Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Belknap Press) (Hardcover)

~ Vladislav Zubok (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Alexander F. Remington In Russia, appreciating literary beauty has long been a silent political protest. Boris Pasternak's 1958 anti-authoritarian novel "Doctor Zhivago," for example, published abroad and banned in the Soviet Union, became a touchstone for the post-Stalin intelligentsia. In his moving "Zhivago's Children," historian Vladislav Zubok chronicles the rise and fall of this generation of Russian intellectuals, a group he calls "the spiritual heirs of Boris Pasternak's noble doctor." Zubok's hero is Alexander Tvardovsky, whom Khrushchev appointed to edit the literary journal Novy Mir (New World). Constantly pushing the boundaries of acceptable social criticism, Tvardovsky was behind a watershed moment in Soviet literature: In 1962, he convinced Khrushchev to let him publish Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," an unsparing portrait of life in the gulag. The other players in Zubok's fascinating study come from all corners of the Soviet intelligentsia, from leftist socialist true believers to right-wing patriots. The result is a thorough, scholarly examination of a vital era in Russian history whose themes of human rights, freedom and dissent will resonate among experts and lay readers alike.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist

Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) symbolized the predicaments of Russia’s intellectual class. Published abroad in defiance of officialdom, the novel was a sensation that resonated with a generation’s yearnings to free itself from communist control. Zubok’s cultural history covers how those aspirations worked out until the mid-1980s, especially in searches for sources of inspiration to recover from the stultifications of Stalinism. Should writers look to Russia’s pre-revolutionary cultural and religious traditions? Should they awaken communist idealism from the totalitarian nightmare? Should artistic trends in the West, like jazz music, be emulated instead? Zubok’s summaries of the cultural responses to such questions in novels, poems, theatrical productions, and literary criticism recount the revival of Russia’s intelligentsia under Khrushchev’s “thaw,” while his sketches of such personalities as Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Alexander Solzhenitsyn underscore incompatible philosophies in play within the intelligentsia. Shifts in political wind, Zubok shows, posed to intellectuals serious dilemmas of conforming and dissenting, especially during the less free-wheeling Brezhnev era. Students of 1960s cultural ferment, Russian-style, will find much substance in Zubok’s account. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 1 edition (May 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674033442
• ISBN-13: 978-0674033443
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #290,329 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent way to understand the essence of Russia, August 8, 2009

By	M. A Newman (Alexandria, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This is a remarkable book, though probably not the last word on the subject, it is likely to break new ground in Russian cultural history. When I was in Russia in 1992, I was wondering what sort of history could ever be written of Russia inthe 20th century since most of the sources were either uncritical praise of the regime or the elite discussions of dissidents. There was no way to determine what the real truth was. This book deals with the thoughts and aspirations of the intellectuals during the period after WWII, and how things developed after deStalinization, the 1960s, the period of stagnation under Brezhnev and finally the end of the Soviet Union. Zubok shows us a panorama of leading lights who defined the times in which they lived. What is fascinating is just how much influence the generation of the 1960s still seems to exercise on society. which could be seen not only as the contest between slavophiles and westernizers, but between Memorial and Pamyat (Remember).