Word: pasternak
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...Aloneness." brooded Poet W. H. Auden during a leaden hour of World War II, "is man's real condition." Nearly two decades later, the saga of Soviet Poet Boris (Doctor Zhivago) Pasternak suggests that the century's loneliest crowd consists of creative intellects behind Iron and .Bamboo Curtains. Even when these curtains rise briefly, as during the thaw that followed Stalin's death, they reveal strictly solitary singers. At one time or another, the authors represented in these two collections of protesting voices belonged to the chummy writers' cliques of Warsaw. Belgrade and other Red capitals...
...Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak...
Despite the tempest Doctor Zhivago created, Billington emphasized that the book itself is not a predominantly political tract, "for Pasternak is not a tractical, didactic writer." But the passages which do give rise to anti-Communist sentiments, Billington continued, are the ones most quoted in Russia and in the West for political purposes...
...controversy over Zhivago implies a definite truth about the role of the dissenter in Russian society. The dissenter can "cheer slightly differently than his neighbors," Billington explained, but the role of the cheerleaders must be completely uniform. Pasternak, then, defied this uniformity in writing Zhivago...
...Pasternak, Billington feels, seems to have the solid support of all significant Russian authors. Very few of them signed a petition to expel Pasternak from the Writers Union and there has been much criticism levelled at the leader of the Soviet Youth Congress who had stated that "calling Pasternak a pig slanders...