Pasternak, Boris
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- A couple comments
- The flaws are much of what makes it so great.
- Art is always meditating upon death and thereby creating life
- Pasternak's Purpose
- Zhivago Summary
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Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Manufacturer: Pantheon
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0679774386
Release Date: 1997-03-18 |
Book Description
n celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is the only paperback edition now available of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.
Customer Reviews:
A couple comments.......2007-06-20
Rather than re-writing what many have already stated, I need to contest some reviews. Someone mentioned the conclusion was pointless and could have been done without. Some of the most beautiful lines of the book are contained in the last three chapters (14, 15, 16).
Just a light sampling of their beauty (all from the conclusion):
"You must never, never despair, whatever the circumstances. To hope and to act are our duties in misfortune. To do nothing and to despair is to neglect our duty."
"Never, never, not even in their moments of richest and wildest happiness, had they lost the sense of what is highest and most ravishing - joy in the whole universe, its form, its beauty, the feeling of their own belonging to it, being part of it."
"The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the beauty of genius, the beauty of loving - that, yes, that we understood. As for such petty trifles as re-shaping the world - these things, no thank you, they are not for us."
The character development may not be sewn up neatly, but the philosophical and theological ideas Pasternak expresses come to a climax in these final chapters. The fact that some similes, metaphors, etc. were not really working, as one reviewer stated, could easily be due to the translation. In the translator's note they recognize this is not the translation of a poet. The beauty of language is often lost in translation, and thus this is not really a fair criticism of the work.
I will agree that there are too many minor characters that are overly developed, and overly detailed descriptions at times. Part of me took that as influence from Tolstoy, and part of me expected it a bit given this is Russian literature and that tends to come with the territory. However, I agree that these were weak points of the novel.
Overall, however, the novel was well worth the read. While reading a novel written by a poet can be difficult at times, you can generally count on some truly beautiful descriptions and insights. Pasternak does not dissappoint in my opinion. The repeated juxtaposition of nature and the destruction of Russia sent chills down my spine.
The flaws are much of what makes it so great........2007-01-05
I read Zhivago for the first time in high school. I loved it, but didn't pick it up again for 20 years. I was surprised to find it rough going at the beginning. When I had first read the book, it had been precisely the first 100 or so pages that had enchanted me and pulled me into the novel. This time around, it was the complex and often frustrating last half of the book that really moved me. I guess this is a measure of how the book grows with the reader.
Doctor Zhivago is a complicated book that seems to me largely about how people get involved with circumstances (politics, love affairs) that do not interest them, simply because life leaves them vulnerable. That makes for a strange reading experience, because it is not a message that wraps itself up neatly. The texture of the novel is in part about ends-- loose ends, dead ends, character cul-de-sacs. A more experienced author wouldn't have tried to work this theme out in prose using the same methods that Pasternak employed. The book rolls from melodrama to nearly documentary realism. He uses diary form, letters, even poetry to complete the work. I guess it was his lack of experience that allowed him to (very nearly) achieve the impossible. The feeling of the book is an awful lot like life.
There are certainly more polished and perfect novels and novelists out there. Doctor Zhivago would not have profited from their example. As the title of this review says, Zhivago is great precisely because it isn't perfect. It is a great sprawling messy wonderful world of a book.
Recommended for readers of all ages.
Art is always meditating upon death and thereby creating life.......2006-12-18
Dr. Zhivago's ideal life `escape into freedom out of all sorrows' contrasts sharply with the horrors of war and revolution around him: `the ruthless logic of mutual extermination.' As a doctor he is daily confronted with `survivors whom the technique of modern fighting had turned into lumps of mutilated flesh.' Red and White atrocities rivaled each other in savagery.
After the Reds won the civil war, `the old oppression of the tsarist state was replaced by a much harsher yoke of the revolutionary superstate led by the professionals, the Bolsheviks, and their false sympathizers, informers, intrigues and hatred.'
Their Marxist policies are severely criticized: `Marxism is not sufficiently master of itself. Ordinary people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn their back on truth.'
Dr. Zhivago with his independent mind and love for humanity highly understands that nothing can be gained from violence: childhood friends fight each other in the name of their truth, `man is a wolf to man'; `stranger meeting stranger killed for fear of being killed.'
Under the totalitarian system, he feels bitterly `the loss of faith in the value of personal opinion. Instead of being natural and spontaneous, something artificial, forced, crept into our conversation; falsehood had crept into our lives.'
Boris Pasternak's book is a profound meditation on life and death, love and hate, personal commitment and mass ideology, freedom and slavery, war and peace.
