Word: summering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Anyone who found the first 75 pages of Doctor Zhivago 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...
...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...