Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak’s novel follows physician and poet Yuri Zhivago through the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, exploring love, art, and individual life amid political upheaval.

Boris Pasternak: A Russian poet and novelist whose works include the novel Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak wrote the novel over many years, drawing on personal experience and Russian history.
Yuri Zhivago: The physician and poet whose life and relationships anchor Doctor Zhivago. His divided commitments to medicine, poetry, family, and love organize the narrative.
Free indirect discourse: A narrative style that blends third-person narration with a character’s thoughts and idiom. It brings Zhivago’s perceptions into the narration without turning the novel into a first-person account.
Socialist realism: The officially prescribed Soviet artistic method portraying society through a socialist ideological framework. Pasternak’s novel rejects the method’s heroic political certainty and approved historical narrative.
Pasternak affair: The international political controversy surrounding Pasternak’s 1958 Nobel Prize and his treatment by Soviet authorities. The novel’s recognition abroad made its author the focus of a confrontation over state control.
Russian Revolution: The upheavals of 1917 that ended the Russian monarchy and brought the Bolsheviks to power. The revolution and civil war overturn Zhivago’s world and drive the novel’s central events.
Lara Antipova: A central character in Doctor Zhivago, whose relationship with Yuri unfolds amid revolution and war. Lara’s independent, often perilous life gives the novel’s love story its other center.
Motif (narrative): A recurring element in a literary work that develops or reinforces its themes. Recurring images of weather, light, and nature link private feeling to historical change.
And Quiet Flows the Don: Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel depicting Cossack life through revolution and the Russian Civil War. Its Soviet-approved account of upheaval offers a striking comparison with Pasternak’s banned novel.
Radio Liberty: A US-funded broadcaster that transmitted news and cultural programming to audiences in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Its broadcasts included readings of the novel in Russian after its clandestine circulation.

Linked from 10 pages