, Feltrinelli republishes the Russian text of the novel.

1988

January - April: thanks to the initiative and efforts of the historian and deputy editor-in-chief of "New World" Vadim Borisov, the first edition of "Doctor Zhivago" is published in Russia: in Nos. 1-4 "New World" prints the novel from typescript with Pasternak's editing and taking into account the latest author's will. 

In 1957, the Italian publishing house Feltrinelli published the first copies of Doctor Zhivago. In 1958, Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for this novel, which he was forced to publicly refuse. In Russia, the work was published only in 1988 (in the magazine “New World”), more than thirty years from the date of the first publication of “Doctor Zhivago”. The action of the novel takes place in that difficult time when Russia faced all the trials at once: the First World War and the Civil Wars, the abdication of the Tsar, the revolution. Boris Pasternak's novel about the fate of his generation, which became a witness, participant and victim of this madness. Reviews in the press Famous novel Nobel laureate has been republished several times and has long become a programmatic work of Russian literature. Here is an audio performance of the work performed by Honored Artist of Russia Alexei Borzunov. The text is reproduced without abbreviations: both parts of the masterpiece and the poem by Yuri Zhivago. Your leisure time Listening to a novel performed by an artist is not as easy as it might seem at first glance, because the listener will be required full participation, and this is reflected in the specificity of the novel as a whole and Borzunov’s intonation features: he reads as if he were telling the story about himself, very confidentially and very sincerely, so that you begin to listen, empathize, follow the course of the story, and in the end you become part of it. Those who are familiar with the plot of the novel should listen to the audio version at least for comparison. own attitude to certain events occurring in the novel, with the emphasis placed by Alexey Borzunov. AIF “I want to know everything” © B. Pasternak (heirs) ©&? IP Vorobiev V.A. ©&? ID UNION

"Doctor Zhivago" - plot

The main character of the novel, Yuri Zhivago, appears before the reader as a little boy on the first pages of the work, describing the funeral of his mother: “They walked and walked and sang” Eternal memory“...” Yura is a descendant of a wealthy family that made its fortune in industrial, commercial and banking operations. The parents' marriage was not happy: the father abandoned the family before the death of the mother.

Orphaned Yura will be sheltered for a while by his uncle living in the south of Russia. Then numerous relatives and friends will send him to Moscow, where he will be accepted into the family of Alexander and Anna Gromeko as if he were his own.

Yuri's exceptionalism becomes obvious quite early - even as a young man, he shows himself as a talented poet. But at the same time he decides to follow in the footsteps of his adoptive father Alexander Gromeko and enters the medical department of the university, where he also proves himself as a talented doctor. The first love, and subsequently the wife of Yuri Zhivago, becomes the daughter of his benefactors, Tonya Gromeko.

Yuri and Tony had two children, but then fate separated them forever, and the doctor never saw his youngest daughter, who was born after the separation.

At the beginning of the novel, new faces constantly appear before the reader. All of them will be tied into a single ball by the further course of the story. One of them is Larisa, the slave of the elderly lawyer Komarovsky, who tries with all her might and cannot escape the captivity of his “patronage.” Lara has a childhood friend, Pavel Antipov, who will later become her husband, and Lara will see her salvation in him. Having gotten married, he and Antipov cannot find their happiness; Pavel leaves his family and goes to the front of the First World War. Subsequently, he would become a formidable revolutionary commissar, changing his surname to Strelnikov. At the end of the Civil War, he plans to reunite with his family, but this desire will never come true.