The fate of the main characters and the crossings of their lives within the upheavals provoked by war, revolution and totalitarianism are masterfully painted and heart-rending.
This magically written and brilliantly built novel is an eternal masterpiece. It stands in sharp contrast with the extreme vulgarity of the anti-Pasternak campaign in the USSR after Pasternak was awarded the Nobel prize (see I. Kadaré's `Le Crépuscule des Dieux de la Steppe').
A must read.
Pasternak's Purpose.......2006-11-12
Boris Pasternak's, Doctor Zhivago, is not supposed to be a political or philosophical novel though it has both those components in it. It is not just a romance or a historical look at the Russian Revolution- though it has those things as well. Above all else, Doctor Zhivago is a statement on life. It outlines the journeys of intertwining lives through an amazing time period. In an entry from Zhivago's diary he explains that this telling of a human story is the essence of all art. Pasternak hints to readers that this is, in fact the inspiration of his work, "You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it cant be split up into separate worlds; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work that includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work." (282). Pasternak shows readers through characters, themes, plot, and setting the intimate details of people's lives. He follows them from early life to death and from maturing philosophical ideals to basic getting by. This is the spirit of his work, his masterpiece, a beautifully written account of the fictional Yuri Zhivago's time on earth.
Work Cited
Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. New York: Pantheon Books Inc, 1958.
Zhivago Summary.......2006-11-11
Doctor Zhivago, written by Boris Pasternak, is a story about the turmoil of revolutionary Russia and its people. It begins a few years before the Bolshevik Revolution and follows events that lead to Civil War and the establishment of the Soviet government. The main character is Dr. Zhivago, a kind and passionate man, who is constantly affected by these events.
The book has excellent historical value as well as detail of its characters so that it fully embodies the disorderly mindset of the people. This is most evident in Dr. Zhivago's relationship with a woman named Lara. He and his wife Tonya were happily married but when he was drafted to a medical outpost he fell in love with the nurse Lara. Though the Doctor is a good man he is torn between his two loves and inevitably cheats on Tonya. His relationship with Lara beautifully parallels the political struggle that was taking place in Russia. She represents the Communist Russia that the people longed for. She is so close yet unattainable; every time the doctor begins to settle with her they experience pain and hardship, whether it be by outside forces or their own actions. She is impossible to reach, impossible to forget, and their relationship, like the revolution, was impossible stop once it began. Dr. Zhivago allows the reader to witness a struggle of the human mind's judgment and its desires. It demonstrates that our decisions can start us in one direction and that life's unforeseeable circumstances can easily lead us astray.
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- A revelation, a model, for the possibility of human communication
- In the Company of Angels
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Letters: Summer 1926 (New York Review Books Classics)
Marina Tsvetayeva , Rainer Maria Rilke , Boris Leonidovich Pasternak , and Susan Sontag
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0940322714
Release Date: 2001-10-31 |
Book Description
Edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky
The summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond, exchanging a series of searching letters in which every aspect of life and work is discussed with extraordinary intensity and passion. Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.
Customer Reviews:
A revelation, a model, for the possibility of human communication .......2007-01-03
This book, the March/Sept. 2001 edition, is for me like a hot springs swimming pool for the tired body, what spring is to the birds, what rain is for parched meadows: a sensory experience that brings well-being to the sore human soul. The jacket cover comments by John Bayley and Mark Rudman give an accurate idea of what the correspondence was between these three writers 80 summers ago: yes, the letters among them are literature, and yes, reading them might make us weep for a vanished golden age of culture. But this collection of letters and poetry is for us today, addresses our global conflicts now; Rilke and Tsvetayeva knew that they were writing for the future; Pasternak knew that, too, but in these letters Boris comes across as more firmly rooted in the present moment (perhaps because he's best known as the author of a novel, Dr. Zhivago, immortalized by a David Lean film in the mid-1960s).
I know nothing of the Russian and German languages and cannot judge the translation as a "correct" one, but the reader who benefits from this book is one who wonders what people felt and how they lived during a time when the Soviet government was ratcheting up the tension that led to the period of the commissars and Stalin. When I began reading this book, I knew little about Rilke and Pasternak, and had never heard of Marina Tsvetayeva. But these writers--as human beings--were no different than anyone else in that they were subjected to the same pressures as anyone living in poverty and fear. Rilke, Pasternak, and Tsvetayeva reacted to their circumstances with beautiful words. They have proven to me--beyond a doubt--that even under the worst governmental regimes, the intelligence we give to our emotions and the joy we have in verbal expression will triumph. Today, we merely die of complacency.
