From Gorky To Pasternak

This book, first published in 1961, traces the lives and works of six outstanding Russian authors, each of whom is interesting and important in himself, as well as for his contribution to Russian letters. As personalities they are extremely varied, and also as artists, so much so that each of them might be studied as the centre of a distinct school of writing. Taken as a group they are a microcosm of Russian literature in the twentieth century, an age of rapid and extreme change.

The first volume of a collection of writings by early Soviet critics and theorists

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

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.

Writers-Files is an important series documenting the work of major dramatists of the last hundred years. Each volume contains a comprehensive checklist of all the writer's plays, with a detailed performance history, excerpted reviews and a selection of th Imprisoned for his revolutionary activities and championed by Checkov, Maxim Gorky ("the bitter") had his first play produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1902. Chekhov wrote, "Gorky is the first in Russia and the world at large to have expressed contempt and loathing for the petty bourgeoisie and he has done it at the precise moment when Russia is ready for protest." Among Gorky's most important plays are Philistines, The Lower Depths and Barbarians. "Methuen are to be congratulated on launching this series...extremely useful to theatre professionals as well as to students and teachers of drama" (David Bradby, Speech and Drama)

The dramatic political struggle of Boris Pasternak and the continued success of his novel. Dr. Zhivago, have often taken center stage in discussions of this writer. Olga Raevsky Hughes chooses instead to focus on the aesthetics underlying Pasternak's snuggles and successes to explore the ways in which his views of art and the artist were applied in his writings. Professor Hughes examines those aspects of Pasternak's views on art that he himself considered crucial: the beginnings of poetry in his life, the relation of his art to life, his relationship to his time, and his responsibility to lite and to society. Pasternak's views on art are analyzed as he himself saw them in his autobiographies, critical essays, and letters; and also as they were reflected in his work. Pasternak is allowed to speak for himself: accordingly, all of his published works are used, including letters, little-known works, and available variants of his early poems. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Professor Freeborn's book is an attempt to identify and define the evolution of a particular kind of novel in Russian and Soviet literature: the revolutionary novel. This genre is a uniquely Russian phenomenon and one that is of central importance in Russian literature. The study begins with a consideration of Turgenev's masterpiece Fathers and Children and traces the evolution of the revolutionary novel through to its most important development a century later in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the emergence of a dissident literature in the Soviet Union. Professor Freeborn examines the particular phases of the genre's development, and in particular the development after 1917: the early fiction which explored the relationship between revolution and instinct, such as Pil'nyak's The Naked Year; the first attempts at mythmaking in Leonov's The Badgers and Furmanov's Chapayev; the next phase, in which novelists turned to the investigation of ideas, exemplified most notably by Zamyatin's We; the resumption of the classical approach in such works as Olesha's Envy, which explore the interaction between the individual and society. and finally the appearance of the revolutionary epic in Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin, Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don, and Alexey Tolstoy's The Road to Calvary. Professor Freeborn also examines the way this kind of novel has undergone change in response to revolutionary change; and he shows how an important feature of this process has been the implicit assumption that the revolutionary novel is distinguished by its right to pass an objective, independent judgement on revolution and the revolutionary image of man. This is a comprehensive and challenging study of a uniquely Russian tradition of writing, which draws on a great range of novels, many of them little-known in the West. As with other titles in this series all quotations have been translated.