Fate brings Yuri Zhivago and Lara together in different ways during the First World War in the front-line settlement of Melyuzeyevo, where main character works is called to war as a military doctor, and Antipova volunteers as a sister of mercy, trying to find her missing husband Pavel. Subsequently, the lives of Zhivago and Lara intersect again in the provincial Yuryatin-on-Rynva (a fictional Ural city, the prototype of which was Perm), where they vainly seek refuge from the revolution that destroys everything. Yuri and Larisa will meet and fall in love. But soon poverty, hunger and repression will separate both Doctor Zhivago’s family and Larina’s family. For a year and a half, Zhivago will disappear in Siberia, serving as a military doctor in captivity of the Red partisans. Having escaped, he will return on foot back to the Urals - to Yuryatin, where he will again meet with Lara. His wife Tonya, together with Yuri's children and father-in-law, while in Moscow, writes about imminent forced deportation abroad. Hoping to wait out the winter and the horrors of the Yuryatinsky Revolutionary Military Council, Yuri and Lara take refuge in the abandoned Varykino estate. Soon an unexpected guest comes to them - Komarovsky, who received an invitation to head the Ministry of Justice in the Far Eastern Republic, proclaimed on the territory of Transbaikalia and the Russian Far East. He persuades Yuri Andreevich to let Lara and her daughter go with him to the east, promising to transport them then abroad. Yuri Andreevich agrees, realizing that he will never see them again.

Gradually he begins to go crazy from loneliness. Soon Lara's husband, Pavel Antipov (Strelnikov), comes to Varykino. Demoted and wandering across the expanses of Siberia, he tells Yuri Andreevich about his participation in the revolution, about Lenin, about the ideals of Soviet power, but, having learned from Yuri Andreevich that Lara has loved and loves him all this time, he understands how bitterly he was mistaken. Strelnikov commits suicide with a rifle shot. After Strelnikov's suicide, the doctor returns to Moscow in the hope of fighting for his later life. There he meets his last woman - Marina, the daughter of the former (back in Tsarist Russia) Zhivag janitor Markel. In a civil marriage with Marina, they have two girls. Yuri gradually descends, abandons scientific and literary activity and, even realizing his fall, he cannot do anything about it. One morning, on the way to work, he becomes ill on the tram and dies of a heart attack in the center of Moscow. His half-brother Evgraf and Lara, who will soon go missing soon after, come to say goodbye to him at his coffin.

Ahead will be the Second World War, and the Kursk Bulge, and the washerwoman Tanya, who will tell Yuri Andreevich’s gray-haired childhood friends - Innokenty Dudorov and Mikhail Gordon, who survived the Gulag, arrests and repressions of the late 30s, the story of their lives; it turns out that this illegitimate daughter Yuri and Lara, and Yuri’s brother, Major General Evgraf Zhivago, will take her under his wing. He will also compile a collection of Yuri's works - a notebook that Dudorov and Gordon read in last scene novel. The novel ends with 25 poems by Yuri Zhivago.

Story

In November 1957, the novel was first published in Italian in Milan by the Feltrinelli publishing house, “despite all the efforts of the Kremlin and the Italian Communist Party” (for this Feltrinelli was later expelled from the Communist Party).

On August 24, 1958, a “pirated” (without the consent of Feltrinelli) edition in Russian was released in Holland with a circulation of 500 copies.

The Russian edition, based on a manuscript not corrected by the author, was published in Milan in January 1959.

Awards

On October 23, 1958, Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize with the wording “for significant achievements in modern lyric poetry, as well as for continuing the traditions of the great Russian epic novel.” The USSR authorities, led by N. S. Khrushchev, perceived this event with indignation, since they considered the novel anti-Soviet. Due to the persecution that unfolded in the USSR, Pasternak was forced to refuse to receive the prize. Only on December 9, 1989, the Nobel diploma and medal were awarded to the writer’s son, Evgeniy Pasternak, in Stockholm.

Criticism

V. V. Nabokov gave a negative assessment of the novel, which replaced Lolita in the list of bestsellers: “Doctor Zhivago is a pathetic thing, clumsy, banal and melodramatic, with hackneyed situations, voluptuous lawyers, implausible girls, romantic robbers and banal coincidences.”