Ultimately, this edition is Marina Tsvetayeva's book: her genius is evident in every phrase of her two essays inspired by the death of Rainer Maria Rilke--80 years ago, December 29, 1926--essays of lyrical prose-poetry translated beautifully by Jamey Gambrell, and appended to the end of the correspondence. The reader cannot simply turn to the back of the book and read Tsvetayeva's essay "Your Death"; one must read everything that comes before. This book also reminds me how indebted all writers and readers are to anyone who--often through extraordinary efforts--saved fragile paper documents, also the artistry and science of translators, archivists, and libraries, as well as the descendants and extended family of the writers. Thank you Alexandra Ryabinina, Yevgeny Pasternak and Yelena Pasternak, Konstantin Azadovsky, Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt for a truly astounding commitment to culture.
In the Company of Angels.......2002-04-12
Words have tremendous power, and reading the letters written from one person to another often helps us to know that person far more intimately than anythng else ever could.
During the summer of 1926, three extraordinary poets (two Russian and one German) began a correxpondence of the highest order. These three extraordinary people were Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Ranier Maria Rilke. Rilke, who is revered as a god by both Pasternak and Tsvetayeva, is seen by them as the very essence of poetry, itself.
None of these three correspondents is having a good year: Pasternak is still living in Moscow, attempting to reconcile his life to the Bolshevik regime; Tsvetayeva has been exiled to France with her husband and children and is living in the direst financial straits, with each day presenting a new hurdle in the struggle to simply "get by;" Rilke's situation is perhaps the worst of all...he is dying of leukemia in Switzerland.
Pasternak and Tsvetayeva have already exchanged years of letters filled with the passion and romance of poetry, itself. Although Pasternak saw Rilke briefly in 1900, Tsvetayeva has never laid eyes on her idol. These three poets are, however, connected by a bond far stronger than the physical. They are kindred spirits, and each find repetitions and echoes of himself in the other.
Tsvetayeva quickly becomes the driving force of this trio. This is not surprising given her character. She's the most outrageous of the three, the boldest, the neediest, the one most likely to bare her inner soul to its very depths. Tsvetayeva's exuberance, however, eventually has disatrous effects.
Although Pasternak and Tsvetayeva consider Rilke their superior by far, these are not the letters of acolyte to mentor, but an exchange of thoughts and ideas among equals. If you've ever read the sappy, sentimental "Letters to a Young Poet," you'll find a very different Rilke in this book. Gone is the grandiose, condescending Rilke. In his place we find an enthusiastic Rilke, one filled with an almost overwhelming "joie de vivre," despite his sad circumstances.
As Susan Sontag says in her preface, these letters are definitely love letters of the highest order. The poets seek to possess and consume one another as only lovers can. But even these lovers haven't suspected that one of their trio is fatally ill. Pasternak and Tsvetayeva are both shocked and devastated when Rilke dies.
Love, many people will argue, is best expressed when the people involved are able to spend time together. There is, however, something to be said for separateness, for there is much that can only come to the surface when the lover is separated from the beloved.
These letters can teach us much about Rilke, Pasternak and Tsvetayeva. They can also teach us much about the very depths of the soul...both its anguish and those sublime, angelic heights...areas not often explored by anyone, anywhere, at any time.
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DR. ZHIVAGO
BORIS PASTERNAK
Manufacturer: INTERNATIONAL COLLECTORS LIBRARY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000EJSA1S |
Product Description
THIS CLASSIC NOVEL HAS BEEN TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY MAX HAYWARD AND MANYA HARARI, AND INCLUDES BERNARD GUILBERT GUERNEY'S "THE POEMS OF YURII ZHIVAGO"
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Safe Conduct, an Autobiography and Other Writings
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
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ASIN: 081120135X |
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Doktor Zhivago.
Pasternak Boris.
Manufacturer: Eksmo (M.)
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ASIN: 5699151141 |
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Second Nature
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak , and Andrei Navrozov
Manufacturer: Peter Owen Publishers
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ASIN: 072061192X |
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This volume comes to you in the Victorian Replica Binding
Book Description
One of the great books of twentieth-century poetry.
Customer Reviews:
Powerful poetry of material things.......2007-04-15
Some of our strongest poets are those who energize the material things and concrete sensations of daily life in special ways. Objects set apart by poetic imagination and power become sacred and establish a bond between the reader as perceiver and the thing perceived. By extension the bond opens the reader to an entire universe of ensouled matter--a new way of looking at the world.
