...must have come from one of the boxes of books donated to the sale. I paid the two-dollar asking price, brought Zhivago home and started re-reading it, for the first time in over forty years, an image of the luminous Julie Christie as Pasternak's heroine in the back of my mind. I was surprised by the narrator's wry sense of humour, which I hadn't remembered, and the story kept my attention. Later I found the paperback edition read during my high school years, and its cover proclaimed it "The Novel That Made World History."

Next fall marks the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication in English, a moment in time when a novel could draw the attention of readers around the world, with word of mouth spreading about a manuscript smuggled out of Russia. It's easy to forget the fear that shadowed the Cold War era. Just two years before Zhivago arrived in American bookstores, Soviet tanks drove into Budapest and ended the Hungarian uprising; two years after its arrival, Nikita Khrushchev pounded his right shoe on a podium at the United Nations and threatened to bury the West.

BEGUN in 1948 and originally planned for serial publication in Russia in 1956, Zhivago did not pass the censors. Pasternak had also given his manuscript to an agent of the Italian publisher Feltrinelli in the spring of that year, saying, "You've invited me to my own execution." The Italian translation appeared in the fall of 1957 and a Russian-language version followed, also in Milan; both were published at considerable risk to Pasternak and those closest to him. An English translation from the Russian, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, appeared a year later, in September (from Collins in Canada and Great Britain and Pantheon in the United States) and on 23 October, the second anniversary of the start of the abortive Hungarian revolution, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Doctor Zhivago quickly rose to first place on the best-seller lists, bypassing a book by another Russian writer--the emigre Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Perhaps Zhivago better suited the Cold War atmosphere, reassuring people that, despite communism,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Queen's Quarterly
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Skating at the Gardens with Uncle Mario.(Poem), December 22, 2007

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