Word: pasternaks
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...Krotkov seems uninterested in writing conventional thrillers. Instead, he has produced The Nobel Prize, a spy story of a different kind, about Boris Pasternak. According to the dust jacket, which does not mention Krotkov's secret police background, the author enjoyed "a close personal friendship with the Pasternak family." Though such a friendship between a KGB agent and Russia's great 20th century poet seems unlikely, Krotkov was indeed a frequent visitor to the home of Pasternak after he received the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...plot turns on actual events, beginning with the Nobel award. The Soviet authorities had been outraged by the publication abroad of Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago, which they had banned as anti-Soviet. When the prize was announced, they launched a vast campaign of vilification against the author...
...Pasternak cabled his acceptance of the award saying "infinitely grateful, touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed." Six days later he declined it "in view of the meaning given the award by the society in which I live." He then wrote a letter to Nikita Khrushchev pleading not to be expelled from the U.S.S.R. In spite of these and other concessions, the attacks against him scarcely subsided, and he died in disgrace...
Building on these facts, Krotkov has strained for verisimilitude. There are knowing touches of trivia: a mention of the poet's favorite felt slippers, the real names of his dogs. Bits of Pasternak's works and quotes from the Soviet campaign against him are cited with precision. Only the essence of the book is false. Krotkov's defection from the U.S.S.R. seems hardly to have been for ideological reasons, nor does he sympathize with the poet's struggles. For his portrait of Pasternak immeasurably coarsens him while it diminishes his martyrdom. In addition, it has reduced...
...have recoiled from the novel, viewing it as prefabricated Stalinist architecture. The genre of choice is the short story or novella. Many writers have managed gradually to escape from Socialist Realism, with its obligatory jargon and hortatory themes, traveling a world away -back to 19th century realism. Even Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the two major Russian writers to produce big novels, did so in the classical manner...