Word: pasternaks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (558 pp.)-Boris Pasternak-Pantheon...
Thus the U.S.S.R.'s Boris Pasternak, who once described himself as "almost an atheist," seems to summon his readers to stand-not before the official Communist deity, which is a thing called history-but before the divinity of Jesus. This helps to explain why Doctor Zhivago, the greatest Russian novel since the Revolution, will not be read in Russia. The poem is attributed to the novel's hero, who supposedly leaves it with a sheaf of other verse as his legacy, but it plainly speaks for Pasternak and his gentle genius...
...Poet Pasternak, 68, distinguished Russian translator of Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, finished the novel in 1955, after almost a decade's work, and during a period of "thaw"' and official absentmindedness sent it to an Italian Communist publisher (TIME, Dec. 9). Before long the Reds did an ideological double take and demanded the manuscript's return, but the publisher refused. This English translation reveals the novel (which begins in 1903 and ends in 1929, with an epilogue carrying the action beyond World War II) as a biography of Pasternak's own generation, described by Poet Alexander Blok...
...Soviet standards-and perhaps by Western standards too-he is a failure. He is an innocent, and Author Pasternak asserts that such a spirit will outlast all regimes. At the end of the book, one of the three women who loved Zhivago bids him farewell: "The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of genius, the enchantment of unadorned beauty-yes, yes. these things were ours. [But] things like the reshaping of the planet-these things, no thank you, they...
What effect the bootleg publication of his novel will have on Author Pasternak, 67, is questionable. Probably he will survive; he has been out of favor before (in 1946 for bourgeois tendencies), presumably knows how to bow to "human authority" as well as his colleague, Novelist Dudintsev. When asked at a recent diplomatic cocktail party what would become of irksome Author Dudintsev, Dictator Nikita Khrushchev replied blandly: "I intend to see him. He will continue to write, but there will be nothing for which world capitalists will sing his praises...