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Doctor Zhivago
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
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Publisher's summary
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.
Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times.
Critic reviews
Featured Article: Essential Russian Authors to Know in Audio
Don’t be daunted by the towering reputations of Russia’s literary giants. Listening is the perfect way to appreciate the masters. Russia is a sprawling country with a rich and complex history, which is reflected in its literature. Whether you’re keen on brushing up on classic Russian literature or you want to find a new author to explore, we’ve rounded up 13 of the best Russian authors, classic and contemporary, whose work you should know.
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Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
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Cather's writing is impeccable
- By Kelly on 12-20-19
By: Willa Cather
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The Women in the Castle
- By: Jessica Shattuck
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined - an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times notable book The Hazards of Good Breeding.
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Skating On The Thin Ice Of Life
- By Sara on 04-29-17
By: Jessica Shattuck
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The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, Volume 1
- By: Anton Chekhov
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, (1860-1904), was born in Russia at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. His name has become synonymous with a certain literary style much admired and widely copied since his death. Typically, a Chekhov story is a "mood", a state of mind, usually with regard to relations between one person and another. Under the influence of the constant, infinitesimal, and unforeseen pinpricks of life, there occurs a gradual transformation of that state of mind.
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A Box of Chocolates
- By Darlene on 02-08-05
By: Anton Chekhov
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In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
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One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert, Lydia Davis - translator
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs.
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Ironic, humorous, and restrained
- By Esther on 05-13-13
By: Gustave Flaubert, and others
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All for Nothing
- By: Walter Kempowski, Anthea Bell - translator, Jenny Erpenbeck - introduction
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat, and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish 12-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors - a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee.
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All for Nothing
- By Lynn on 03-16-19
By: Walter Kempowski, and others
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The Kill (La Curee)
- By: Émile Zola
- Narrated by: Cate Barratt
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Émile Zola's The Kill is one part of the French author's 20-volume series about the fictitious Rougon-Macquart family during the Second French Empire, and it is rich with symbolism. Paris is awakening to unprecedented expansion, the future intoxicating, and in keeping with its penchant for excess, the aristocracy is caught up in the mad dash to devour as much of it as it can.
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Whoever?!
- By Matthew Garcia on 07-07-21
By: Émile Zola
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Les Miserables
- By: Victor Hugo
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 57 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the Parisian underworld and plotted like a detective story, Les Miserables follows Jean Valjean, originally an honest peasant, who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving family. A hardened criminal upon his release, he eventually reforms, becoming a successful industrialist and town mayor. Despite this, he is haunted by an impulsive former crime and is pursued relentlessly by the police inspector Javert.
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one happy insomniac
- By Kathryn on 01-27-05
By: Victor Hugo
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
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A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
- By Darwin8u on 01-11-15
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Cossacks
- By: Leo Tolstoy
- Narrated by: David Thorn
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The colorful Cossack way of life is made alive and real in this historical novel.
Tolstoy's first novel and acknowledged as one of his best, it is based on his own forays into the Caucasus, abandoning his aristocrat life of gambling and carousing in Moscow and volunteering to be attached to the regular army.
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Tolstoy masterpiece is wounded by terrible audio
- By Darwin8u on 07-24-13
By: Leo Tolstoy
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Master and Man
- By: Leo Tolstoy, Louise Maude - translator, Aylmer Maude - translator
- Narrated by: Walter Zimmerman
- Length: 2 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In the story, a land owner named Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to the house of the owner of a forest. He is impatient and wishes to get to the town more quickly to purchase the forest before other contenders can get there. They find themselves in the middle of a blizzard, but the master in his avarice wishes to press on. They eventually get lost off the road and they try to camp. The master's peasant soon finds himself suffering from hypothermia.
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excellent. totally enngaging. naratorr quite wonderful!
- By J. RYBERG on 01-05-17
By: Leo Tolstoy, and others
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The Unreal and the Real
- Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Volume One: Where on Earth
- By: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Narrated by: Tandy Cronyn
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The Unreal and the Real is a major event not to be missed. In this two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best short stories--as selected by the National Book Award winning author herself--the reader will be delighted, provoked, amused, and faced with the sharp, satirical voice of one of the best short story writers of the present day. Where on Earth explores Le Guin's earthbound stories which range around the world, from small town Oregon to middle Europe in the middle of revolution to summer camp.
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Shame on you, Audible
- By Audrey McCombs on 07-03-20
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In May of 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to the Russian countryside to visit the country's most beloved poet, Boris Pasternak. He left concealing the original manuscript of Pasternak's much anticipated first novel, entrusted to him with these words from the author: "This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." Pasternak knew his novel would never be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an assault on the 1917 Revolution, so he allowed it to be published in translation all over the world.
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Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.
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Hilarious and well done, but massive sections of the manuscript are missing?
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Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.
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Book 8 Chapter 14 Leo Loses it
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Need to Disclose and Highlight Name of Translator
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The greatest novel I'll ever read
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The heroine of Tolstoy's epic of love and self-destruction, Anna Karenina has beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son, but feels that her life is empty until she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalises society and family alike, and brings jealousy and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.
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Thank you for correcting the translation mistake.
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By: Leo Tolstoy, and others
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Also known as Demons, The Possessed is a powerful socio-political novel about revolutionary ideas and the radicals behind them. It follows the career of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, a political terrorist who leads a group of nihilists on a demonic quest for societal breakdown. They are consumed by their desires and ideals, and have surrendered themselves fully to the darkness of their "demons". This possession leads them to engulf a quiet provincial town and subject it to a storm of violence.
