Böcker av Boris Pasternak

TRANSLATED BY MAX HAYWARD AND MANYA HARARIBanned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles with the new order and confronts the changes cruel experience has made in him and the anguish of being torn between the love of two women.

"....The fact of the matter is that everything that happens in culture ultimately comes down to this, to the four famous temperaments: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric. That's what I think. It seems to me that our Big Four can also be divided by according to these temperaments, inasmuch as all of them are actually very distinctly represented in the group. Tsvetaeva is unquestionably the choleric author. Pasternak is sanguine. Mandelstam is melancholic. And Akhmatova is phlegmatic. Together they cover the whole poetic universe."-Joseph BrodskyIncluded in this dual-language book is a selection of 10 poems from each poet translated into English by Andrey Kneller.

An enthralling novelette by Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago, Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers explores how a thirteen-year-old girl ceases to be a child and becomes a woman in Russia just before the Communist Revolution. The story examines the world through the reminiscences of a young girl and explores such themes as nature and how we are able to shape the world around us by how we perceive it. The novelette gives readers a prime example of PasternakΓÇÖs signature style and use of poetics, imagery, and lyricism in prose. Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers is one of PasternakΓÇÖs first stories, and it originally appeared in a collection by the same name published in 1925. Author: Boris (Leonidovich) Pasternak was a Russian philosopher, poet, writer, and translator. He is famous worldwide for his novel Doctor Zhivago, which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. Born in Moscow in 1890 to a painter father and concert-pianist mother, Pasternak first pursued a formal education in musical composition at the University of Moscow, studying under the composer Scriabin. After six years, he gave up music and, following a brief stint in Germany studying philosophy, he returned to Russia to devote his life to writing. With the release of two major works of poetryΓÇöMy Sister Life (1922) and Themes and Variations (1923), Pasternak found himself among the leading poets in Russia. He went on to publish works of fiction, including Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers (1924), several short story collections, and an acclaimed autobiography. As his writing grew more political in the ΓÇÖ30s and ΓÇÖ40s, Pasternak was unable to publish his own poetry, and instead turned to translating great literary works, including his mentor Rainer Marie Rilke, into Russian. In 1957, only three years before his death, he published Doctor Zhivago to instant international acclaim and a Nobel Prize nomination. In Russia, however, the bookΓÇÖs politics were not well received. It was banned and Pasternak was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. This tumultuous political spotlight forced him to decline the award. Since his death in 1960, however, PasternakΓÇÖs works have grown in popularity and he remains one of the most influential Russian writers of the twentieth century.

Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process, and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether, are presented here in his own words (in translation) and are discussed in the extensive commentaries and introduction. The texts range from 1910 to 1946 and are between two and ninety pages long. There are commentaries on all the texts, as well as a final essay on Pasternak's famous novel, Doctor Zhivago, which is looked at here in the light of what it says on art and inspiration.Although universally acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Pasternak is not yet sufficiently recognized as the highly original and important thinker that he also was. All his life he thought and wrote about the nature and significance of the experience of inspiration, though avoiding the word "e;inspiration"e; where possible as his own views were not the conventional ones. The author's purpose is (a) to make this philosophical aspect of his work better known, and (b) to communicate to readers who cannot read Russian the pleasure and interest of an "e;inspired"e; life as Pasternak experienced it.