ABSTRACT
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, is an historical novel. Pasternak traces the significant passages in the lives of his characters from childhood in the early years of the century through the revolutions and wars that followed; and his control of the historical, geographical and social material, his accumulation of authentic detail, the feeling conveyed, quite simply, of living thus and there, invites the highest comparisons. The consequence of Pasternak's symbolist faith is that Zhivago, at the centre of the book, must be an artist. The novel with all its passionate, inexplicable tragic complexities, asserts Zhivago's wholeness against the partiality of even Strelnikov. Prose and Poems is a paperback and includes Safe Conduct, an earlier autobiography, in a translation by Beatrice Scott, first published by Lindsay Drummond in 1945; Alec Brown's version of the same work was published by Elek.
