The Big Idea Behind DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890, the son of a celebrated portrait painter and a concert pianist. One of his influences as a child was composer Alexander Scriabin, a friend of his mother's.

Pasternak first built his reputation as a poet and translator (particularly of Shakespeare's plays). In 1945, he started work on Doctor Zhivago, drawing on his own experiences during the Russian Revolution and his romance with Olga Ivinskaya.

Nine years later, Doctor Zhivago was accepted for publication by the Soviet Union's State Publishing House, then banned as a vehicle for "hatred of Socialism."

When the novel was smuggled into Italy, the foreign rights were sold to an Italian publisher who declined orders to return the manuscript to the Soviet Union for revisions. He published the book in September 1957. The American edition was published by Pantheon Books in September 1958.

Doctor Zhivago was translated into 18 languages before it was published in the Soviet Union.

Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958 for both his poetry and the novel Doctor Zhivago. Under pressure from the Soviet Union, he chose not to attend the awards ceremony "in view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong."

When the Nobel Prize Committee announced their choice, Soviet critics damned Pasternak as a "traitor," a "malevolent Philistine," a "libeler," a "Judas" and an "extraneous smudge in our Socialist country." He was also expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union and his former mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, was arrested.

Pasternak never lived to see the Soviet Union change its official opinion of his work. He died of lung cancer in 1960.

Despite the Soviet ban on the novel, foreign editions were smuggled into the country, and a typewritten version was distributed by an underground do-it-yourself publishing network. As a result, the book attracted a devoted following among younger Soviets who established a tradition of yearly pilgrimages to Pasternak's grave.

Winning out over several other producers Carlo Ponti bought the film rights to Doctor Zhivago from its Italian publisher in 1963.

At the time, David Lean was the only director who seemed capable of pulling off such a large-scale production. On the strength of his international success with Lawrence of Arabia, Ponti hired him and gave him complete artistic control.

Lean was attracted to the project because after two films with no female characters (The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957] and Lawrence of Arabia) he wanted to get back to a film with a love story. One of his biggest early hits had been Brief Encounter (1945), which, like Doctor Zhivago, told a classic tale of doomed love.

He agreed to do the film on condition that Robert Bolt, who had written Lawrence of Arabia write the script.

Although time constraints made it impossible to use more than about 1/24th of the novel, the biggest change Bolt made was to add a framing story in which Zhivago's half-brother, Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), tells the story of Zhivago and Lara to a girl (Rita Tushingham) who could be their long-lost daughter.

by Frank Miller