Doctor Zhivago

ALSO TRANSLATED BY

RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Stories by Anton Chekhov

The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Double and The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Translation, Translators’ Notes, and end notes copyright © 2010 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Introduction copyright © 2010 by Richard Pevear

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

This Russian-language work was originally published in Italian by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, in 1957. Copyright © 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, Italy.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of parts two and three, along with the poems “A Winter Night,” “The Star of the Nativity” and “Magdalene,” were originally published in The Hudson Review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 1890–1960.

[Doktor Zhivago. English]

Doctor Zhivago / Boris Pasternak; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-37996-2

1. Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Fiction. I. Pevear, Richard, 1943– II. Volokhonsky, Larissa. III. Title.

PG3476.P27d63 2010

891.73′42—dc22

2010000163

www.pantheonbooks.com

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Also Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Translators’ Notes

Book One

Part One THE FIVE O’CLOCK EXPRESS

Part Two A GIRL FROM A DIFFERENT CIRCLE

Part Three THE CHRISTMAS PARTY AT THE SVENTITSKYS’

Part Four IMMINENT INEVITABILITIES

Part Five FAREWELL TO THE OLD

Part Six THE MOSCOW ENCAMPMENT

Part Seven ON THE WAY

Book Two

Part Eight ARRIVAL

Part Nine VARYKINO

Part Ten ON THE HIGH ROAD

Part Eleven THE FOREST ARMY

Part Twelve THE FROSTED ROWAN

Part Thirteen OPPOSITE THE HOUSE WITH FIGURES

Part Fourteen IN VARYKINO AGAIN

Part Fifteen THE ENDING

Part Sixteen EPILOGUE

Part Seventeen THE POEMS OF YURI ZHIVAGO

A Note About the Author

A Note About the Translators

Notes

INTRODUCTION

I would pretend (metaphorically) to have seen nature and universe themselves not as a picture made or fastened on an immovable wall, but as a sort of painted canvas roof or curtain in the air, incessantly pulled and blown and flapped by a something of an immaterial unknown and unknowable wind.

—BORIS PASTERNAK

Letter (in English) to Stephen Spender, August 22, 1959

1

The first edition of Doctor Zhivago, the major work of one of the most important Russian writers of the twentieth century, was an Italian translation published in 1957. The next year translations of the novel into English and a number of other languages appeared and Russian-language editions were published in Italy and the United States. But it would take another thirty years and the reforms of perestroika before the novel could be published in Russia. Those circumstances and all that determined them made the reception of the book highly problematical at the time of its appearance.

Pasternak had spent ten years, from 1946 to 1955, writing Doctor Zhivago. He considered it the work that justified his life and his survival, when so many of his fellow Russians had perished during the first decades of the century from war, revolution, famine, forced labor, and political terror. After Stalin’s death in 1953 came a period known as the Thaw, when there was a general easing of the mechanisms of repression and ideological control. The ban then in place on Pasternak’s work (he had been in and out of favor time and again over the years) was lifted, and in 1954 he was able to publish ten poems from Doctor Zhivago in the journal Znamya (“The Banner”), where the title of the novel was mentioned for the first time. In January 1956, he sent the completed work to Novy Mir (“New World”), the most liberal of Moscow literary magazines, and it was also under consideration by Goslitizdat, the state publishing house.

In March 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party and virtual head of the government, made a “secret speech” to the twentieth party congress denouncing the crimes of Stalin. This speech, which immediately became known all over the world, seemed to herald a further opening up of Soviet society. But in fact the thaw was brief. Stirrings of liberation following Khrushchev’s speech, especially in such satellite countries as Hungary and Poland, worried the party leadership and caused them to tighten the controls again. The Poznan protests at the end of June were crushed by military force, as were the Polish and Hungarian uprisings later that same year.

The chill made itself felt in literary circles as well. In September 1956, the editors of Novy Mir returned the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to Pasternak with a detailed letter explaining that the spirit of the novel, its emotional content, and the author’s point of view were incompatible with the spirit of the revolution and the Marxist ideology that was the theoretical foundation of the Soviet state.

Pasternak was not surprised by the rejection. He had anticipated it, and in anticipation had even taken an extraordinary step, which surprised and outraged the Soviet authorities when they learned of it. In May 1956, an Italian Communist journalist by the name of Sergio d’Angelo visited Pasternak at his country house in Peredelkino, a writers’ village near Moscow. He had heard about the existence of Doctor Zhivago and offered to place it with the Milanese publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (also a Communist) for publication in Italian translation. According to d’Angelo’s account, Pasternak, after hesitating for a moment, went to his study, brought out a copy of the novel, and handed it to him with the words: “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.” Since 1929, when Evgeny Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak were vilified in the press for publishing their works abroad, no Soviet writers had had direct dealings with foreign publishers. Zamyatin had been forced to emigrate, and Pilnyak had eventually been shot. Pasternak knew that very well, of course, but he was intent on seeing Zhivago published abroad, if it could not be published at home, and was prepared to face the wrath of the authorities.