Ivan Tolstoy, author of the book “The Laundered Novel”: Because this man overcame what all other writers in the Soviet Union could not overcome. For example, Andrei Sinyavsky sent his manuscripts to the West under the pseudonym Abram Terts. In the USSR in 1958 there was only one person who, raising his visor, said: “I am Boris Pasternak, I am the author of the novel Doctor Zhivago. And I want it to come out in the form in which it was created." And this man was awarded the Nobel Prize. I believe that this highest award was awarded to the most correct person on Earth at that time.

Reviews

Reviews of the book "Doctor Zhivago"

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Yulia Olegina

The Great Russian Epic Novel

I really enjoyed this novel! Moreover, Doctor Zhivago has become my favorite Russian novel!

Everyone knows that it was for this work that Pasternak was given the Nobel Prize with the wording “... for continuing the traditions of the great Russian epic novel.” And it is true. "Doctor Zhivago" is a new "War and Peace", only a century later. Shown here different destinies, the impact of the First World War on the lives of people from different social strata. There is love that breaks through walls and love that is locked.

At first I didn't really like it. The description of the life of Yura Zhivago, Gordon, Lara in childhood is not very interesting and even a little “intrusive”. The plot jumps from one character to another, you don’t even have time to remember everyone, who, to whom and by whom. But from the moment Yura and Tonya’s promise to Tonya’s dying mother to love each other, the novel seems to get a “second wind.” Now the action unfolds rapidly, excitingly and most importantly - powerfully. You read avidly and can’t stop. Pasternak put a lot of effort into his narration style, every word of his is precise, you can neither delete nor add. Just the way it should be.

1. For everyone who loves classic Russian novels, such as "War and Peace", "Anna Karenina", " The captain's daughter" etc.

Doctor Zhivago

Year and place of first publication: 1957, Italy; 1958, USA

Publishers: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore; Pantheon Books

Literary form: novel

Doctor Zhivago traces the fate of the hero, whose name appears in the title of the work, until his death on the eve of his fortieth birthday. The novel covers a turbulent period in Russian history: from the beginning of the 20th century through the revolution of 1917, the Civil War to the terror of the 1930s. The action of the epilogue develops against the backdrop of World War II (after the death of Zhivago); he gives glimpses of the future and sums up the past.

Yuri Andreevich Zhivago was orphaned as a child. His father, a wealthy industrialist who abandoned his family before his mother's premature death, squandered the family fortune. Yuri ended up in the house of an intelligent Moscow family. He studies to become a therapist - he is highly regarded as a diagnostician - and marries Tonya, the daughter of his adoptive parents. They had a child, but after Zhivago was called to the front (the First World War was underway).

At the service, Zhivago meets Lara - Larisa Fedorovna Antipova (née Guichard), the daughter of a Russified French widow. He saw her several times in his youth. Having completed nursing courses, she is looking for her husband Pasha - Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, who, according to rumors, is either wounded or killed in battle. Lara carries with her the weight of dishonor: in her youth she was seduced by the libertine Komarovsky, her mother's lover. Yuri and Lara gradually become friends, but then she returns home to the Urals, and he returns to his family in Moscow.

Events of extreme importance. There are street riots in St. Petersburg. The troops of the St. Petersburg garrison went over to the side of the rebels. Revolution.

This news ends the first part of the novel - it foreshadows dramatic changes in the destinies of the main characters and all of Russia.

Returning, Yuri finds Moscow alarmed and at the same time sad. There is not enough fuel and firewood. Finding a livelihood is very difficult. Yuri tries to resume his medical practice and social circle, but finds that he has become a stranger to his friends and colleagues. He begins to realize that the political atmosphere for his family has become threatening - due to the situation in the past.

After a difficult winter, Tonya and her father, with the help of Yuri's half-brother, Evgraf, convince Yuri to flee Moscow to Varykino, the estate of Tonya's grandfather - a risky move that exposes them noble origin. The long journey in a freight train is dangerous: they have to endure constant searches. Not far from Yuryatin, Zhivago meets Strelnikov, a Red Army officer known for his fanaticism. (In reality, this is Lara's missing husband, who took advantage of rumors of his death to change his name.)

