A TRAGEDY OF THE REVOLUTION

PASTERNAK, BORIS.

Doctor Zhivago. Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari.

London, Collins and Harvill Press, 1958. Orig. full red cloth w. gilt lettering to back in an excellent, not price-clipped orig. red, blue and yellow dust-jacket w. only very minor nicks and creases to extremities. An excellent, nice and clean copy.

First English edition, first printing of this modern classic, which tells the tragic story of the medical doctor and poet, Yuri Zhivago, in the years during the Russian Revolution.

Though begun several decades earlier, the work was completed in 1956, and was submitted for publication to the journal "Novij Mir" the same year, but due to the controversial contents of the work and the Soviet government's dislike of Pasternak, it was rejected. The following year the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union by the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, who published the book in Russian in Milan in 1957. Already the following year numerous European translations of the work had been made, and the English and Italian ones appeared as the first. These immediate translations and the publications of them partly caused Pasternak being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958. Due to the immense popularity of the work, all the European translations were reprinted numerous times.

In 1965 the work was made into the large-scale film-production by David Lean, which was nominated for ten Oscars and won five.

Order-nr.: 34161