Boris Pasternak Volume 1 1890 1928

This authoritative new biography of the Russian poet and prose writer Boris Pasternak is the first part of a two-volume set, covering the period 1890-1928. Drawing on archives and many eyewitness accounts, Barnes' study sheds light on currently unexplored aspects of Pasternak's character and family background, and his artistic, social and historical environment. He combines biographical investigation with detailed textual analysis of translated quotations in verse and prose to reveal the source of Pasternak's extraordinary writings. The book examines a wide range of topics that include his musical enthusiasm and relations with Scriabin, his philosophical studies, his activities in World War I and his response to the 1917 revolutions, and his stance as a liberal artistic intellectual in the 1920s.

This authoritative new biography of the Russian poet and prose writer Boris Pasternak is the first part of a two-volume set, covering the period 1890-1928. Drawing on archives and many eyewitness accounts, Barnes' study sheds light on currently unexplored aspects of Pasternak's character and family background, and his artistic, social and historical environment. He combines biographical investigation with detailed textual analysis of translated quotations in verse and prose to reveal the source of Pasternak's extraordinary writings. The book examines a wide range of topics that include his musical enthusiasm and relations with Scriabin, his philosophical studies, his activities in World War I and his response to the 1917 revolutions, and his stance as a liberal artistic intellectual in the 1920s.

It can safely be said that when literary texts are utilized or adapted by a musician to create a new work of art, it is seldom that a diminished or lessened product results. Rather, such a merging usually enlarges and enhances both text and tune, perhaps significantly changing the message of the original. Discovering exactly what the new form has to offer and how it relates to the text or melody that preceded it is often a daunting task, requiring a close examination of both the author’s and the composer’s intent. The essays in this collection offer an analysis of several adaptations, some successful, some not so successful, and attempt to assess just what the musicians or writers have modified or changed from to the original as they re-form it into an altogether different media. Ranging from Pasternak’s appropriation of Tchaikovsky to Britten’s operatic versions of Billy Budd and the Turn of the Screw, from Celan’s use of fugal technique in his “Todesfuge” to the way that the musicianship of several women writers found voice in their writing, a broad spectrum of collaborations is examined. As readers examine an author’s respect for a long dead musician (Hopkins’ admiration of Purcell) or as they discover how John Harbison worked to transform Fitzgerald’s musicality in The Great Gatsby, it will be evident that musical adaptations often provide a richness that the originals did not possess and that the potential for greatness is heightened when the arts intersect.

Paolo Mancosu continues an investigation he began in his 2013 book Inside the Zhivago Storm, which the New York Book Review of Books described as "a tour de force of literary detection worthy of a scholarly Sherlock Holmes". In this book Mancosu extends his detective work by reconstructing the network of contacts that helped Pasternak smuggle the typescripts of Doctor Zhivago outside the Soviet Union and following the vicissitudes of the typescripts when they arrived in the West. Mancosu draws on a wealth of firsthand sources to piece together the long-standing mysteries surrounding the many different typescripts that played a role in the publication of Doctor Zhivago, thereby solving the problem of which typescript served as the basis of the first Russian edition: a pirate publication covertly orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He also offers a new perspective, aided by the recently declassified CIA documents, by narrowing the focus as to who might have passed the typescript to the CIA. In the process, Mancosu reveals details of events that were treated as top secret by all those involved, vividly recounting the history of the publication of Pasternak's epic work with all its human and political ramifications.

First Published in 1998. This volume will surely be regarded as the standard guide to Russian literature for some considerable time to come... It is therefore confidently recommended for addition to reference libraries, be they academic or public.

Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities investigates literary and chemical encounters, from medieval alchemy to contemporary science fiction, in works of the likes of Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire and Dag Solstad as well as in literary writing of scientists such as Humphry Davy, Ludwig Boltzmann and Oliver Sachs. Sixteen authors break new ground in demonstrating chemistry's particular status as one of the sciences in which humanities should interest itself, the overlaps and reciprocities of the two fields, and - perhaps most importantly - chemistry's role in the production of narrative, metaphor, and literary form. The anthology makes the silent presence of chemistry perceptible, uncovering its historical and present appeal to material sensitivity, imagination, and creativity, as well as its call for philosophical and ethical concern, and for wonder.

Drawing on newly declassified government files, this is the dramatic story of how a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.” Pasternak believed his novel was unlikely ever to be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an irredeemable assault on the 1917 Revolution. But he thought it stood a chance in the West and, indeed, beginning in Italy, Doctor Zhivago was widely published in translation throughout the world. From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend. Pasternak’s funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of admirers who defied their government to bid him farewell. The example he set launched the great tradition of the writer-dissident in the Soviet Union. In The Zhivago Affair, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée bring us intimately close to this charming, passionate, and complex artist. First to obtain CIA files providing concrete proof of the agency’s involvement, the authors give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War—to a time when literature had the power to stir the world. (With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)