HomeArts & LifestyleThe Folio Society releases exclusive translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

The Folio Society releases exclusive translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

Credit: The Folio Society

Exclusive to The Folio Society, this magnificent new Limited Edition translation promises to become the pre-eminent English language version. Translated by the author’s nephew, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, and lavishly illustrated with more than 60 works by the author’s father, Leonid Pasternak, this spectacular volume brings together the creative brilliance of three generations of Pasternaks for the first time.

Bound in leather and hand-marbled paper and signed by the translator Nicolas Pasternak Slater, this limited edition of 750 hand-numbered copies is exclusively available from The Folio Society.

Doctor Zhivago’s relationship with translation has been long and controversial. The first English edition, rushed to press in 1958, is often critiqued for its omissions and simplifications; the second, published over 50 years later, offers a more literal rendering, but at the cost of readability and elegance. In this definitive new translation, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, an eminent translator of Dostoevsky and Pushkin and nephew of Boris Pasternak, brings English-language readers as close as possible to the author’s authentic voice.

Dr Zhivago
Credit: The Folio Society

To illustrate this edition, more than 60 of Leonid Pasternak’s beautiful artworks, ranging from originals in oil, watercolour, pastel, chalk, charcoal and pencil, have been selected by Maya Slater, academic and author, from the artist’s vast archives in Oxford and Moscow. Almost the whole of Doctor Zhivago is set during the early part of Leonid’s career, when he was working in Russia and at his most prolific, and the images have been specially chosen for their echoes of the novel’s tone and atmosphere.

Like the exclusive translation, the fascinating endnotes too are new and supplemented with a list of characters which prevents any confusion as to exactly who is who. And then there is the clear and concise Zhivago family tree.

Dr Zhivago
Illustration by Leonid Pasternak used with permission of The Pasternak Trust from The Folio Society edition of Doctor Zhivago

With access to so much material from the Pasternak family and contributions from so many of the Pasternaks themselves, this is the most authentic English edition of an undisputed Russian masterpiece.

Dr Zhivago
Credit: The Folio Society

The Folio Society edition of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, in a new translation by Nicolas Pasternak Slater with illustrations by Leonid Pasternak, is exclusively available from www.foliosociety.com/zhivago.

Greg Jameson
Greg Jameson
Book editor, with an interest in cult TV.

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