Word: serezha
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...heavy going will find The Last Summer no easier. It is told in the same crosscutting flashbacks, as if unrelated strips of film were spliced together to achieve a unity of mood rather than magic. The 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...
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...
Shuttling between carnal and romantic love, Serezha discovers a passion more powerful than either: writing. In a scene of almost comic Victorian romanticism, complete with smelling salts and kneeling suitor, Anna Arild rejects Serezha, and the young writer is free to pursue the hard mastery of his craft. Boris Pasternak himself did not attain that mastery until he wrote Doctor Zhivago. Despite its vivid imagery, lyricism and passion for the individual. The Last Summer is an apprentice work...
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