![]() And yet, despite it all, the novel has always ranked among my favorites. (Indeed, his likeness is missing from my nesting doll set of great Russian writers.) I think most Americans would agree that David Lean’s sweeping 1965 film adaptation outpaced the popularity of its source text. Pasternak is often left off the list of Russia’s iconic literary writers such as Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Zhivago is now part of Russia’s 11th-grade school curriculum, but many Slavic departments in the West gave up on the novel long ago, siding with Nabokov, who dismissed it as a “clumsy, trivial, and melodramatic” book. ![]() Consequently, the novel’s reputation in the West has suffered. While the Hayward-Harrari version has long been criticized for its divergence from Pasternak’s original prose, Pevear and Volokhonsky demonstrated another flaw - slavish devotion to its Russian syntax. Unfortunately, justice still eluded Zhivago. This second translation was done by the husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky for the 50th anniversary of Pasternak’s death in 2010. Many decades later, another duo attempted the feat. They were, as they say in their introduction, under no illusions that they had done justice even remotely to the original. In their translators’ note, Hayward and Harari expressed their wish to see the novel appear in Russian and, eventually, to “fall into the hands of a translator whose talent is equal to that of its author.” This note may sound charmingly self-deprecating to readers, but Hayward and Harari had been given just three months to translate Pasternak’s lengthy text. This Russian literary classic was in fact first printed as Il Dottor Živago in Milan English and French translations quickly followed. In response, Boris Pasternak entrusted copies of his manuscript to foreign friends who ensured the novel would be published and read abroad. ![]() ![]() The novel, which traces the life and love affair of a Moscow doctor through three wars and two revolutions, was considered “anti-revolutionary” by the Politburo, and Soviet publishers had refused to publish it. WHEN MAX HAYWARD and Manya Harari translated Doctor Zhivago into English in 1958, it had not yet appeared in Russian. ![]()
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