Zhivago and the other Russia

Boris Pasternak began work on his novel Dr Zhivago in 1950. At that time his was not a wide reputation even among educated contemporaries but his name commanded great respect among a small number of cultivated people in his own country - and in the West - as a poet and the translator of Goethe, Shelley, Rilke, Schiller and Shakespeare. While it is now fashionable in Western countries, perhaps in his own too, for people to hail Pasternak as part of their cultural background the fact remains that until he became controversial his name was far better known than anything he had written and, even then, only to a few.