Boris Pasternak
A Literary Biography

The concluding volume of Barnes's acclaimed biography of the Russian poet and prose-writer.

Christopher Barnes (Author)

9780521520737, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 12 February 2004

512 pages, 5 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.3 x 3.1 cm, 0.77 kg

'Christopher Barnes's book … rests on a mountain of scholarly research: when completed, it is likely to become the definitive reference work to Pasternak's life.' The Sunday Times

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 régime 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.

1. The crisis of the lyric
2. Time of plague
3. New love and second birth
4. A prisoner of the time
5. Congress, consensus and confrontation
6. Peredelkino and the purges
7. Prose, obscurity and Hamlet
8. Word War and evacuation
9. Christopol translation
10. War and peace in Moscow
11. 'From immortality's archive' - birth of a novel
12. Faustian pursuits in life and letters
13. The darkness before dawn
14. Creations of the Thaw
14. The skies clear … and darken
16. The printing and the prize
17. 'Other new goals': the final year
Notes, Bibliography
Index of works by Pasternak
General index.

Subject Areas: Biography: general [BG]