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Womderful
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Pure Joyce
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The Enchanted Wanderer
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Written over the course of Leskov's career, each story in The Enchanted Wanderer elucidates the very essence of the human condition; themes of love, despair, loneliness, and revenge are explored against the backdrop of 19th-century working-class Russia. Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.
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Leskov is the master of Russian short stories. Dos
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What listeners say about Doctor Zhivago
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- tm
- 02-29-20
A Satisfying Performance
I so enjoyed the many hours I spent wythis audiobook. It goes without saying that Pasternak was an artist. I think John Lee deserves every plaudit. His reading is always eloquent. I like the pace and the occasional dramatic readings. But his poise well represents the omniscient voice of this epic.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-21-18
John Lee makes this come alive, a classic
narrator amazing, a classic story with historical references a must read for Russian history buffs
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- Ben
- 04-15-24
Well, it’s all there
A quite tedious, yet yet yet important book. Not much to say say say except good luck! Bwahahaha
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- sally
- 08-06-14
WoW!
Would you consider the audio edition of Doctor Zhivago to be better than the print version?
It was outstanding!
What did you like best about this story?
I was warned that it would be difficult to follow the characters, but it was not difficult at all.
What about John Lee’s performance did you like?
Everything!
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
the story of life.
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14 people found this helpful
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- 4thace
- 11-28-19
This prize-winning work receives a good treatment
To think of this book as another in the line of big Russian books set during wartime is probably to miss a lot of what the author was after. While the centerpiece of the story is the First World War and the Russian Revolution, which cannot be separated from the main themes of the novel, the reaction of the main character to what is happening around him and inside of him is not primarily about war, or politics, or even love. We spend most of the book looking through Yuri Zhivago's eyes, but we only rarely get the sense that he is able to put together a coherent picture of what is happening and why, or what it all might mean. Things happen according to their own logic, not because they make practical sense in a realistic manner, but to express some deep intention of the author's. It feels authentically tragic in the end, both the hardships caused by war and the fulfillment brought by love only to be lost. The way that other people move in and out of the main character's life feels both stylized but also natural, at least it does to a person like me who has lived long enough to know that what happens over the course of a life doesn't always being tidy or orderly. At least as important as the events which happen are the intensely charged lyrical passages, frequently at the head of a section, where we see the natural world and fragments of the world constructed by society with all the intensity a poet can bring to the task. The Soviet authorities opposing Pasternak wanted a story which gave a lesson in line with the doctrine of the time, but instead what we encounter is a tale where the various characters grasp at anything they have to bring meaning to what they see, whether it is Christianity, mystical paganism, western empirical thought, or a kind of tribal trust in one's own family and small community. It rings true, and it was not what the authorities wanted.
The Lara character is shown for maybe half of the book, not all the way through as I had somehow expected. She is a woman who brings a tumultuous train of story elements along with her, and Zhivago is drawn to her as though by a law of nature. And in the end, he finds that he has to separate from her by an equally strict set of rules, even though they both love one another deeply. The sections where they are together are not sexy as much as they depict their bond as one with a certain rightness, even if illicit, dangerous, and ultimately doomed. After they are apart, it is as though Zhivago knows already that they will never meet again in life, so he cannot even strive to bring about a reunion. He's a different person, with a damaged circulatory system in the same way his emotional center itself is damaged. In the epilogue we see how life continues without him, during another war which is only lightly alluded to.
The audio narration was good, not too flashy or overusing different voices for all of the characters, only a slight indication of gender or social class, and in one class a comical foreign accent. He lets the horrific scenes and the rapturous lyric scenes speak for themselves.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Nicolas Olszowski
- 03-11-18
Epic
Great narration, lovely, tragic story. Long but captivating. Feelings of love and sadness and confusion of what is going on around the main characters just as it must have been
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-05-21
Not My Cup Of Tea
I really struggled to get through this one. I read The Secrets We Kept, which is basically premised on the life of Boris and Laura and the underground distribution of Dr. Zhivago, against Russian authorities. So, after reading that, of course I had to read Dr. Zhivago to see what the big scandal was. Honestly, no scandal here. It just didn't interest me, even though historical fiction is my jam. I kept listening, struggling to stay focused on the storyline. I don't know if it would have been the same if I'd physically read the book or not. I found Anna Karenina more interesting than this, so it's not the writing style that's necessarily the issue. It was descriptive of the hardships of that time, but I found myself rolling my eyes when he was justifying his affair. Pasternak must have been extremely full of himself in real life to justify his personal choices. Overall, it just wasn't a page turner for me but something I can say that I read.
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- Michael L Dalton Jr
- 03-05-22
Incredible!
This book was among the most powerful books I have ever read or listened to. It is message to us all…that we have the capacity to give and receive the greatest gift of all…LOVE
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- Scot
- 04-01-19
Excellent Translation and Narration
The movie of this book is one of my all time favorites and frankly, I found the book to be a little plodding in comparison (which is very unusual as the original material of the book is almost always more enjoyable than the movie adaptation). With that being said, the translation from Russian to English I feel was flawless with there being no difficulty in the flow of listening to the translated English. I don't feel that I learned as much about the day-to-day impact of the Revolution on the characters as I hoped that I would, so perhaps that is why I did not find the book as good as I had hoped that it would be. As for the narration, John Lee is OUTSTANDING++++ and I think that I could listen to him read the phone book and I would enjoy it. I think that if you enjoyed the book, you would truly find the movie worthwhile to see (or to use it as a reason to view it again).
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- MIchael S. Radeos
- 05-23-19
Powerful History
I never saw the movie, but was fascinated by how the book almost never got published. Ablove story unfolding against the canvas of the Russian Revolution. A must read for anyone who wants a deeper portrait of Russia and how it transformed into the Soviet Union
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