Zhivago’s life in Varykino flows peacefully and inconspicuously. But Yuri's peace is disturbed by two events. First, his affair with Lara, whom he accidentally encountered in the Yuryatino library: he is tormented by this treacherous betrayal of Tonya, who still loves him. And then the Red partisans, the forest brotherhood, mobilize him at gunpoint to replace their murdered surgeon. This duty lasts more than a year before he manages to escape.

Six weeks later, Yuri, black with dirt, exhausted and weak, reaches Yuryatin to find Lara. He learns that his family returned to Moscow and were then expelled from Russia. Since Lara is Strelnikov’s wife, her and Yuri’s situation is not safe. They hide together in Varykino, but their paths diverge when Lara runs to Far East. Lara expects Zhivago to follow her, but he stays; he deceives Lara for her own safety, deciding to go to Moscow. Before Yuri leaves, Strelnikov appears, trying to find his wife and shelter. The next day, knowing that he would soon be arrested, he shoots himself.

In Moscow, Yuri cannot bring himself to work or write. Even attempts to obtain an exit visa are made by him without enthusiasm. He is deteriorating physically and mentally. In the end, with the help of his brother Evgraf, he tries to awaken himself to life. However, he dies of a heart attack on the way to the hospital, where he barely managed to get a job.

Meanwhile, Lara appears. She comes to Moscow to find her and Yuri lost daughter. Guided by memories, she comes to her husband's student apartment, where he lived recent months. After the funeral, she stays to help Evgraf deal with Zhivago's papers and then disappears.

“One day Larisa Fedorovna left home and never returned. Apparently, she was arrested on the street in those days and she died or disappeared somewhere unknown, forgotten under some nameless number from the subsequently lost lists, in one of the innumerable general or women’s concentration camps of the North.”

Pasternak introduces readers to and portrays a variety of characters from all walks of life life situations. He recreates the vicissitudes of private life and the socio-political events of the time, bringing to life the historical and human landscape. Before the First World War, the charming life of the prosperous upper classes contrasts with the everyday life of the working class: on the one hand - musical evenings, Christmas balls, banquets and cards, and on the other - strikes at railway and Cossacks beating peaceful demonstrators.

The interlude in Varykino is built on contrast: family prosperity, fruitful work, the beauty of nature are surrounded by devastation - burned, devastated villages that found themselves under the crossfire of the White and Red armies or were destroyed by the rebels local residents. The peasants live in poverty, their lives are ruined, their sons were taken into soldiers.

Yuri's first reaction to the revolution is the expectation of “signs of the new,” as representatives of revolutionary-utopian thought of 1905 and 1912–1914 put it; he was well aware of the oppression in Tsarist Russia. Later, he begins to be irritated by less familiar ideas based on the practice of wild and ruthless war and revolution: “a soldier’s revolution, directed by experts in this element, the Bolsheviks.” On the way to Moscow, a revolutionary fellow traveler objects to Zhivago’s suggestion that the country should wait for “relative calm and order” before embarking on “risky experiments”:

“This is naive... What you call collapse is as normal a phenomenon as your vaunted and beloved order. These destructions are a natural and preliminary part of a broader creative plan. Society has not collapsed enough yet. It must be completely disintegrated, and then the real revolutionary government will piece it together piece by piece on completely different grounds.”

Zhivago does not fall under the spell of this “siren song”; The closer he gets to Moscow, the more empty and meaningless war and revolution seem to him, and home, on the contrary, is the most important and expensive.

From the revolutionary episodes it is clear that he is familiar with devastation and deprivation. These episodes discredit the politically biased rhetoric of the revolutionaries. A village is shelled by an armored train as punishment for being next door to another who refused to support the party. Another village is wiped off the face of the earth for hiding food from the army. The second stage of the revolution is a time of suspicion and intrigue: informers, out of hatred, are ready to destroy opponents “in the name of the highest revolutionary justice.”

