Boris Pasternak

This concluding volume of Christopher Barnes’s acclaimed biography of the Russian poet and prose-writer Boris Pasternak covers the period from 1928 to his death, during which he wrote the famous Dr Zhivago and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Drawing on archive material (including the Pasternak family archive), eyewitness accounts and a huge range of biographical and background information, Barnes brings to light many aspects of Pasternak’s personality and private life, while illuminating his relations with the Communist régime and the literary establishment. There is a detailed discussion of Pasternak’s original writing (with ample quotation in English translation), and his translations of Goethe, Shakespeare and others. The growth story of Dr Zhivago is traced, and the personal and political implications of the novel’s controversial publication explored. The biography concludes with a discussion of Pasternak’s Nobel Prize award, final years and death, with a brief account of his posthumous and artistic legacy.