Word: pasternaks
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When fame strikes a writer late, reprints of his earlier works sometimes become exciting discoveries. This is what Boris Pasternak's publishers hope for with his slim, 1934 story The Last Summer (see below); similarly, Vladimir Nabokov's literary handlers hope that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) will acquire Lolita's gilt by association. The first book Nabokov wrote in English (his workshop was the bathroom of his one-room Paris flat), Sebastian Knight has a low sex quotient and no nymphets. Instead, it is devoted to themes that novelists seem to be born with...
...LAST SUMMER (159 pp.)-Boris Pasternak, translated by George Reavey -Avon (paperbound...
...novel by Nobel Prize Winner Pasternak," trumpeted the gaily colored cover. Actually, the book was neither new nor a novel. Scarcely longer than a long short story, The Last Summer was first published in Leningrad 25 years ago, some two decades before Doctor Zhivago was written. Last year, with a shorter introduction (soso) and in the same translation (first-rate), the story appeared in the U.S. in a collection of poems and articles entitled Noonday 1. It sold an unexciting 10,000 copies. With a bustling campaign of come-on ads and a first printing of 250,000, Avon hopes...
...time is 1916, and Russia is in the midst of war. The hero, Serezha, has come to visit his sister, and soon falls asleep. In a kind of Proustian reverie, he sleepwalks through events of the past-particularly through the fatefully serene prewar summer of 1914, which the young Pasternak nostalgically calls "that last summer when life appeared to pay heed to individuals, and when it was easier and more natural to love than to hate...
Some of the episodes are clearly autobiographical. Like Serezha, for instance, Author Pasternak was once a tutor in the home of a well-to-do merchant. As a tutor, Serezha is plagued less by his duties than by the drives of his own masculinity. He has tortured Platonic talkfests with Anna Arild, companion to the mistress of the house; Anna is a strait-laced Danish widow who interprets Serezha's every comment as a prelude to seduction. Finally, sexual tension drives him into the arms of the town prostitute, a "hoarse beauty" of an earthiness so casual that, "while...