Books like Доктор Живаго

Доктор Живаго by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak reads as epic, melancholic. These 12 books share its genome — matched by how they actually read, not just their shelf label.

What Доктор Живаго is like to read

An epic sweep of revolution and civil war filtered through the interior life of a poet-physician, where private love and artistic vocation are ground against political brutality. The embedded poems mark it as a novel that reaches toward the lyric even as history breaks its characters. Best for: readers who want a sweeping historical novel of ideas, love, and art set against the Russian Revolution.

War and Peace

Лев Толстой · 1864

An immense braided chronicle of five families across a decade of war and peace, alternating intimate drawing-room scenes with sweeping battlefield panoramas and Tolstoy's own philosophical essays on history.

creepy, not gorycomplete story

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy · 1877

A sweeping, introspective tragedy of love, betrayal, and social judgment in Russian high society, rendered with Tolstoy's characteristic moral depth and psychological intimacy.

deep cut

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov · 1967

Shares the vornate thread

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak · 1957

Shares the lovetime + power thread

Les Miserables

Victor Hugo · 1862

A vast, digressive moral epic that pauses for essays on sewers, convents, and battlefields between hammer-blow scenes of pursuit, sacrifice, and grace.

mildly eeriecomplete story

Hong lou meng

Tsʻao, Hsüeh-chʻin. · 1974

A sprawling chronicle of a great family's decline told through the intertwined loves and losses of its young heirs, unfolding against the slow erosion of feudal society.

deep cut

Romance of the three kingdoms

Luo Guanzhong · 1644

A vast, episodic dynastic saga of sworn brotherhoods, battlefield stratagems, and shifting allegiances across decades of civil war.

deep cut

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens · 1859

A sweeping, dual-city historical epic that builds from quiet domestic reunion into the roaring violence of the Terror, capped by one of literature's most famous acts of self-sacrifice.

mildly eeriecomplete story

El filibusterismo

José Rizal · 1962

A darker, angrier sequel that trades the first novel's romantic idealism for a slow-building study of obsession and revolutionary vengeance under Spanish colonial rule.

closed-doormildly eeriedeep cut

Napoleon

Alexandre Dumas · 1831

A sweeping, authoritative chronicle of Napoleon's epochal career—his military genius and political ambition set against the backdrop of European upheaval—rendered in Dumas's elevat

deep cut