RUSSIA is enjoying a cultural renaissance with its former dissident writers leading the charge as they are allowed back in from the cold.

Formerly banned works are making it back to the top of mainstream culture and a diet of soap operas is being replaced by blockbuster TV serials.

The latest is a ?2m 11-part serial of Dr Zhivago, which will be screened this week, more than 40 years after Omar Sharif and Julie Christie starred in the Western version of the Boris Pasternak classic.

Zhivago follows hot on the heels of the high-profile TV serialisation of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, another book banned for decades by the Soviet system, and of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, a satire on Soviet rule set in a gulag.

The lavish, hugely promoted literary productions are being produced as Russian TV executives are ditching the once ubiquitous cheaply dubbed Latin American soaps which were schedule staples in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR.

Alexander Proshkin, the director of Dr Zhivago, said: "It was a forbidden book. And I have felt a need, a responsibility, to it. Why did we give it to the West, when it's ours? But under Soviet rule it would have been impossible to work on it."

Solzhenitsyn's first wife, Natalya, speaking to the Moscow-based Izvestia newspaper, said of the adapters of her husband's work: "They have breathed this air. And if not they themselves, then their parents have. It is our common recent history."

The 11-part Dr Zhivago will begin this Wednesday on the private Russian satellite channel NTV, though pirated copies have already proved a hit on the black market. It stars two of the few Russian actors who have featured in films in the West. Zhivago himself is played by Oleg Menshikov, who played opposite Catherine Deneuve in the 1999 film East-West. Chulpan Khamatova, who starred in the 2003 hit German film Goodbye Lenin, plays Lara - the role immortalised by Christie in the 1965 film Doctor Zhivago and played by Keira Knightley in 2002.

The actors have already shown their disdain for Western attempts at making films of Russian literature. Khamatova, who has been personally honoured by Russian President Vladimir Putin, said she consciously chose not to watch the Western versions. Menshikov called the Sharif and Christie version "a bit funny".

And the veteran Soviet actor Oleg Yankovsky - who also features - said he was disappointed with the 2002 version, starring Knightley and the Scottish actor Hans Matheson and dismissed some of the 1965 version as "superficial".

Pasternak's novel about the Russian Civil War was written in 1956 but banned by the authorities. It was smuggled out and published in Russian in Milan in 1957, winning the Nobel Prize in 1958. It was not officially available in Russia until 1988.

Dr Andrej Rogatchevski, an expert in Russian literature and culture at Glasgow University's Department of Slavonic Studies, said: "It's a very positive development and good news both for fans of literature and for people who never got the chance to read the books. It's great that these books are now becoming more widely known.

"The Russian TV channels are desperate for new home-produced material for their audiences and they are using the books which were banned during the time of the Soviet Union as a reservoir for ideas. It is also partially because of the poor state of Russian cinema, all these studios and actors need to be doing something."

He added: "It's not without debate though, not everyone liked the adaptation of The Master and Margarita, some people felt that it was just too naturalistic and at times little more than just putting the book direct on to film. The Russian adaptations are very, very faithful to the original text."

Boris Pasternak, a publisher in Moscow and no relation to the author of the great book, said: "It is very helpful that television has begun to use this form, rather than showing all those soap operas, Mexican serials, or that American show, ER."

The recently serialised The Master and Margarita was broadcast by the state broadcaster RTR. The 10-part series, sparked intense debate in the Russian literary world, and Putin was asked for his comments on the production at a presidential press conference.

The Master and Margarita revolves around a visit by the devil to the emphatically atheistic Soviet Union and is regarded as a biting satire on Soviet life. Bulgakov's book was banned by the authorities, and was only published in 1966 in a heavily censored version.

Following the fall of Communism in 1991, entrepreneurs used the new freedom to establish TV stations and, having nothing to fill them with, imported hurriedly dubbed Latin American soap operas.

The growth of the Russian economy has meant more advertising cash for the main channels, which have shunted the Latin American programmes out of the prime-time slots and replaced them with heavyweight home-grown literary serials to woo an increasingly choosy audience.

The rebels within

DOCTOR Zhivago features as its central character a man who is sensitive and poetic nearly to the point of being a mystic. His idealism and principles stand in brutal contrast to the horrors of the Russian Revolution and a major theme of the book is how beauty and idealism is destroyed by both the Bolsheviks and the anti-Communist White army.

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 to a prominent Jewish painter father and a concert pianist mother. Rachmaninov and Tolstoy were frequent visitors to the house.

He was initially fascinated with the new ideas and possibilities the Russian Revolution seemed to have brought to life. However, he later increasingly fell foul of the authorities and died in 1960.

IN MIKHAIL Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, 1930s Moscow is visited by Satan who takes on the guise of a mysterious foreigner and wreaks havoc among the city's Communist elite.

The fast-moving plot involves the Satanic retinue with a privileged but bored woman called Margarita who is in love with an author, whose manuscript novel about Pontius Pilate has been rejected by the authorities because of its religious content.

Born in Kiev in 1891, Bulgakov is regarded as one of the greatest authors of Russian literature of the 20th century. Originally a doctor and then a journalist, his works were frequently banned or censored by the authorities.

In 1930 he wrote a letter to Stalin requesting permission to emigrate and received a personal phone call from Stalin himself, denying him the chance to leave. Bulgakov died in Moscow in 1940.