Doctor Zhivago

Vintage Classic Russians Series

By: Boris Pasternak, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

Listen to this stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

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 people.

VINTAGE CLASSICS RUSSIAN SERIES - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

©2020 Boris Pasternak (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'Not since Shakespeare has love been so fully, vividly, scrupulously and directly communicated' Sunday Times

Overrated story about a two-timer

I think this book was the big success it was because it was forbidden in the USSR (one of the best ways to promote interest in a book is to ban it). And then a successful film. At the time, some critics said it trivialized history. Well, that’s how I feel about the book itself. The historical side of it is quite shallow. There is a war setting, but the transition from WWI to the Revolution is not clear, and the end is suddenly set in WWII, feeling like he just wanted to stick that in, too. The love story is also kind of shallow - never really clear what drives Zhivago to love another woman when he clearly loves his wife. He is irresponsible towards the women in his life and his children. I find it hard to sympathize with such a person. I get a feeling that Pasternak wanted to write a 20th century War and Peace, but failed. Though the writing (based on what is considered a good translation here) is often quite lovely, it often also rambles without any real purpose other than Pasternak seems to like to “hear” himself “talk”. The last chapter of poetry I did not finish. I found it boring and purposeless. Juliet Stevens did an excellent job of reading, including the male voices, though sometimes they were hard to distinguish. But I do have one nit to pick with her: the way she pronounces “plice” without a schwa between the p and l drives me nuts. (And I wrote that about her in my review of a different book, where the word was far more frequent.) There is far better 20th century Russian literature than this, but I’m not sorry I listened, so that I know more about the book than I did from seeing the film decades ago.