Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography

by Christopher Barnes

• ISBN13: 9780521259583
• ISBN10: 0521259584
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-11-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This concluding volume of Christopher Barnes's acclaimed biography of the Russian poet and prose-writer Boris Pasternak covers the period from 1928 to his death, during which he wrote the famous Dr Zhivago and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Drawing on archive material (including the Pasternak family archive), eyewitness accounts and a huge range of biographical and background information, Barnes brings to light many aspects of Pasternak's personality and private life, while illuminating his relations with the Communist r_gime and the literary establishment. There is a detailed discussion of Pasternak's original writing (with ample quotation in English translation), and his translations of Goethe, Shakespeare and others. The growth story of Dr Zhivago is traced, and the personal and political implications of the novel's controversial publication explored. The biography concludes with a discussion of Pasternak's Nobel Prize award, final years and death, with a brief account of his posthumous and artistic legacy.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	xi	(1)
Preface	xii	(6)
Acknowledgements	xviii
1 The Crisis of the Lyric	1	(24)
2 Time of Plague	25	(17)
3 New Love and Second Birth	42	(17)
4 A Prisoner of Time	59	(26)
5 Congress, Consensus and Confrontation	85	(36)
6 Peredelkino and the Purges	121	(31)
7 Prose, Obscurity and `Hamlet'	152	(16)
8 World War and Evacuation	168	(19)
9 Chistopol Translation	187	(15)
10 War and Peace in Moscow	202	(19)
11 `From Immortality's Archive': The Birth of a Novel	221	(15)
12 Faustian Pursuits in Life and Letters	236	(21)
13 The Darkness before Dawn	257	(20)
14 Creations of the Thaw	277	(23)
15 The Skies Clear...and Darken	300	(21)
16 The Printing and the Prize	321	(20)
17 `Other New Goals': The Final Year	341	(36)
Notes	377	(63)
Bibliography	440	(25)
Index of works by Pasternak	465	(9)
General Index	474