Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Published 1957 · 546 pages · 211,297 words · about 15 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance

How hard is Doctor Zhivago to read?

Doctor Zhivago scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Pasternak writes in Russian (here translated), with vocabulary appropriate to the revolution and its aftermath. The prose is literary and elevated.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Long, flowing sentences that capture the sweep of historical events and inner life. The prose is demanding but rewarding.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
The personal drama of Zhivago is loves unfolds against vast historical forces. Abstract questions about fate, freedom, and art pervade the narrative.
Information density: 60 out of 100
Dense with Russian history, poetry, and philosophical meditation. Pasternak assumes familiarity with the Revolution and Civil War.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
Pasternak tells his story through accumulation and coincidence. The meaning is in the pattern, in how lives intersect and diverge.
Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
The train, the frozen road, the poems that close the novel—Pasternak builds an elaborate symbolic structure around his characters.
Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
Pasternak writes with romantic intensity. There is irony in how history treats individuals, but no protective distance from their suffering.
Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
The novel reaches its devastating conclusion, but the poems Zhivago leaves behind promise something beyond tragedy.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
An epic spanning decades, with many characters and intersecting storylines. The structure is ambitious, following the sweep of Russian history.

How Doctor Zhivago is regarded

Doctor Zhivago holds a literary regard score of 82 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Doctor Zhivago sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (371 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Doctor Zhivago scores 62 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
He realized that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future
Symbol: Formal
the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony phase 4) (irony iv)
took a step, another, a third, collapsed on the stone paving, and did not get up again.
Genre: Novel + Romance + Confession
It remains to tell the brief story of the last eight or ten years of Zhivago ' s life

Where the story of Doctor Zhivago takes place

  • Russia during revolution and civil war, 1903-1929 (1903 to 1929), the main setting
  • Moscow and the Volga-Urals estate, 1903-1912 (1903 to 1912)
  • Galician front and Meliuzeievo, 1915-1917 (1915 to 1917)
  • Revolutionary Moscow, 1917-1918 (1917 to 1918)
  • Varykino, Yuriatin and the Siberian partisan camps (1918 to 1921)
  • NEP Moscow, 1922-1929 (1922 to 1929)
  • Bryansk-Orel front, 1943

5 things that are true of Doctor Zhivago, with the passage for each

  1. Zhivago's father, a millionaire, jumps from a moving train in front of the boy Misha Gordon.

    dashing out onto the platform threw himself from the train.

  2. The girl who shoots at a prosecutor at the Christmas party is Lara.

    So it was the girl who had fired the shot?

  3. Tonia writes to Zhivago that Uncle Nikolai, her father and the rest are being deported abroad.

    Miliukov, Kizevetter, Kuskov, and several others including your Uncle Nikolai, my father, and the rest of us, are being deported abroad.

  4. Strelnikov kills himself in the snow near the house at Varykino.

    Strelnikov lay across the path with his head in a snowdrift. He had shot himself.

  5. Zhivago dies of a heart attack after getting off a stalled Moscow trolley.

    took a step, another, a third, collapsed on the stone paving, and did not get up again.

Scenes in Doctor Zhivago that Frye would name

75 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
Strelnikov lay across the path with his head in a snowdrift. He had shot himself. Strelnikov's suicide closes the second protagonist's arc.
Pathos, untitled
took a step, another, a third, collapsed on the stone paving, and did not get up again. The hero's death in the street while a crowd quarrels about what to do.
Sparagmos, untitled
he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys Pamphil dismembers his own family in a delirium of fear.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Cut-and-dried ideas, a one-track mind, harsh principles, and integrity, absolute integrity…Strelnikov! Zhivago recognises the armed stranger at Varykino as the commissar of the railway car.
Lyric, untitled
The stir is over. I step forth on the boards. The Hamlet poem opens Zhivago's appended cycle.
Lyric, untitled
A candle burned on the table; Winter Night lyricises the candle motif seen from the sleigh.

Books that share these scenes with Doctor Zhivago

About the author

Boris Pasternak