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.

'[A] meticulously detailed biography [which] brings us as close as we are likely to come to this awkward, sometimes mysterious, sometimes transparently foolish man.' John Spurling, Sunday Times, 'The restrained, informed and clear judgements [Barnes] makes, testify to his critical and organizational flair … After this study, no other biography with the right mixture of intellectual, social and creative skills is likely to appear for a very long time, and few new revelations about Pasternak's life can be expected … [a] magnificent biography and critique.' The Times Literary Supplement, 'In this extraordinary book, Barnes does for Boris Pasternak what Joseph Frank, in his brilliant multivolume study, did for Fyodor Dostoevsky … i. e. … combine meticulous scholarship with a broad understanding of the times and weave both into an enthralling account of the writer's life and works.' E. Yarwood, Choice, 'One is tempted to use the word definitive - at least for the present generation - in the case of this book. As the crowning achievement of more than two decades of sustained research, it deserves comparison with much other mutivolume studies as Avril Pyman's work on the poet Aleksander Blok, although Mr Barnes is more objective than Ms Pyman and Joseph Frank's celebrated biography of Dostoevsky.' David Bethea, The New York Times Book Review, 'Christopher Barnes writes carefully, intelligently, and with a restrained gentlemany wit that softens the impact of his thorough and intimidating familiarity with his subject and with the people, events, and issues involved in the first stage of Boris Pasternak's career … It is indeed a literary biography in its best function, that of a handmaiden to a serious study of the poet's art.' World Literature Today