Doctor Zhivago (Vintage International)

Overview: First published in Italy in 1957 amidst international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Here is a masterful chronicle of its outbreak and the consequences: army revolts, irrational killings, starvation, epidemics, Communist Party inquisitions. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. This edition (the only paperback edition now available) includes an introduction by the distinguished Oxford University scholar John Bayley. It reacquaints a new generation of readers with the controversy surrounding the original publication of Doctor Zhivago and places the book in the context of Soviet literary history and the fall of the Soviet Union.