ABSTRACT
The phantom of a long novel had haunted Pasternak sporadically for at least forty years before the publication of Doctor Zhivago. In 1918 Pasternak told Tsvetayeva that he wanted ‘to write a long novel — with love, with a heroine — like Balzac’. In the mid-1920s Pasternak was still obsessed with the idea of writing a novel, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s sardonic account. Readers of Doctor Zhivago have by no means all accepted the claims made for it by the author. The novel chronicles a single main hero, Yury Andreyevich Zhivago, who eclipses all the other characters in importance. Doctor Zhivago is intimately and multiply linked with its author’s personal evolution. Zhivago copies Pasternak in being a native of Moscow, and also in sojourning for prolonged periods in the Urals, except that the periods of residence are different. The main target for Pasternak’s disapproval is the activity of politics, with special reference to Soviet practices and phraseology.
