Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak [ILLUSTRATED HARDCOVER / 1990]

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak 

SPECIAL ILLUSTRATED EDITON [1990] READER'S DIGEST / WORLD'S BEST READING

Gilded heavyweight hardcover w decorative frontispiece, leatherette spine and  original inserts. Full color illustrations by Norman Green. 

Book is in very good condition. 

Cover has light shelf wear and one tiny spot of damage on back cover.  Inside reads like new.  

This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.

Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel. .