Such is the poetry of Boris Pasternak in this 1917 book written at the height of The Great War and on the eve of the October Revolution. Pasternak's spirited materialism predates William Carlos Williams's concept "No ideas but in things."
Pasternak sets many of these poems in concretely described locations where his magical materialism can go to work. In "The Flies of the Moochkap Teahouse,"
The spirit sweats--the horizon's
tobacco-tinged--like thought
Windmills image a fishing village
Boats and weathered nets.
This poet's world view of ensouled materiality provides a unique perspective on the new century just beginning. Each reader must decide for him or herself just how prescient or prophetic Pasternak's "The Definition of Soul" was to become.
It falls like a ripe pear into the storm
with a single clinging leaf
How faithful--it quits its branch--
reckless--it chokes in the heat.
We learn much about Pasternak from his later novel and the film (Dr. Zhivago) it spawned--but we don't experience his power as a poet. He was possibly the the most poetically powerful of figures in what is known as the Silver Age of Russian Literature, including Marina Tsvetaeva Selected Poems (Tsvetaeva, Marina) (Twentieth-Century Classics), Osip Mandelstam Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (New York Review Books Classics), Anna Akhmatova Anna Akhmatova (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets), and Nikolai Gumilyov The Pillar of Fire, among the most talented and brilliant poets of the twentieth century. They bore the brunt of the Soviet regime's ideological attacks and physical repression.
Here is poetic brilliance and talent of the first rank--the power of poetry of material things on display.
Right up there with Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Pushkin.......2002-05-21
Pasternak's poetry is better than his prose. Why he is still often better known for the latter baffles me. I suggest this or any of his collected poems to the reader looking for creative, quality poetry. Pasternak certainly ranks as one of the greatest amongst the group of very talented Russian poets that emerged during the first quarter of the 20th centuary. His poems deserve just as much (if not more) recognition as his novels.
Sister of Mine: Poetry of Detail
.......1996-09-06
While Pasternak is known in the United States mainly for his novel "Dr. Zhivago" - or, more to the point, the film based on "Dr. Zhivago" - he was quite an accomplished poet. A better poet, I think, than he was a novelist. Although I've never read Mr. Rudman's translation - or, for that matter, any translation at all - "Sister of Mine-Life" keeps to its bosom a host of beautiful poems.
Rather than try to explain Pasternak's incredible gift for metaphor and detail, his absolute love of words - he was a decent translator of Shakespeare and others - I'll roughly approximate my favorite poem, from it's original Russian. It is untitled.
***
My friend, you ask, who ordered
That the holy idiot's speech should blaze?
***
Let us trickle words
As the garden drips amber and lemon
Absently and generous,
Gently, gently, gently.
And there's no need to explain
Why there is such ceremony
Of madder and of lemon
Scattering on leaves.
Who made pine needles rush
On a long stick, like music
Through the locks of Venetian blinds,
To the bookcase.
Who reddened the rug of mountain ash
Rippling beyond the door,
Written through with beautiful,
Quivering cursives.
You ask, who orders
That August be great
To whom nothing is small
Who lives in the finishing
Of maple leaves;
Who, since the days of the Ecclesiastes,
Hasn't left his post
And is hewing alabaster?
You ask, who orders,
That the September lips of asters and dahlias
Shall suffer?
That leaves
Should fall from stone caryatids
To the damp gravestones
Of autumn hospitals?
You ask, who orders?
--Omnipotent God of details,
Omnipotent God of love,
Of Yaigails and Yaidvigas.
I don't know, was it decided,
The riddle of the road to the afterlife,
But life, like the stillness
Of autumn -- is details.
I can't quite transmit the pine needles rushing through the Venetian blinds as boats through a sluice, but I'm sure Mr. Rudman could. Even through my approximate translation, it's possible to see what a man of detail Pasternak was. In my edition, the introduction begins: "With Pasternak, you must hurt" -- as great ideas are, the editor notes, painful.
Pasternak certainly took painful care of his words, his thoughts, his beauty. And "Sister of Mine-Life," one of his earlier collections - (the summer of 1917) - is beautiful, detailed and pained.
***
As a post script, I prefer "Sister of Mine-Life," to "My Sister-Life" because the construction "sistra maya" - rather than "maya sistra" stresses that she's my sister.
Also, because life and sister are both female in gender, "my sister" and "my life" are dually coupled in Pasternak's title. "My" could refer solely to sister, or it could be my life, as well.
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Doctor Zhivago A Novel
Boris and Ampelio Tettamanti, Max Hayward Pasternak
Manufacturer: Pantheon Books, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: B000BV0P1M |
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Zhivago the physician and poet
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