Word: pasternak
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sign: IF YOU ARE AGAINST THE ARMS RACE, YOU HAD BETTER STUDY RUSSIAN. I decided to have a chat with the two cheerful gentlemen who sat sipping soft drinks at the table. I wanted to find out why an American should study the language of Pushkin and Pasternak only if he felt threatened by a Soviet invasion...
Back in 1958 I witnessed the expulsion of Boris Pasternak from the Writers' ( Union. Some even demanded that he be thrown out of the country. They called him a "pig rooting in our Soviet garden." Today Historian Dmitri Likhachev in a Literaturnaya Gazeta article unequivocally demands that Doctor Zhivago be published. Today our literary journals are preparing important books for publication: Vladimir Dudintsev writing about Stalin's suppression of genetics; Anatoli Pristavkin on the forced resettlement of ethnic Chechens from the Caucasus; Anatoli Rybakov on the assassination of Sergei Kirov. All these subjects were banned in the past...
...early 1930s, Boris Pasternak and other Russian writers were officially encouraged to visit some of the Soviet Union's quarter-million newly established collective farms. Several of the writers produced the expected screeds: they marveled at the revolution wrought in the countryside and heralded a new era of joyful collective labor...
...Pasternak declined to join the chorus. "What I saw could not be expressed in words," Russia's greatest modern poet recalled in an unpublished memoir. "There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness. I fell ill. For an entire year I could not write." What he had glimpsed was the consequences of Stalin's war against his country's peasantry, otherwise known as the collectivization of agriculture. Between 1929 and 1934, 20 million family farms had disappeared. So had the kulaks...
...years ago. Since then the true story has been told only in fragmentary fashion, as the facts filtered through decades of unrelenting Soviet denial. Fittingly, another poet, Robert Conquest, has now come forward to write The Harvest of Sorrow, the first major scholarly book on the horrors that struck Pasternak speechless. The author of five books of poetry, Conquest is no stranger to Stalinist atrocities, as witness his magisterial 1968 study, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. For Harvest he gathered a mass of scattered data, including testimony by survivors and participants, accounts by foreign witnesses...