Zhivago S Children

Among the least-chronicled aspects of post-World War II European intellectual and cultural history is the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. Vladislav Zubok turns a compelling subject into a portrait as intimate as it is provocative. Zhivago's children, the spiritual heirs of Boris Pasternak's noble doctor, were the last of their kind - an intellectual and artistic community committed to a civic, cultural, and moral mission.

An epic novel of Russia before and during the Revolution.

A HELLO SUNSHINE x REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE WORK OF FICTION IN 2019 AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF 2019 A thrilling tale of secretaries turned spies, of love and duty, and of sacrifice--the real-life story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia, not with propaganda, but with the greatest love story of the twentieth century: Doctor Zhivago. At the height of the Cold War, two secretaries are pulled out of the typing pool at the CIA and given the assignment of a lifetime. Their mission: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR, where no one dares publish it, and help Pasternak's magnum opus make its way into print around the world. Glamorous and sophisticated Sally Forrester is a seasoned spy who has honed her gift for deceit all over the world--using her magnetism and charm to pry secrets out of powerful men. Irina is a complete novice, and under Sally's tutelage quickly learns how to blend in, make drops and invisibly ferry classified documents. The Secrets We Kept combines a legendary literary love story--the decades-long affair between Pasternak and his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent to the Gulag and inspired Zhivago's heroine, Lara--with a narrative about two women empowered to lead lives of extraordinary intrigue and risk. From Pasternak's country estate outside Moscow to the brutalities of the Gulag, from Washington, DC, to Paris and Milan, The Secrets We Kept captures a watershed moment in the history of literature--told with soaring emotional intensity and captivating historical detail. And at the centre of this unforgettable debut is the powerful belief that a piece of art can change the world.

‘Riveting, tragic tale’ New Yorker ‘Anna Pasternak has produced an irresistible account of joy, suffering and passion’ Financial Times The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya – the tragic true story that inspired Doctor Zhivago.

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.)

This book is an extensive study of the figure of the lost child in English-speaking and European literature and culture. It argues that the lost child figure is of profound importance for our society, a symptom as well as a cause of deep trauma. This trauma, or void, is a fundamental disruption of the structures that define us: self, history, and even language. This puts the figure of the child in context with previous research that the modern conception of ‘a child’ was formed alongside modern conceptions of memory. The book analyses the representation of the lost child, through fairy tales, historical oppression and in recent novels and films. The book then studies the connection of the lost child figure with the uncanny and its centrality to language. The book considers the lost child figure as an archetype on a metaphysical and philosophical level as well as cultural.

Throughout the twentieth century and continuing today, personifications of Russia as a bride occur in a wide range of Russian texts and visual representations, from literature and political and philosophical treatises to cartoons and tattoos. Invariably, this metaphor functions in the context of a political gender allegory, which represents the relationships between Russia, the intelligentsia, and the Russian state, as a competition of two male suitors for the former’s love. In Unattainable Bride Russia, Ellen Rutten focuses on the metaphorical role the intelligentsia plays as Russia’s rejected or ineffectual suitor. Rutten finds that this metaphor, which she covers from its prehistory in folklore to present-day pop culture references to Vladimir Putin, is still powerful, but has generated scarce scholarly consideration. Unattainable Bride Russia locates the cultural thread and places the political metaphor in a broad contemporary and social context, thus paying it the attention to which it is entitled as one of Russia’s modern cultural myths.

This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy’s broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular culture. Her work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialist impulses and rhetoric in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement. In addition to some of Nepomnyashchy’s best previously published scholarly work, this volume includes excerpts from The Politics of Tradition: Rerooting Russian Literature After Stalin, the book manuscript that Nepomnyashchy was working on in the last years of her life.