The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Monday, September 7, 2015

Anna Akhmatova on the affair

Anna Akhmatova dismissed Pasternak's ordeal [after foreign publication of Zhivago and his joyful acceptance, and then coerced rejection, of the Nobel Prize for Literature] as inconsequential. . . .

Akhmatova continued to believe that Doctor Zhivago was a bad novel, "except for the landscapes," and that Pasternak was too self-satisfied with his martyrdom and his fame.

Pasternak signed a trumped-up public letter of contrition.

Say the authors,

In Ryazan, a schoolteacher named Alexander Solzhenitsyn "writhed with shame for him."

Still, some people thought a lot of the novel - though perhaps not actually as a work of literature.

Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker wrote,

Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history. 

Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state . . . who did not have the courage of genius.

Reading The Zhivago Affair.

No comments:

Post a Comment