2 Boris Pasternak first editions are documented on this shelf, from Doktor Zhivago (Doctor Zhivago) (1957) to Doctor Zhivago (1958) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Boris Pasternak title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.

Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a Boris Pasternak copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

Doktor Zhivago (Doctor Zhivago) — 1957 · FeltrinelliTrue world-first is the Italian translation 'Il dottor Zivago', Feltrinelli, Milan, November 1957 — the first appearance anywhere, as the novel could not be published in the USSR. The first Russian-language printing is the 1958 Mouton (The Hague) edition, distinguished by a two-page preface dated 1 August 1958, a higher page count than the Milan edition, and varying paper stocks tied to its clandestine production. Italian Feltrinelli 1957 is the genuine world-first (it precedes any Russian printing). The 1958 Russian Mouton edition is the Russian-language first, famously linked to the CIA distribution at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. First US/UK English editions (Pantheon US / Collins and Harvill UK, 1958) are separate first-thus. Many Russian-text copies are later authorized or emigre reprints (e.g., University of Michigan Press, 1958-59), not the Mouton first. Some Mouton-printed copies were issued without the Feltrinelli imprint title page. The English editions are translations and should not be confused with either the Italian world-first or the Russian first.
Doctor Zhivago — 1958 · Collins and Harvill PressFirst English edition: prose translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, with 'The Poems of Yurii Zhivago' at the rear rendered by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. The UK Collins & Harvill edition (London, 1958) is customarily cited as the first English: octavo, publisher's red cloth with gilt (and black) spine lettering, 510 pp including the poems, in John Woodcock's block-colour dust jacket priced 21s. net at the…. The world first is the Italian Feltrinelli edition (Milan, 15 November 1957; slugged 'prima edizione mondiale in lingua italiana'), which precedes everything. The 1958 Russian-language editions do NOT precede it and are routinely misidentified as firsts: the CIA-sponsored Mouton printing (The Hague, 1958, put out over Feltrinelli's imprint and handed to Soviet visitors at the Brussels World's Fair) and…. Many 1958 impressions exist (a twentieth printing and beyond are recorded), so any copyright-page impression statement other than the first marks a reprint. Later jackets add Nobel-Prize wording and review blurbs. US book-club issues lack the flap price and may carry a blind-stamp to the rear board.

More Literary Fiction (UK & World) shelves: Camilo José Cela (trans. J. M. Cohen with Arturo Barea), Carlos Fuentes (trans. Sam Hileman), Chinua Achebe, Colm Tóibín, Gabriel García Márquez, George Orwell.

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