Yuri, often too frank (to the detriment of his safety), demonstrates his rejection of what is happening:

“But, firstly, the ideas of general improvement, as they began to be understood in October, do not inflame me. Secondly, this is still far from existence, and for the mere talk about it, such seas of blood have been paid that, perhaps, the end does not justify the means. Thirdly, and this is the main thing, when I hear about remaking my life, I lose power over myself and fall into despair.”

Elsewhere he reflects on Marxism and its leaders:

“Marxism and science?... Marxism has too little self-control to be a science. Sciences are more balanced. Marxism and objectivity? I do not know a movement more isolated in itself and far from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is concerned with testing themselves through experience, and people in power, for the sake of the fable of their own infallibility, do their best to turn away from the truth. Politics doesn't tell me anything. I don’t like people who are indifferent to the truth.”

Being in the prime of his strength and abilities, Yuri dreams of living life fully and brightly, by the sweat of his brow. He talks about “man’s eternal craving for the earth,” admires the beauty of the world around him, he likes to experience the world and express it. He wants to be free, he fights to protect his privacy and his worldview.

The epilogue takes place during World War II in 1943 and concerns two childhood friends of Zhivago. They visited Soviet camps, but now have become army officers. They reflect on the past, on the suffering they have endured. One of them comments on one of the most important aspects of the Soviet system:

“I think collectivization was a false, failed measure, and a mistake could not be admitted. To hide the failure, it was necessary to use all means of intimidation to wean people from judging and thinking and to force them to see what does not exist and to prove the opposite with evidence. Hence the unprecedented cruelty of the Yezhovshchina, the promulgation of a constitution not designed for application, the introduction of elections not based on an elective principle.

And when the war broke out, its real horrors, real danger and threat of real death were a blessing compared to the inhuman dominion of fiction, and brought relief because they limited the witchcraft the force of the dead letters".

CENSORSHIP HISTORY

After Stalin's death in 1953, the Kremlin relaxed censorship controls; Pasternak begins writing Doctor Zhivago. He was silent during Stalin's times, which "deprived him of his voice creative individuality and all writers were required to conform to party dogmas.” After he sent the manuscript to Gosizdat and received an approving review, the author sent a copy of the manuscript to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Later, Gosizdat changed its mind and rejected the book due to the fact that, in the opinion of the publishing house, it depicted the Bolshevik revolution as the greatest crime. Pasternak was demanded to take the book back from the Italian publisher for “revision.” The publisher refused to return the manuscript.

When Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, he was forced to refuse it: “Because of the significance that the award has received in the society to which I belong, I must refuse it.”

The Soviet Union stated that the award and the actions of the Swedish judges were “a hostile political action, because a work was recognized that was hidden from Soviet readers and was counter-revolutionary and slanderous.” Pasternak was later expelled from the Writers' Union and stripped of the title of "Soviet writer".

In 1986, with the beginning of Gorbachev's glasnost policy, issues of censorship and government interference in literary process discussed at the Eighth Congress Soviet writers. Reform criticism took leading positions in the Writers' Union. The head of the Union said that the state publishing house is discussing the possibility of publishing Doctor Zhivago. The novel was published in 1988 in No. 1–4 of the New World magazine - A.E.

In the United States in 1964, a bookstore owner in Larchmont, New York, reported that a man claiming to be a member of the John Birch Society called him to protest a number of “subversive” books on the shelves of his store. These books were Doctor Zhivago, John Gunter's Russia Today and Marx's Capital, and he also noted Nabokov's books and a Russian-English dictionary. He threatened that if these and other “un-American” books were not removed from the shelves, the community would boycott the store. The editor of the Newsletter and Intellectual Freedom advised the bookseller: “Do not take seriously the idle chatter of a self-appointed censor.” Apparently the store owner followed this advice.

Jonathan Green (under the title "Index of Banned Books") names Doctor Zhivago among the works that have been "particularly frequently" censored.