A sympathetic portrait of a woman who saw her lover in the same “heroic light” as he saw himself.
A British journalist investigates her great-uncle’s love affair.
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was 56 and married to his second wife, Zinaida, when he met 34-year-old Olga Ivinskaya and immediately fell in love: “She is so enchanting, such a radiant, golden person,” he exulted. “I never thought I would still know such joy.” Flattered by the attentions of Russia’s most lauded poet, Olga reciprocated his passion. Pasternak (Daisy Dooley Does Divorce, 2007, etc.) draws on family correspondence; memoirs by Olga, her daughter (whom Pasternak interviewed), Boris’ sister and son; and Boris’ own writings to sensitively examine the dramatic relationship as well as to rescue the reputation of the woman whom the Pasternak family derided and denounced. At first, Pasternak worried about discovering that Boris “used Olga” but concluded that he did his best “within the constraints of his domestic situation to honour her and her family,” supporting them financially and trusting Olga “with his most precious commodity—his work. He sought her advice, her editing and typing assistance” and showed his love in his novel Doctor Zhivago, which Pasternak reads as a “long and heartfelt love letter to her.” Nevertheless, Boris comes across as self-absorbed, at best naively romantic, enjoying “the drama of anguish” and torment that he created for long-suffering Olga and his wife and children. He seemed to care nothing about putting them at risk with his defiance of Stalinist policy. He was somewhat protected by fame, but Olga was vulnerable: twice she was arrested, sentenced to years in gulags. “I owe my life and the fact that they did not touch me in those years to her heroism and endurance,” Boris admitted. Yet he was so insensitive that upon her release from prison, he asked her daughter to tell her that their relationship was over. Pasternak’s recounting of the publication of Doctor Zhivago, and Soviet pressure for him to renounce the Nobel Prize in Literature, draws largely on Peter Finn and Petra Couvée’s The Zhivago Affair (2014).
A sympathetic portrait of a woman who saw her lover in the same “heroic light” as he saw himself.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243934-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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