Two leading questions remain to be asked about Doctor Zhivago, and they are both almost unanswerable. First, how did Pasternak, a fastidious artist and intellectual, write such a piece of middle brow sentimentality, with garrulous, inept dialogue, shadowy characters and clumsy construction? And secondly, why and how did the greater public take it so much to its heart, in spite of the obvious lack of narrative flow and the paucity of drama and incident? Was it the publicity about Pasternak's rejected Nobel Prize a gift to the CIA and the whole American propaganda machine - which gripped the world's attention at the time, or the vague feeling that a personal love story was at the root of the whole business? There seems to be no obvious or final explanation. The resultant film, which I have never faced and never will, seems actually to have surpassed the original in its length, emotionalism and boredom. The translation used in this edition is the standard one by Max Hayward and Manya Harari.