new, exciting, and delightful

----------------- [excerpts, The Zhivago Affair] ------------------- The Italian was in Peredelkino to charm a poet.


     The previous month D'Angelo, an Italian Communist working at Radio Moscow, read a brief cultural news item noting the imminent publication of a first novel by the Russian poet Boris Pasternak.  The two-sentence bulletin told him little except that Pasternak's book promised to be another Russian epic.  The novel was called Doctor Zhivago.

     Before leaving Italy, D'Angelo had agreed to scout out new Soviet literature for a young publishing house in Milan....Getting the rights to a first novel by one of Russia's best-known poets would be a major coup....He...asked Vladimirsky, a colleague at Radio Moscow, to set up a meeting with Pasternak.

(rebel art from the Soviet Union)
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----------------- [excerpt 2] ------

     ...After leaving the train station, D'Angelo and Vladimirsky passed the walled summer residence of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.  They crossed a stream by a graveyard and walked along roads that were still a little muddy before turning onto Pavlenko Street, the narrow lane at the edge of the village where Pasternak lived.  D'Angelo was unsure what to expect.  

He knew from his research that Pasternak was esteemed as a supremely gifted poet and was praised by scholars in the West as someone who stood out brightly in the stolid world of Soviet letters.  

But D'Angelo had never actually read anything by him.  


Within the Soviet establishment, recognition of Pasternak's talent was tempered by doubts about his political commitment, and for long periods original work by the poet was not published.  He earned a living as a translator of foreign literature, becoming one of the premier Russian interpreters of Shakespeare's plays and Goethe's Faust.

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--------------------- [excerpt 3] -----------

     ...Pasternak greeted his visitors with firm handshakes.  His smile was exuberant, almost childlike.  Pasternak enjoyed the company of foreigners, a distinct pleasure in the Soviet Union, which only began to open up to outsiders after the death of Stalin in 1953.  

Another Western visitor to Peredelkino that summer, the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, 

said the experience of conversing with writers there was "like speaking to the victims of shipwreck on a desert island, cut off for decades from civilization -- all they heard they received as new, exciting and delightful."

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