Abstract
Pasternak’s novel Doktor Zhivago continues to enjoy an extraordinary worldwide popularity. By 1975 it had sold over five million copies in the USA, where it was the top-selling work of foreign-language fiction, as well as coming ahead of several of the novels of Harold Robbins and well ahead of Nabokov’s Lolita (Parsons, pp. 68–9).2 In an essay called ‘Travels in Hyperreality’, written in 1975, Umberto Eco describes Zhivago in wax at the Movieland Wax Museum at Buena Park, California:
you enter a snowy steppe where Zhivago is getting out of a sleigh, followed by Lara, but to reach it you have to pass the cabin where the lovers will go and live, and from the broken roof a mountain of snow has collected on the floor. You experience a certain emotion, you feel very Zhivago, you wonder if this involvement is due to the lifelike faces, to the natural poses, or to ‘Lara’s Theme’ which is being played with insinuating sweetness; and then you realize that the temperature really is lower, kept below zero centigrade, because everything must be like reality. (p. 13)
Owing to my diplomatic work I had not yet managed to read ‘Doctor Zhivago’, and when I did so later I found nothing wrong with it. (Andrei Gromyko, Memories)1
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© 1990 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London
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Cornwell, N. (1990). Soviet Responses to Doktor Zhivago. In: McMillin, A. (eds) From Pushkin to Palisandriia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21065-7_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21065-7_13
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