“SECOND BIRTH” NOVEL PASTERNAK “DOCTOR ZHIVAGO”: THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE THAW

The article is devoted to the history of study of Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago” since its appearance abroad in 1957 and until it release in 1988 in the Soviet Union. The publication of the novel in Italy in the 50’s caused thorny literary and political debates in the Western and the Soviet press. The study found that the main purpose of the Soviet critics was to convict the wrong ideological principles in the book instead of assessed the artistic value of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”, while the foreign critics, less ideology-driven, tried to evaluate the novel objectively. Due to the high interest of Western intellectuals to the Pasternak’s novel first attempts to sheds light on currently unexplored aspects of Pasternak’s oeuvre has already made in the Khrushchev times. Research of Western critics combined issues devoted to the special topics: individualism and the Pasternak’s Soviet ethos, the theme of intellectual freedom, the question of the legitimacy of a political assessment of novel Pasternak and other topics. A new stage in the discussion of the novel among Soviet theorists of literature began with the publication of the novel in the 80’s in the Soviet Union. The article deals with the first attempts of analyze the “Doctor Zhivago” in the Soviet Union, not overburdened with ideology.

Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Khrushchev’s Thaw, The Nobel Prize, the Pasternak affair, criticism, symbolist novel